Treating Pano Problems

For the first time in my limited experience (I've built about 150 pano movies), I'm beginning to see problems in delivering panoramas with QuickTimeVR. So far all of these problems are related to Spin Panorama, so the simplest advice for anyone having trouble is to move to a Macintosh and QTVRAS for stitching.

Let's say you have produced your pano in Spin, uploaded it in good order to Cow, but on trying the requisite page you see an error message saying "There has been an error in a plugin on this page." Or worse, your browser generates an exception and quits. (In the Mac world we call this a crash.)

I don't know what causes this trouble -- I saw it with about half the sample movies I produced for Assignment 5; the other half were fine. The following procedure cured the problem in all cases. It should be quite familiar from Assignment 2.

1. If you did not use the Save-as-Image option in Spin, go back into the program and do so -- i.e., generate a stitched JPEG image of your panorama.
   
   
2. Using Photoshop, adjust the dimensions of your JPEG so that the height is 184 pixels (the number specified in Assignment 5) and the width some number that is divisible by 4 times some even number. 3200, for example, is a multiple of 8 (x 400), 16 (x 200), and 32 (x 100): therefore 3200 is a good number to use. Note however that 3208 is not a good number -- 8 goes into it neatly, but it goes in an odd number of times (401).
   
   Consider resizing your JPEG's width to 3200, then trimming its height to 184 by resetting the canvas dimensions. (This could mean clipping off some of the top and bottom of your image.)
   
   
3. If you haven't already moved to a Mac for the resizing job, do so now. Launch QuickTimeVR Authoring Studio and select New/Panorama Maker. Feed your modified JPEG into QTVRAS. Click Make Pano.
   
   The resulting panorama should wrap successfully without a dark combination line (though there still may be some apparent discontinuity, depending on the nature of your image); and as you remember from Assignment 2, you can feed this .pano file back into Authoring Studio again in order to create a Scene with hypertext links.

The steps above should solve any problems that originate in Spin. I can't predict other problems you may see along the way to Pano Valhalla, but will be happy to diagnose them as they come.