Rich,

Will do, I can share more images of what we have in mind.  Thanks for the tips.

Vince

Rich,

I do have a question with regard to the Road Maker software.  My goal is to create a realistic looking model that can be used to create a driving simulation movie (AVI) in HD.  What are the limiting factors with regard to resolution that I should consider when starting this process so it is as realistic looking as possible when completed?

The HD movie will then be used as an input to our optical simulation software to predict optical distortion with various automakers glass cad designs before the actual glass design is manufactured.  Sort of a predictive tool to prevent bad designs from hitting the road, or to prevent good people from hitting objects on the road that they cannot see.  Currently we took an actual 640 x 480 video driving down the road which is used as the input.  But we want to increase the movie resolution to true HD so we can obtain more information from the predictive results.  I do not have an HD camera (true HD) available so I cannot use the same method to obtain the input video, also customer requests want us to customize the roads based on the vehicle use.

Vince

Thank you very much, the road maker will help a lot after I get the hang of it.

Look very useful, thank you. 

Thanks Fred255 and to others. I have demo products from most of the companys to test the final outputs. I received the camera on Thursday, so not much time to play with it yet, that is planned for the weekened. I do not have a pano tool as of yet, so I will have to try with just a tripod for now, I can fine tune that later. Sun and rain are called for this weekend, so you will see me outside during the sunny times, I will be the guy with a big smile on my face. :-))

There are some very interesting sites there, a lot of useful information. It appears there are a few software options that can provide a solution, but one thing I did not really see in any of the documention is where they correct for lens distortion. Or is that done automatically without my intervention?

Well I spoke too soon, they only stitch 180 and 360 pano's. They do not mention anything about planar pano's, I have entered a question to their tech support about it so we will see what they answer. Thanks!

Whoooo hoooooo! That looks like it will do exactly what I need, so simple even a caveman could do it. :-) Now all I need is a little cooperation from the weather to get started. Thank you all for the answers and attention you have provided. Regards Vince

I have not shot the images yet, too many days of rain so hopefully it will clear up soon.    I will keep the RAW files. The machine that I planned to do the compositing is a Quad core workstation with 32Gb of Ram, it will still tax it but I had hoped it would be enough to complete the job.  If I need something bigger I will be in trouble from the start unless I figure out another way.

Creating the HDR's and then stitching appeared to be the easier path, but stitching the raw images first and then using the Photomatrix software to create the HDR would seem to be the method that will give me the highest quality.  The Photomatrix software looks nice, I will purchase that Monday when I get back to the office, I locked my corporate charge card there over the weekend not thinking about such a software purchase.  Thank you for the tip.

Has anyone published any articles or tried such a silly thing before.  There must be some other insane person out there.  :-))

I have used a copy of this color chart for some time, it might help you to determine what setting you would like. http://www.3drender.com/glossary/colortemp.htm Vince

Thank you very much, they are always appreciated. Do you have plans to extend into other country signs?

Fantastic find, thank you for sharing this with us. Other than the Dosch CD, I was not aware of any shop items such as this.

There are a few free ones out there, they do not have all of the features as other programs, but they might just be the ticket until you outgrow them. http://www.andybrain.com/archive/photo-mosaic-software.htm http://www.aolej.com/mosaic/index.html http://andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic/

Tanchelyn - Yes, I tried a small sample last night with a seven image animated gif of one competitor bowing to receive their medal. I needed to create the individual frames to correct the color. The compress them back into a movie. Still not a bad arrangement with actions and batch processing. PS. - Mrs. Claus said I was a good boy, so I could order it for Christmas. :-))

Thank you so much for the help, that is the best I have ever seen one of the images look from there. Inshaala - I have larger images to work with, I tried the auto color setting but I tried no adjustment on it what so ever. Possibly I did not complete the operation to the best it could calculate. As for option 2, it went right over my head and gained speed. :-} Tanchelyn - $50 is better than ruining a lifetime of images. Possibly Santa is listening and I am on the good list so I can get that for Christmas, I will check with Mrs. Claus tonight and see. I will try the demo software on the rest of the shots and see what I can do. I have several when they received their medals that I would like to improve. Does the colorwasher software work on movies, I took a few video clips that I would like to improve if that is possible? I can always extract the frames, batch process the images if that is allowed, and recompile them back into a new movie. :-))