A French Canadian PTE user emailed and asked if I had tried a 360 degree panorama with the PTE panorama technique. Of course I hadn't, but it got my curiosity going. I remembered experimenting with 360 degree panoramas a couple of years ago and fortunately I had retained one in my photo files.

The panorama was not equally exposed in all frames but good enough for a test and fortunately the end frames matched up very well. The panorama was originally made with Canon's "photo stitch" program, that does a pretty reasonable job of matching seams, and shot with a Canon G2 camera.

The panorama is quite large, 10617x1536 pixels. The hard part was determing how to crop. For a slideshow display size of 1024x768, I decided that seven(7) crops would work nicely. As 7x1024=7168 pixels, I resized the panorama to 7168x1037 pixels, which maintained the original aspect ratio. Next, I did a major crop of the photo to obtain a final panorama of 7168x768 pixels.

Now I precisely cropped the seven slides, to be used in PTE, to a size of 1024x768. I put the 7 slides into PTE with a 15000ms left to right push effect and 1 ms slide duration. I also setup to "repeat show" so that it would pan forever until I hit <esc>. I included some MP3 background music...and ran the show...it worked the first time. Of course there is still the momentary pause between slide transitions but not bad.


I remember back when I was experimenting around with panoramas, I decided that this is useless as they are to wide to print and there was no good way to display them. This little experiment has regenerated my interest, as PTE can do a reasonable job of displaying them.

ken nickles

4/15/2005
usa tax day
