Increasingly there is a move from shooting mirror balls to shooting wide angle lens shots for both texture reflection maps and HDRs. In this exclusive interview we explore the new Stitcher 5.5 and hear about the new plans for an HDR pipeline, from the team at REALVIZ headquaters in France.
We are in Sophia Antipolis, France this week at the home of REALVIZ, a leader in image processing software development,and home of Stitcher, which has just released its new Unlimited 5.5 DS (“Double Shot”), which offers the ability to automatically stitch 2-shot fisheye photos.
With the new DS (“Double Shot”) extension for Stitcher 5.5 Unlimited, even just 2 fisheye shots can now be stitched automatically, providing a unique step solution for anyone doing on set referencing and visual effects supervision. This is mainly possible using the newer Digital cameras from Canon and Nikon – which now have a CCD large enough to capture an entire 180 degree fisheye. But even with older cameras that crop top and bottom – three shots can be perfectly blended into one 360 image – making even slightly older digital cameras able to work seamlessly on set.
This is really significant for the post community for a couple of reasons, firstly on set there has been a move from shooting mirror balls to just shooting fish eye lens shots, but if you have ever tried to stitch those together it can be a real problem – and applications like Photoshop just can’t handle the transforms into different projection spaces correctly. The second key is that in making up HDR images you need to bracket shots. With a greater than 180 degree fish eye it is not possible to take just 2 sets of bracketed exposures and thus waste less time on set.
The workflow with Stitcher DS is to stitch together one pair of each exposure bracket – export the solution and then take those 360 pairs into HDRshop etc to make the final HDR. But we were pleasantly surprised to discover that REALVIZ will soon be handling HDR directly. In a sneak peak behind the scenes at the REALVIZ research labs we got to see the work being done towards a full REALVIZ stitcher HDR pipeline. This is good news for VFX artists and good news for anyone concerned that Photoshop CS2 stitching functions might mean that REALVIZ was backing off from its long term premier image-stitching program.
Stitcher is a professional-level application, used by thousands of professional photographers, effects, compositing and 3D artists worldwide, and enables the creation of superb wide-angle panoramas for the, film, matte painting, and 3D. Stitcher is also widely used by post-production professionals for the creation of 3D environments, matte paintings, reflection maps and textures for film/television. Stitcher Unlimited, which released in July of this year, is targeted at professional panorama creators looking to produce multiple panoramas of the highest quality and with maximum productivity.
“2-shot fisheye stitching has been one of the main requests from our film users for some time,” explains Dominique Pouliquen, REALVIZ CEO. “Now finally we are able to offer this capability to these users”.