I’ve covered the Big Valley Jamboreeseveral, times, now, and this year I wanted to create a virtual tour that showed how BVJ is more than just music. There’s partying, bull riding, music workshops, more partying, and of course country music.
I shot several still image panoramas with my Canon 5D-Mark III and the handy dandy Canon 8-15mmL fish eye lens.
I also shot two 360 videos using six GoPro Hero cameras on a stick. Everything was stitched together using PTgui and I used KrPano as the viewer.
Click here to watch the virtual tour. Click the right and left arrows to go to the next panorama. If you click on the little globe button you can see a map of the area with dots.
The more I do these, the easier they get. I literally put this together in one day. So much cooler than just a photo gallery.
Speaking of photo gallery. Here’s a photo gallery of Big Valley Jamboree 2013 too!
Andrew Satter @asatter discusses innovative video techniques. Ryan Jackson @ryan_jackson talks about his 360-video projects and an open discussion on video with the audience happens at the end. Enjoy! Sept. 22, 2012 at Online News Association annual conference ONA12 in San Francisco. http://www.ryanjackson.ca http://www.asatter.com
Ashley and I are driving back to Edmonton from San Francisco and I have limited internet connectivity so this blog post will be fully updated with links and quotes in a couple days.P.S. If you ever get a chance to drive the west coast, DO IT!
This is a super duper quick list of the links I’ll be sharing at the #ONAunconf Unconference session at the 2012 ONA conference in San Francisco
Try to do something different. NOT TV. “make something worth talking about” – Seth Godin.
-Multimedia — use best tool to do the job. … sometimes video, sometimes sound slides, sometimes panoramas, sometimes interactives.
– I want there to be a holodeck like on Star Trek!
-I want to have the news beamed into my brain like in the Matrix or Simpsons.
PICTURE
-We’re going to get there before you know it
-28 mins of video here. people spent WAY more time on it than if it was just a normal linear video.
-think backwards. how do you wish you could watch long videos that are boring?
Immersive Video
-Best viewed on iPad.
-now this is cheesy but think of it as a little town. You could do panoramas of a small town or neighborhood and make it so you go to each section and talk to people.
-360 video on a Roller Coaster
-Start with one thing and build build build on it.
-i use KRpano.
-interfaces with VR headsets and game controllers.
-360 isn’t for everything
-A LOT OF TIME.
-must be super duper interesting topic to get good ROI
-must be something worth looking around for.
The Journal's Ryan Jackson has created a fun "choose your own adventure" style 360-degree panoramic tour of Capital Ex including 360-degree videos on a roller coaster and several other rides. You can eat corn dogs, play games and watch the fireworks. The game is especially neat on a gyro-enabled iPad2 or iPhone 4. Go to http://www.edmontonjournal.com/capex360 (Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal)
Go to http://www.edmontonjournal.com/slavelakemap to see a panoramic before and after view of Slave Lake.
A panoramic view of the homes on 13th St. SE near 6 Ave. SE in Slave Lake, Alta. on May 23, 2011 (top) and May 2, 2012 (bottom). Nearly one-year after after a wildfire devastated the neighbourhood. Images were created by stitching multiple pictures taken taken at GPS location N55°16.582' W114°45.476' (Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal) To see these images in a 360-degree interactive split screen view, go to http://www.edmontonjournal.com/slavelakemap where you'll find more before-and-after photos and panoramas.
Me and Journal reporter Mariam Ibrahim about to photograph some firemen starting a controlled burn.
Sheldon Houle, Heltack Leader with Alberta Sustainable Resources Development poses for a photo with a drip torch used to start controlled burns in Slave Lake, Alta. on May 2, 2012.
A HUGE timesaver was using the EveryTrail app on my iPhone to map out a GPS trail the first time I shot the 360 tour. Then, one year later I could just retrace my path. I also used the GPSPhotoLinker program for Mac OSX to sync all my photos with GPS so I knew where each photo was taken. Some day I
I had five GoPro Hero 1080p cameras mounted on the roof of the van, They were all shooting at the same time (or close as possible) every 5-seconds.
Filming this video was pretty easy and also pretty hard!
I chose the local coffee shop Cafe Rista, 14213 103 ave. in Edmonton because it was quiet during the day and also the owner Simon was super accommodating.
He even let me put marks on the floor so I could keep the chairs and table in the exact same spot for each interview.
I spent a day in the coffee shop shooting test videos with myself in the chairs. I used this time to build templates for stitching the images and also work on the code for KRpano.
For a camera I just used my Canon 5D Mark-II with the Canon 8-15mm fisheye lens at 8mm. I kept the table and chairs in the same position for every video and the stitched them together after.
I used a little slider thing from an old enlarger to offset my lens a bit so I would find the no-parallax point. This helped make stitching the images together easier.
It was very important that I clamped the camera in the exact same spot for all of the interviews and also that the tables and chairs were in the exact same spot every time.
Here’s me interviewing Premier Alison Redford. The wonderful and talented Journal reporter Trish Audette actually came up with all the smart questions that I asked
For sound I used my Sennheiser wireless lav mic and I had my trusty Olympus recorder as a backup. I used my LitePanels MicroPro as a fill light.
After interviewing each leader separately and in different chairs, I used Final Cut Pro to align all the video clips. I then batch exported all the video clips and used Quicktime Pro to extract the video files into image sequences.
Once all the video was converted into still images I used PTgui to create a template and then batch stitch all of the still images into panoramas.
I them recombined all the panoramas back into video files using Quicktime Pro and synced the audio back.
I explain the process a little better here though my workflow has vastly improved since then. It pretty much changes every time I do a 360-video.
I used the amazing KRpano for displaying the 360-degree video. The HTML and Flash panorama viewer is very powerful. Pretty much anything is possible.
In total there was 31 minutes and 50 seconds of video which works out to 45802 panoramas that I had to stitch together.
Needless to say I’ve been sitting in front of my computer way too much lately!
This has certainly been my most complicated video to date but also one of the most fun an innovative to create.
It’s not the holodeck… but we’re getting closer!
And here’s how it ran in the paper. I was sure that the caption explained that this was created from four separate images and it said “Photo Illustration by Ryan Jackson”
I was invited to speak at VendAsta Technologies about the work I’ve done on 360 panoramas and video. It was really cool because I’ve talked dozens of times about photography and video but I’ve never given a full presentation about 360 panoramas.
As I explain in the video , I’ve always been fascinated with the Holodeck from Star Trek and we are slowly getting closer and closer.
As a photojournalist I always get to go to places and see things that most people don’t and I find that 360-degree panoramas with audio or 360 Video can help give you the same experience.
At the pace of technology today. What’s stopping us from being able to download a 360-degree video into our brains in the future?
The Journal got an exclusive tour of the devastation created by the Slave Lake wildfire. Videographer Ryan Jackson set up four cameras on top of a vehicle to capture a 360-degree view as he drove through the town.
I used four GoPro cameras to capture the video and then stitched the video together. I have since bought a fifth GoPro to use for future videos.
I setup everything on the ground first.
A flash stand worked well for raising the camera above the roof of the Jeep.
Dent puller suction cups from Princess Auto. $5 each!
Even with the super strong suction cups you still need tie-down straps for safety.
I looped the tie-down straps inside the car.
Journal reporter Jana Pruden and me in Slave Lake. A lady in Athabasca was making these shirts to raise money for Slave Lake.
When we got back to the hotel I dumped all the images into my main laptop and then had four more laptops (total of five) processing the video into panoramas. I used a D-Link Gigabit Switch for the network and I had a D-Link DNS-343 8TB NAS drive for backup storage.
When I got home I had all five laptops processing the panoramas.
And here’s how it ran in the paper. I was sure that the caption explained that this was created from four separate images and it said “Photo Illustration by Ryan Jackson”
