Switching Movie Resolutions

This tutorial demonstrates how to swap a node movie for a movie with a different resolution, without affecting its hotspots, so that a larger or smaller tour can be exported.

Introduction

Sometimes two versions of a tour are required, for example, a high resolution tour that may be played from a hard drive or CD-ROM where each node is over 2 MB in size, and a similar but low resolution version for the web where each node is heavily compressed to occupy just a few hundred K. (These two different resolutions of the one movie may have been prepared in a program such as CubicConverter.)

In the past, it was necessary to build two different projects separately, as switching movies with different tile sizes would destroy the hotspot definitions. With CubicConnector 2.0 however, the hotspots have changed to a "relative" coordinate system, meaning the different resolution movies can be substituted and a different resolution tour made without re-defining them. This tutorial shows how.

Step 1 - Prepare the movie in the normal way

For this tutorial, we will start where the "Chinese Gardens Walk" tutorial left off.

The above tutorial used movies which were created at a medium resolution where each cube face had a resolution of 636x636 (created from source equirectangular images of 2000x1000). These were made to keep the practise materials fairly small to download: each movie is approximately 340 K.

While preparing these, we also prepared high resolution movies with a cube face size of 1272x1272 (from source equirectangular 4000x2000) - these had an average size of 2 MB - and low resolution movies with a cube face size of 380x380 (from source equirectangular 1200x600) - these had an average size of 120 K, more suitable for a web page.

This tutorial will replace the existing movies with these low resolution movies.

Step 2 - Select Node 1 and choose 'Switch This Node's Movie'

In the Layout area, click on the "node001" marker to select it, then choose "Switch This Node's Movie" from the Movie menu.

Step 3 - Choose the movie to replace it with

In the file dialog that appears, navigate to the movie that you want to replace this movie with.

Step 4 - Check the hotspot is positioned correctly

Click the Hotspots tab to go to the hotspots area and check the hotspot is positioned correctly.

When switching node movies while preserving hotspots, you have to be careful that the newly chosen movie is identical apart from its different resolution.

If it has been created with a different orientation, perhaps from changing the centerpoint slider in CubicConverter, then the hotspots will not match. If this is the case, then you have no choice but to either move the hotspots or redefine them from scratch.

Step 5 - Continue for the rest of the nodes

Return to the layout and repeat the process of selecting a node and substituting a lower resolution movie. You can use the menu key shortcut Command-T to assist.

Step 6 - Assemble and check the movie

With all nodes substituted, you can now update the movie and check all the hotspots are valid. Click the Movie tab to go to the Movie area and click the "Assemble Movie" (or "Update Movie") button to create a preview movie using the lower resolution movies.

As lower resolution movies lookly more blurry when shown in large sizes, you may also want to decrease the dimensions of the movie by dragging the resize box at the bottom right of the preview movie.

For the 100 K lo-res movies which we often use for quick loading on web sites, we've found a size of 320x240 keeps the movie looking fairly clear while still achieving the compromise of rapid transfer over the web (100 K movies appear quite quickly, even for modem users).

For your more keen and/or patient visitors, you may want to offer a link to higher resolution movies that can fill the browser window while still remaining clear.

This ends the tutorial.

Watch Movie of Tutorial Being Performed  [1:02]

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