Tutorial - Converting Multinodes for Kinoma Player 3 EX (Palm)

Converting Multinodes Movies Ready for Kinoma Player 3 for Palm PDAs

This tutorial shows how to take an existing QuickTime VR multinode movie, split it into single nodes, and optimize it so it plays well on Kinoma Player 3 EX, the application for Palm-based PDAs which allows cubic format QuickTime VR movies to be displayed.

Step 1

First choose the multinode movie you want to convert into individual nodes for showing with Kinoma Player. The sample we are using in this tutorial is an 11 node tour of a terrace house, which begins in the street then has nodes for each room in the house.

Step 2

Open CubicConverter and go to the Batch area by clicking the tab control at the top of the window.

Step 3

Drop the multinode movie into the batch list on the left.

CubicConverter will automatically split multinode movies into separate, single nodes to be processed individually.

The default "Convert To" format is cubic format QuickTime VR, which is what we want, so we don't have to change the conversion type.

Step 4

The original cube face size from the multinode movie will probably be too large for our use with Kinoma Player, so we now choose a more optimal size to reduce it to.

Kinoma Player's QuickTime VR viewer works optimally with cube faces that will both fit in the memory space of a typical PDA and have a size which makes internal calculations efficient. In practice, this works out to be one of 800, 768, 640, 512, 384 or 256.

The larger the cube face, the more detail the panorama can contain, but since the screen of a PDA is quite small, having too much detail can be overkill and waste precious flash memory that could otherwise be used for storing more media. Thus, for most purposes, cube faces of 512 x 512 are a good compromise.

Step 5

Click the "Cube Faces" area of the tab control.

Move to the cube face size indicator on the left and drag the blue dot to move the "size square" to the 512 guide line (you can also type the number in directly if you want to).

As you get close, the line should "snap" into place.

Step 6

Return to the Batch area and select the "Use Current Cube Face Size" checkbox in the batch settings area on the right of the window.

The line underneath the checkbox title should indicate the cube face size you have just selected.

With the checkbox selected, each item in the batch list will be resized to have cube faces of this size.

Also in the batch settings area, you can choose whether the processed nodes will be written in the same folder as the original mulitnode, or for you to select a destination when the batch starts.

Step 7

Now start the batch conversion by clicking the "Start Batch" button underneath the batch settings area.

Each node of the multinode tour will be processed individually and saved with a name which matches the original, but with a -1, -2, -3, etc after it to prevent name conflicts.

You are now ready to install these files on the Palm device.

Step 8

Open the Palm's HotSync Manager and choose Install Handheld Files... (command-I) from the HotSync menu.

You can either drag the movie into the install files window, or use the Add To List button to open a file dialog box.

Note: depending on how you use your Palm device, there are other methods of doing this as well. Experienced users may simply want to save the movie direct from CubicConverter to somewhere like:

      ˜/Documents/Palm/Users/<yourname>/Files to Install/SecureDigital (SD) Card

The method described in the steps above is simply the easiest to follow for the purposes of the tutorial.

Step 9

Now connect your Palm device and do a HotSync. The new movie will be transferred and ready to be displayed with Kinoma Player.

Step 10

Launch the Kinoma application on the Palm. The new nodes should be present in the list of media ready to be displayed (clicking the "pen" icon at the top right of the screen will filter the list to show just the interactive movies).

Tap on a node to open it and drag from the center to pan around.

Tap the arrow buttons to the top right of the display to move to the next or previous nodes.

Watch Movie of Tutorial Being Performed  [4:06]

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