Tutorial - Optimizing Movies for Kinoma Player 3 (Palm)

Creating Optimized Movies for Kinoma Player 3 for Palm PDAs

This tutorial shows how to take an existing QuickTime VR movie (or other panorama) 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.

Note: make sure you are using version 2.1 of CubicConverter to get the benefit of higher quality resizing. The update can be downloaded from here: CubicConverter 2.1.dmg

Step 1

First select the media you want to convert. This can be anything that CubicConverter can normally read - an existing cubic format QTVR movie, cylindrical movie, equirectangular image, cube faces, etc.

For this tutorial, we are going to take a QuickTime VR movie from a web page.

Step 2

Drop the source media into CubicConverter's conversion area.

The movie we chose was a cubic format QuickTime VR movie, so its internal images will be extracted and displayed as a folder of cube faces.

(If the media was another format of panorama, eg, a cylindrical image, the display shown will be appropriate for a cylinder. The steps below apply equally well.)

Step 3

Now we decide on the size of the cube faces of the movie that will be used with Kinoma Player.

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 4

Look at CubicConverter's cube face size indicator on the right of the window. Drag the blue dot to move the "size square" to the 512 guide line.

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

We are now ready to start a conversion.

Step 5

Click the "Convert" button at the bottom of the window. The existing cube faces will be resized and a new movie will be created. (If the source media is different, eg, a cylinder or equirectangular image, it will be converted to cube faces first.)

If necessary, you can adjust the movie settings on the left, such as the codec or min/max tilt settings, but usually the codec and settings stored in the original movie will be sufficient.

Step 6

Now you are ready to save the movie and load it on to the Palm. Click the Save As... button at the bottom of CubicConverter's window and save the new movie in a convenient place such as the Desktop.

Step 7

Then 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 8

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

Step 9

Launch the Kinoma application on the Palm. Your new movie 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 it to open and drag from the center to pan around.

Watch Movie of Tutorial Being Performed  [1:03]

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