| Kaidan Announces PanoPost - A New Post-Production Tool for Digital Panoramic Images Kaidan Introduces a New Software Application Designed to Streamline and Ease the Production of Digital Panoramic Images Obtained From Panoramic Cameras.
Feasterville, PA - Friday, August 9, 2002: Kaidan Incorporated, the leading manufacturer and supplier of Photographic VR and Immersive Imaging solutions, today announced PanoPost, a new software application to facilitate the creation of digital panoramic images. Developed as a Macintosh OS X recommended (OS 9 supported) application for scanning panoramic cameras and panoramic film cameras, PanoPost performs the needed functions to produce a perfect cylindrical or equirectangular source image that's ready for viewing with web-based panoramic viewers such as QuickTime VR, PT Viewer, Zoomify and many others. These functions are needed because many panoramic cameras over-scan the scene in both horizontal and vertical directions and introduce subtle distortions when using certain lenses. There may also be color and exposure variations due to the time it takes to capture the full panoramic image. Specifically, the functions that PanoPost addresses are: - Wraps a panorama to a perfect 360 degrees and blends the seam perfectly.
- Previews and intelligently crops equirectangular images for QTVR Cubics.
- Corrects for the color distortion inherent in tri-linear CCD scanning cameras when used with fisheye lenses for cubic or spherical VR.
- Corrects the geometric distortion of certain fisheye lenses for use with cubic or spherical VR.
- Automatically resizes fisheye images to equirectangular 2:1 proportions; which are ideal for use with cubic or spherical VR players.
PanoPost works with any panoramic image that is a seamless image of 360 degrees or more. The image can be of any vertical field of view but PanoPost is particularly useful for creating fully equirectangular images from digital panoramic scanning cameras like the Panoscan�. PanoPost can open most popular image types such as TIFF, BMP, PICT and JPEG, but PanoPost processes and saves the image files out in TIFF format only. The resulting TIFF file can be further processed for your VR player of choice such as QuickTime VR, Zoomify, Live Picture/MGI/Roxio-Zoom, Java, Hot Media and many more.
PanoPost can be used to process images from almost any 360 degree scanning type camera including digital or film based systems. The wrapping and blending feature is useful with the film based cameras such as the, Seitz Roundshot, Globuscope, Circuit and Hulcherama. PanoPost is especially well suited for use with digital 360 degree scanning cameras that use tri-linear CCD's like, Panoscan, Spheron, SliVR and others.
"PanoPost is an amazing time-saver for the professional panoramic photographer," says Jim Anders, President of Kaidan. "You can crop, blend and enhance images in minutes instead of hours. We chose to recommend PanoPost to run under Mac OS X for several reasons. First, we believe Macintosh is the predominant and preferred computing platform in the professional photography market. We also chose OS X because of the Quartz imaging engine and its strengths in image processing and manipulation."
According to Ted Chavalas, President of Panoscan, "PanoPost drastically eases the imaging workflow and improves the results as well! Before PanoPost, our customers would spend hours of costly post-production time in Photoshop to crop and blend their images. This is a must have tool for every 360 scanning camera owner."
PanoPost is recommended to run under Macintosh OS X (Mac OS 9 is supported) and is available directly from Kaidan Inc. PanoPost sells for $499.95. Additional information can be found at http://www.kaidan.com
###
Kaidan is a trademark of Kaidan Incorporated. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
