Autodesk Stitcher 2009
by Andrew Williams
I have to confess to being something of a software junkie and, whenever
there is a new release, I look forward to trying it out. Needless to say,
when Mike asked me to test the new release of Stitcher (version 2009) I
jumped at the chance.
Stitcher is a program for creating panoramas from a series of images
stitched together. It was developed by RealViz in France and was taken over
by Autodesk in May 2008. At the time Autodesk rationalised the product line
to a single version – Stitcher Unlimited, the latest release being Stitcher
Unlimited 2009. They also cut the price so that the full product Stitcher
Unlimited, containing all features, now retails at £300.
The first thing I wanted to check out was the speed of rendering. Loading an
existing panorama project into Stitcher 2009 gave the following results.
Image Details:
Camera Canon 5D
Lens Canon 15mm diagonal fisheye Monopod, 6 shots around plus nadir
(straight down) and zenith (straight up) shots. The images were shot in RAW
format, adjusted in Lightroom and exported as 1024 pixel-wide JPEG files for
the test. Note that this is much smaller than I would usually use in order
to speed up the testing; larger files will result in much longer rendering
times.
Spherical projection
Render to JPEG at 1:1 size, highest quality, no smoothing Smart blending
mode, Interpolation method Lanczos5 (the slowest but most accurate setting)
Computer:
Intel 2.1 GHz Core Duo CPU with 3Gb memory running Windows XP Pro. Nvidea
graphics card with 250Mb of memory.
Timings:
As Stitcher can use the processing power in your graphics card (GPU) to
speed up rendering I have repeated the test with and without the GPU
enabled.
As you can see, Stitcher 2009 is the fastest version yet and using the CPU
in your graphics card makes a large difference in rendering times, reducing
the time by over 50%.
Although Autodesk quickly released an update Version 5.7.1, version 2009 is
the first major release under the new owners, so I was very interested to
see what new features Autodesk has added. I was a bit disappointed to learn
that there were only three new features that did not appear in version 5.7.
1. Support for the Sunex lens
The addition of specific distortion parameters for the Sunex® fish-eye lens.
This is a lens with a 185° field of vision designed for the smaller sensors
of cameras such as the Nikon D200 or Canon 50D. The lens has a fixed
aperture of f/5.6 and a fixed focal length of 5.6mm. For further details and
prices, see www.360tacticalVR.co.uk. In general Stitcher works well with
fisheye lenses but I don’t use this lens so I cannot confirm how well this
feature works.
Full circle fisheye lenses such as this and the Sigma 4.5mm f/2.8 which I
use are great for 360° panoramas, especially when working in confined spaces
or when things are moving and you want to shoot fast. You only need three
shots to produce a full 360° coverage (in theory you can use two but I like
to have some overlap).
2. Stacking images for High Dynamic Range (HDR) panoramas Stitcher 2009 can
load bracketed LDR (Low Dynamic Range) images in order to stack them to
create HDR images or tone-mapped images. Stitcher 5.7 (and 2009) can use HDR
images created by programs such as Photoshop or Photomatix Pro, as source
images for a panorama.
Now you can also use ‘normal’ bracketed exposures, open them in Stitcher
2009 and automatically stack them. Stitcher will create an HDR image from
the stack. This works well when you have high contrast scenes. I took this
panorama in a short spell of sunny weather to test out this feature.
The sun was very low in the sky, just out of sight on the right of the
image. I took three bracketed shot in each position. When you have loaded
all the images into Stitcher select ‘Stack Exposure By’ from the HDR menu
and enter the number of copies of each shot, in my case 3, and Stitcher will
stack them into a pile for each different shot. [See above top and right]
Next use HDR > Camera Response > Compute Camera Response Curve to set the
optimum use of the exposures to create the HDR panorama. Stitcher uses the
EXIF data from your camera for this calculation. There is the facility to
add this manually if necessary. You can see from the resulting panorama
(above) that the left side of the image uses the darkest exposure whilst the
right-hand side retains the shadow detail by using the lightest.
can see this facility being really useful once I have done some more tests,
particularly with interior images where you may want to retain detail in the
view out of the windows. The only downside is you cannot render the HDR file
as a QuickTime movie.
The QuickTime Control Panel is shown above.
3. There is a new authoring control menu which lets you set up panorama
constraints for QuickTime movies directly in the 3D viewport.
For example if your panorama doesn’t extend to a full 360° you can constrain
how far the viewer can rotate your movie, otherwise they would see black
space at the extremities of rotation. This has always been available within
the Rendering dialogue box but with the new controls you can set the limits
visually by moving the view in the main window and ticking the appropriate
item to record your setting. This really speeds up the process as you can
judge the settings on screen rather than by typing in angles.
OVERALL
My overall impression is that this is not a major upgrade. It does seem to
be more stable that previous versions, although I did have a few crashes,
and the new features can be useful but you will have to decide whether they
justify the upgrade from version 5.7.
For new users Stitcher is very easy to use and produces high quality results
with little effort, which for the busy professional is a winning
combination. It works well with fisheye lenses, removing distortion and
producing good results. I even found time to produce a panorama outside the
Novotel during the SWPP Convention and stitch it on my laptop up in the
room!
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