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Gallery Page - Photos, Videos and 360 Panoramas
- Resizing photos before uploading them to your website
- Creating Videos for Your Site
- Creating 360 Panoramas for your Site
top -Resizing photos before uploading them to your website
HolidaySiteBuilder only allow uploading of GIFs and JPEGs and all images must be less than 2MB. We recommend a great tool called Image Resizer from Microsoft.
Image Resizer is a totally free "PowerToy for Windows XP".
Here is a link to the Microsoft Powertoy Page: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Downloads/powertoys/Xppowertoys.mspx
The XP Image Resizer does not work on Vista. However, some nice people have created a free "Vista Clone" that can be downloaded here - http://sourceforge.net/projects/phototoysclone/
Please see the video below which explains how to use Image Resizer. The "Vista Clone" works in a very similar way.
Watch video »
top -Creating Videos for Your Site
HolidaySiteBuilder allows you to upload a Flash Video (FLV) which can be created using Adobe Premiere Elements (about £70 or $99) and Videospin (FREE) as well as other leading video editors.
We recommend Videospin as it is free (which always helps), very simple to use and does everything you need to create a great video for your site.
We also found that Adobe Premiere was a little unreliable and our PC crashed several times. You may have better luck though
If you use a Mac you will know that iMovie also allows you to create videos very easily as well and it comes installed on all Macs.
You can download Videospin from http://www.videospin.com/
You can download a 30 day trial for Adobe Premiere Elements from http://www.adobe.com/products/premiereel/
There are lots of Mac tutorials for iMovie here http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/
Watch video »
top -Creating 360 Panoramas for your Site
Before we give you a few tips we must warn you that taking Panorama Photos is very difficult, costly and time consuming! We would highly recommend creating a video first as it is much easier.
If you still would like some Panorama photos, we would recommend finding a professional company who can create them for you. As we have not used a company ourselves we cannot recommend anyone specifically, but if you search on Google you will find a few who charge about £200 per Panorama with discounts if you have more than one.
Finally whether you are creating the Panorama yourself or paying a company to do it set the export to be Flash (SWF) and for the best results export at 840 x 600 pixels.
We used the following equipment to create our Panoramas:
Canon 20D DSLR (about £400 - £600 for modern equivalent)
Sigma 8mm f3.5 (about £400)
Nodal Ninja 3 (about £200)
Manfrotto 055 tripod (about £100)
PTGUI Pro v7.8 (149)
Pano2QTVR pro + FlashPack v 1.66 (55)
Links to useful sites
http://www.nodalninja.com/
http://www.nodalninja.com/nodal_ninja_user_manual.html
http://www.nodalninja.com/nodal_ninja_3_camera_settings.html
http://www.panoguide.com/
http://gardengnomesoftware.com/
http://www.ptgui.com/
Tips
Use a very sturdy, heavy tripod like the Manfrotto 055. I used to use a Manfrotto 724, which is designed to be very light and portable but it just was not sturdy enough and caused lots of problems.
If you use the tripod with a handle, remove the handle if it gets in the viewfinder
Turn off RAW you dont need it for indoor panoramas as all the software only accepts JPEGs. It makes everything much quicker just dealing with JPEGs.
DONT use flash you will get very strange results!
Shut curtains if it is a bright day as you will get strange shadows otherwise. Turn on all the lights lots of lights are good to reduce shadows and offer excellent control points when stitching later.
For indoor photos I tend to not take Up (nadir) and Down shots. These are difficult to stitch and do not add much to an indoor photo. You can restrict the tilt later so viewers cannot look right up or right down.
