• Reported by Andreas

When I'm in a place with a view, I often find myself shooting a short movie of the panorama in question. The result is usually a shaky 20 second clip that is a far cry from the open and wide view I was trying to document ;-) So I did a small movie2panorama experiment... What follows is a quick tutorial explaining how you can turn a short movie into a panoramic image - certainly not rocket-science, but I just thought I'd share my findings.

1. Make a short movie. An XVID-encoded version of the 320x240 clip I use in this howto can be found at archive.org.

2. Capture every 5th or 10th frame of your movie. I used AVI2JPG (download), a neat freeware program (Win) that does a great job and is easy to understand (although it's in Japanese). Open your movie, and click on the blue O to select the destination folder, set JPG quality and number of frames to skip (ideally something between 5 and 10). Next, you click on J (for JPG export), then on the play button. Your movie is converted to a set of JPG images. Payware AVI2JPG alternatives are Video2Photo (Win) and, of course, QuickTime Pro (Win/Mac).

3. Image stitching can be done with the (currently still freeware) AutoStitch app (Win), or else, the cross-platform Hugin and Enblend OSS (which I've covered before).

4. You'll probably have to crop and tweak the color settings a bit. This is the result I got: not hi-res of course, but it gives a better idea of the open view than the original movie, I think.

You can also use the same technique for converting non-panorama movies to oddly time-warped images.