welcome aboard.
Genova2004 was an event twelve months long for celebrating the election of Genoa as the European Cultural Capital of the year and the site I am to introducing to you a fascinating, multimedia presentation of this town, made entirely by me using freeware or low cost software only as a further challenge.
What follow below is a long and detailed overview of the software and technologies involved in bilding the site, probably boring for all but the collegues and/or very curious Computers Geeks. Fell free to skip it if you don't belong to the above mentioned categories and go straight to the presentation. Please, be aware that for enjoy all the content the installations of QuickTime 7, java virtual machine 1.5x, Flash Player 8x are required. for the playback of the aquarium's video clips a broadband connection is pratically a paramount.
Click here | Genoa, European Capital of Culture 2004 |
This website was built around the idea (and the necessity) of using the most cost-effective software on the market. Neither Photoshop nor Adobe Dreamweaver were considered but only shareware or alternative software. More precisely most of the images have been shot on film and scanned with a Microtek Artixscan 4000t using its own driver, though Vuescan and Silverfast are better and even the Microtek for Mac handles the slide contrast differently (not to mention Hi-End proprietary drivers like PhaseOne C1). All files were edited with Picture Window Pro 3.5. Photoshop Elements was sometimes used as the host application for Flo's undistort , CurveMeister and Ultrasharpen plugins; Photoshop Elements was choosed also for exporting the JPEG compressed files to upload. For de-graining Neat Image turned out to br the best but a couple of other exellent plugin I can suggest are Kodak Digital GEM and Noise Ninja while Grain Surgery is a third, more complete solution which also add and match grain from different image sources, though a bit less effective when it comes to remove it. Cameras and lenses are reported above every shots on the gallery pages of the site. Few images of the web gallery have been filtered by 55mm. None of them were originally shot on B&W films but converted digitally using a not-so-much efficent tecnique of splitting rgb channels in Photoshop Elements 2 by transforming them in layers for then tweek each transparency level to simulate the classic filters se for Black and White. All thanks to the "how to" extension that came with the book The hidden power of Elements. Clearly Photoshop channel mixer or the ConvertToB&W plugin are a faster and better solution. Again, for correcting lens and perspective distortion there are more comfortable, refined and fast plugin than Flo's wich I supposed written using Filtermeister, that is not what is normally intended for hardware optimized; I mean LensDoc, ImageAlign and DxO but also the free PTLens which takes advantage of the pano12: the math library of PanoTools. The light falloff, when not using Picture Window, was compensated by the PanoTools Plugin but the best in its genre I've found on the web is Vignetting which permits the creation of customized radial curves on a shot per shot base (or lens) and even to analize the frames per areas matrix, useful for correcting flashes suddenly and strong falloff when used with lens with a too wide field of view.
All Immersive images, spherical and cubic panoramas, were assembled thanks to PanoTools, sometimes using PTGui as a Graphic Interface integrated by the free Autopano and Enblend plugins. Chromatic Aberration have been corrected by Picture Window since the largely used and free PTShift relay on the PhotoshopCS javacript compability not supported by the Elements version. A small amount of images was stitched using Panavue Image Assembler while Photoshop Elements did a great job opening the multilayers .psd output of Panotools and editing each transparency mask. Nonetheless the little brother of Photoshop has a serious limitation in which it constrains transformations like rotating an object by steps of several degrees apart. There are a few other PanoTools Gui, both commercial and for free on the Mac and Linux also; for example PTAssemble, Hugin, PTMac and major stiching and linking software sold at the right price like Realviz Stitcher. Readers of Computer Arts enjoyed the 3.1 version of this application given away by the magazine around the end of year 2004 but release 4 is all another story: 3.1 can cope with lens distorsion only if it's very low and implements a bilinear interpolation algorithm risulting in smooth, not exactly razorsharp images.
The final equirectangular projections, when not directly JPEG compressed as the source for the free PanoTools Java applet were converted to cubic QuickTimeVRs by MakeCubic on the Mac or PanoCube+ on Windows and all embedded hotspots for the navigation set with the help of Panolink on Windows but faintheart and those who like simple and elegant applications might prefer CubicConverter and CubicConnector available for Mac by Clickheredesign. Parameters for the java viewer have been embedded with PTViewer Scripter and by hands, since the mentioned application does't write every parameters at all.
Immersive imaging have sometimes been made overlaying three bracketed shots (-2, 0, 2 EV) with Photomatix to compress the color space within the 256 steps for channel (8 bit) dynamic range normally available in commercial monitors. No HDR images were exported as intermadiate format before tone mapping. Picture Window Pro (and others) also has a stacking window which is powerfull becouse allow you to locate up to 16 control points to register the overlaying pictures at the local morphing level but, honestly, the results of Photomatix, even considering the semi-automatic single point alignment for those irriducible film camera users (digital shots come aligned per definition, unless you forget the tripod at home) are much superior. Another very good app for creating HDR files and tonemapping but with a very slow (and very Linuxlike) interface is FDRTools by andreas Shoemann. Also very good is the classic HDRShop but the latest version is unfortunately not free anymore. First release is still downloadable but the Reinhard tone mapping plugin isn't that great. All the mentioned tools can lead to generally better results than Optipix or the several Photoshop actions available (to name a few: the one by Fred Miranda and the one by Erik Krause).
Internet movies have been got by few hours of MiniDV footage of the venerable 3(small:)CCD Panasonic EZ-1. The Movie were then transfered to the HD with a cheap Canon camcorder becouse the Panasonic did not have any DV output. This produced dv raw files (DVSC) hold by the MainConcept DV codec on Windows or QuickTime on Macintosh and edited with MainConcept MainActor 5.1 on Windows. After the editing, final clips were saved as two different submasters for both of the platform: Huffyuv in an .avi container (YUY2, equiv to rgb16-235, lossless compressed) and uncompressed to make Apple QuickTime Player Pro importing it. The Windows Media Series 9 encoding was a job for the free Microsoft Windows Media Encoder while the QuickTime one for the 3ivx MPEG-4 QT component on Windows which also supports the two pass processing, even working as a set of DirectX filters managed by Graphedit, and outputs a pure MPEG-4 stream played back by the inner engine of QuickTime Player still remaining a lot better (to me even better than Sorenson Professional codecs). Windows Media integration into web pages was made hand writing the object tag parameters while for QuickTime the tiny PageOT was choosed. Real Media streaming have been exported by Real Producer Basic and intergrated by hand with the slim "ControlPanel" control
The 1934 vintage shortmovie was digitized by a consumer Hollywood DVBridge and denoised spacially plus temporally (per pixel differences within a frame or among many different frames at the same xy, even z position) with the free DeGrain Median 0.70 followed by a passage through the wavelet based Vague DeNoiser 0.34 for the opensource Avisynth frameserver 2.5x, while de-interlaced with the equally free DeComb of by Donald A. Graft: Telecide(order=1,guide=2). For Aquarium's short footage TomsMoComp was used in place of DeComb because pure video takes advandage of motion compensation, very efficent area based algorhitms which discard and intrpolate fields only where artifacts actually appear (area based) and after having eventually failed searching along motion vectors to rejoint fields. The same goes for frame decimation performed by Free Decimate 1.01, the sharpening for which MSU Smart Sharpen for VirtualdubMod was selected and the final DCT Frequency Suppressor filter which erase the highest ones while the 2nd highest are cut in half allowing for the best possible quality_to_compression ratio.Transformations were all performed into the Avisynth to VirtualdubMod (as a front-end) workflow. A part from MSU Smart Sharpen and some scenes stabilization thru DeShaker by Gunnar thalin, all filters are plugins for Avisynth.
Every audio editing and processing task was made using Goldwave 5x.
The Stereo Pictures experiments have been shots by a trivial Pentax Stereo Adapter mounted on the 50mm F1.4 byonet lens on my old Pentax Lx, then digitized, aligned and tranformed in side-by-side parallel .jps files using Stereo Photo Maker by Mr Masuji Suto whom SPViewer java applet was also used for displaying all images on the web in whatever vision sistem (even page flipping for those having a quad-buffered graphic board like the nVidia Quadro chip based). Originally my intention was to embed the Stereoscope Applet developed by Andreas Petersik but this one proved to be very slow refreshing, thus my decision to to look for something else...Newbye might prefer StereoEye while a very good commercial chance for $99 is 3D Stereo Image factory. I don't like Anabuilder, sorry. Mac users can point their browsers to Stereo Press.
Finally the website has been assembled using the Namo Web Editor 5.5 suite from tables layout to the image slicing but the code was cleaned and fine tuned with Note tab Pro 4.95 and Cascading style Sheets written down by JustStyle. The layout of some pages based on absolute positioned DIV elements have been setup by Layout Master.
HTML Autorunner lite won for autostarting the home page from a local drive and becouse is free too.
Scanner and monitor have been profiled using Profile Mechanic scanner and profile Mechanic monitor but solutions at least as good as this one are provided by many manifacturers like Gretag-Macbeth (Eye One), X-Rite or Pantone and Color Vision which are the same product differently branded. A decent attempt to check your monitor (and printer) rensponse to the gamma and color spectrum can even be made for less through the Kodak Color Management Check Up Kit.
That's all. The rest is just work.
