using After Effects instead of Blender for post-processing

In an earlier post, I'd mentioned using Blender for rotating fulldome frames. The rendering times for 2K frames with Blender was around 22 seconds per frame. Decided to try out Adobe After Effects instead. Dug out the old AE 4.1 box set which we'd purchased in 1999 or so. AE did the render of the 2K frame rotate faster than 1fps, since it's not doing any ray-tracing and instead just doing 2d transforms. Definitely a timesaver.

fulldome frame from celestia using the cube2dome method

Inspired by Ryan Wyatt's article about making fisheye frames from partiview using 6 cube faces, and with the help of code from Selden to display the six different fields of view top, down, left, right, front and back, hacked out a series of screenshots from Celestia and stitched them together to make a fulldome domemaster fisheye image with the help of the archived version of Paul Bourke's cube2dome_linux. On my first try, the registration was not perfect:

Then I thought maybe this was because the frames were not perfectly square. In order to get exactly square pixels, I had to resize the Celestia window to get exactly equal width and height. The getscreendimension function gives the x and y, but there is no "setscreendimension". So I just used the example script at for getscreendimension and kept calling it after tweaking the window size till I got 1002 x 1002 - it could have been any square size, I suppose. Taking those screenshots and making a domemaster, this time it meshed perfectly:

But this is just one frame! So I have to decide whether to pursue this time-consuming route or just purchase the Software Bisque Theater edition as suggested as one of the alternatives to Uniview by Paul Bourke.

exporting clips from Celestia

Tried exporting video clips from Celestia. Running it on secondary display at 1920x1080, tried exporting at 1280x720 with Xvid codec and as uncompressed avi. The Xvid codec version seemed to be better, more quality rendering, at around 11 fps. The look on the dome of course would be the final test. The idea is to warp the exported video after cropping it to a square shape and see if lower third centre view would be good for globes and such.

list of astronomy software

This page has a useful list of Astronomy and Planetarium related software:

http://astronomyonline.org/astronomysoftware.asp

offline rendering of fulldome fisheye frames using partiview

Ryan Wyatt has documented how he rendered fulldome content using partiview and Paul Bourke's tga2dome - http://numerology.ryanwyatt.net/

Seems a bit process intensive. First rendering 6 TGA cubes per angular fisheye frame, then creating the fisheye, and then in our case, warping the fisheye. Probably easier for me to use pre-rendered content as of now. Would be interesting to do a study of whether this process takes more or less time than the Blender render method which was around 1-2 minutes per frame.

There are other partiview resources listed at http://virdir.ncsa.illinois.edu/partiview/

Celestia seems to be able to render multi-view images as given in this old forum post but is limited by the resolution of the output screen.

planetarium systems review

Over the last two days, I could see two different planetariums. Interacted with the staff, saw their features, equipment. Different feature sets, different costs.

Bangalore Planetarium - single projector mirrordome system. Mitsubishi UD8400 projector gives 6500 lumens. Unidirectional seating is achieved through leaving two-thirds of the 15 m theatre empty, seating only 120 instead of 200. They have fulldome shows as well as traditional shows using the star projector, but demand is more for the former. They are making new shows with the help of an animation studio in 3DS Max.

Their website is www.taralaya.org

Calicut Planetarium - Upgraded just last week to Carl Zeiss Powerdome fulldome setup, with all the bells and whistles including a hybrid opto-mechanical system which is supposed to come in a few months. They use 9 JVC DLA-RS65 projectors with the Powerdome system featuring Uniview which can render astronomical objects in realtime, and also save sequences, and allows for show creation by dragging and dropping sequences into a timeline. They drive their HDMI ports over fiber, with the control systems in a rack in another room. They have converted their seating to unidirectional, and are able to seat 200 in their 15 m dome.

Their website is www.rscpcalicut.org

Subjective review: I saw Dawn of the Space Age at Bangalore, and Realm of Light at Calicut. In both cases I was near the rear of the theatre. In both cases, I felt the brightness was quite adequate, though in Calicut I thought some of the dark parts were too dark - like the whale swimming part. Maybe some gamma issue. Could not make out any great improvement in clarity over the single projector setup at Bangalore, except for the area behind the audience - when we use a mirror-dome setup, the area immediately around the mirror is somewhat washed-out, distorted. When observed close to the screen, the pixelation is evident at Bangalore, as it is at our planetarium, but for most of the audience, it is not visible. This pixelation is not seen in the 9 projector setup. I could make out some boundary artifacts of the 9-projector stitch boundaries during the fade-to-black parts. The overall sharpness was probably limited by the 4k dome master, or maybe by all the realtime slicing done to send 9 separate video feeds. Our Space Opera show is quite comparable in terms of audience wow-factor :)

From the audience point of view, the 100x times more costly setup does not deliver that much extra bang for the buck. But from the planetarium executive's point of view, compelling show creation tools are a great asset. Being able to create detailed flythroughs in realtime is a great boon. But patience is a virtue, and if uniview can be licensed and used to export offline for a reasonable cost, we can get most of the advantages of that setup, too. Something like a front-end for the process intensive method of rendering using partiview described here.

wavegain for normalizing

Useful for people who want all the songs in their self-mastered album to sound similar in volume:
http://www.rarewares.org/others.php#wavegain

Simple commandline utility with a GUI frontend that creates batch files for use with the utility. Drawback is that it does not do what I do with SoundForge - normalize to arbitrary RMS values applying limiter/compressor transparently. It does have a -6 dB limiter option, but the way it works seems to be very different from what I'm used to - a much softer limiter, perhaps...

Tata photon backup network device for live audio stream

Plugging in the Tata photon to USB on the Mac in mandir causes problems with the USB midi device and so on. But connecting the tata photon to the USB port before booting, and leaving it connected to the USB throughout, is troublefree.

When I tried to switch back from Photon to LAN, BUTT did not reconnect. Also, I had to disconnect the LAN cable for the Photon to connect. So, if LAN does not work, the way out would be to use Photon till the end.

icecast bandwidth under-reported by awstats

Looks like the icecast bandwidth is under-reported by awstats.

Shoutstats is quite accurate, since it reports the number of connected listeners at any point of time.

Checking out the area under the curve as seen right now, even though yesterday was Sunday and shows less traffic as is usual on Sundays,

If we take the 1 hour units, we have the approximate numbers as the following list from left to right:

300
300
300
300
300
300

400
500
400
400
350
300

300
250
250
200
250
250

250
300
350
550
650
400

That comes to 8150 listener hours. Since our 1 hour of 24 kbps stream filesize is 10.8 MB, taking 11 MB per hour, this comes to 87.5 GB per day on a slow day. The numbers reported by awstat seem to be around half of this.

calculate the disk space based on file date

Contributed by PB:

du -h (current usage)

du -ch `find /path/to/files/ -mtime -365` (last one year)

du -ch `find /path/to/files/ -mtime -730` (last two years)


etc.

viewing our live streams on Android

There was a request from the team preparing a customized android tablet for radiosai to consider changing our embedded player to something based on html5 so that Android would play it. They suggested videojs.

But according to this stackoverflow post, it looks like videojs does not work with our Wowza server: a test page I made also did not work. Our jwplayer embed does have a html5 option, but that seems to work only on iOS devices - "Cupertino streaming".

Wowza forums recommend using RTSP for streaming to Android, and when I made a link like they suggested, that worked fine on my HTC Wildfire for recorded streams. So, perhaps the rtsp urls
rtsp://[our-server-ip-address]:1935/live/myStream
(where myStream is the stream name)
or
rtsp://[our-server-ip-address]:1935/vod/flv:our-filename.flv
is the way to go for Android.

using WinDirStat for disk cleanup

Earlier, I had FolderSize installed on my system, but it was sometimes troublesome in taking up system resources when I did not need it to be running and so on. So, uninstalled it, and now installed WinDirStat. Since it is a standalone application, I can run it only when I need to see the sizes of folders. Collects statistics reasonably fast, all local drives scanned in the time it took to write this post.

problem with HDMI output

Unfortunately, the cable which V gave me to test was probably not meant for HDMI -> VGA. I think it is meant for VGA -> HDMI. I connected my player to my projector with that cable, did not work, and when I put back my old cable which used to work, still not working. Had to run shows from laptop VGA out for a couple of days.

Borrowed a Mac mini from studio to test HDMI projector input, found it working. The Mac mini can play the video at 720p on the HDMI out without any glitches, but with 1080p, the video drops frames, runs at around 15 fps or so. Then, tried the bluray player once again, found it working now! Probably the issue was a loose cable.

ubuntu panel disappearing

V tried to install the Nvidia accelerated driver on the Toshiba AC100 Smartbook running Ubuntu 12.04, and his desktop panel disappeared, though clicking in the relevant place still opened the correct apps. He did not want to change to 12.10 since he preferred the Unity interface to the Lubuntu interface on 12.10.

Problem and solution seems to be described here.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/162854/launcher-icons-invisible-still-work-in-12-04

But it gets stuck as given below,
http://askubuntu.com/questions/146456/cant-restore-unity-desktop

So I just re-flashed and re-installed 12.04.

migration of codeigniter-based site to godaddy

Successfully migrated a site based on the codeigniter framework from a generic server with CPanel to Godaddy. Went smoother than expected, though both servers were Linux servers.

While exporting database, the information_schema database is actually not supposed to be exported or imported. One has to choose the other database and then export. On godaddy, the database has to be created first, and godaddy's control panel fixes that the superuser name (of the db) and the dbname have to be the same. After this was done, came across this "No input file specified" error. The answer, via stackoverflow, was in the github docs. Followed those steps of changing the config file (in two places - in the public folder as well as the admin folder) and changing the htaccess file, choosing to save it in Unix LF style using PsPad, and problem fixed.

Edit: The admin area was broken. To fix it, had to modify the htaccess file in the admin folder, change
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1 [QSA,L]
to
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /admin/index.php?$1 [QSA,L]

and also change the admin/config/config.php file, had to set the URI protocol to Auto in order for auth to work.
$config['uri_protocol']    = 'AUTO';

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope for fulldome

The Microsoft WorldWide Telescope has planetarium features - fulldome projection, warped view as well as fisheye, and the option to use custom warp files in Paul Bourke's format. Unfortunately the tours are bandwidth hungry, and render on the fly, so that many landscapes etc are seen blurry and partly downloaded when played. The "Render to video" feature for the Tours has an option to "wait for downloads to complete" but the feature seems buggy. When I try to render a dome master, it shows the files being written, but no files are seen in the chosen folder. When I try to render low res files, like 640x480, the files do render, but apparently the file write is not able to keep up with the video being played in realtime, so the app crashes instead of doing an async render. This test was done with version 3.0.76.1

This version also crashed on my WinXP machine when doing full screen in full dome fisheye format. But later, after a system restart, full-screen mode did not crash. But it does show visible "stitch boundaries" - quite spoils the night sky look!

Since my main interest in checking out MS WWT was to try and render fulldome masters, and it does not seem to be doing that for me, I'll uninstall it for now.

online resources for fulldome production

Tried out a few options of the many many resources available on the internet, like the ones mentioned in the Small Planetarium Yahoo Group.

1. Tried the dome-masters available at spacetelescope.org - unfortunately, only one of them is a bonafide animation - others seem to be just a single hubble image rotated around the centre of the dome. I can do simple rotations myself!
2. The Science on a Sphere program links to many hi-res movies - 2048x2048 on the public ftp site ftp://public.sos.noaa.gov - these movies are generally suitable only for projection on the sphere as designed, but some parts of some of the movies can perhaps be adapted for fulldome, like animations of LCROSS hitting the surface of the moon etc. In most cases, such animations may be available for fulldome from other sources, so it may not be worth the hassle to try this out. An interesting sidelight while downloading deserves a separate post.
3. Some youtube videos like the ones from jakimsuk are available in 720p and seem to be prewarped for 4x3 projection. But the material is probably copywrited, like Spitz trailers and so on.

downloading large files over ftp

When downloading files from ftp://public.sos.noaa.gov the connection was timing out, and the server did not seem to resume downloads correctly. So I tried downloading from our dedicated server, and then transferring from there to our machine using sftp. Worked like a charm. A 1.3 GB file downloaded in 6 minutes - 40 Mbps! Later, sftp transfer to our local machine took 3 hours or so.

1535001090 bytes received in 359.52 secs (4169.5 kB/s)

using stellarium screenshots in planetarium shows

Tried out various options on the dome -

1. taking screenshots from within stellarium using the Ctrl-S shortcut key or using scripting
2. saving screen-grabs as movies using Fraps and Taksi

The difference in quality is glaring. The best quality is seen with the screenshots captured from withing Stellarium without warping. That is, when the Spheric mirror distortion option is chosen, the quality degrades.

So, I will have to go with first creating screenshots in fisheye mode, then cropping them and distorting them.

smooth edits without re-encoding - Avidemux

Avidemux succeeded where Virtudaldub failed.