some limitations of certain tools

While doing some renders, found the following:

1. Virtualdub (at least my version, 1.8.8) does not work well with 24 bit wav files  when a wav file needs to be added to the video. Needs to be converted to 16 bit to avoid extreme noise in the avi.

2. DMProjector (version 1.05) does not work with tga input files with alpha channel. So, while exporting the clip for use with DMProjector from After Effects, had to choose "Millions of colours" instead of "Millions of colours +" in the advanced settings.

3. For 1920x1080 input files, DMProjector takes around 3 seconds per frame.

note about restoring Android to Toshiba AC-100

V wanted to use the Toshiba AC-100 smartbook for projecting with its HDMI out. The Ubuntu 12.04 which I had loaded for him did not work with the Nvidia driver. Tried Lubuntu 12.10, with the proprietary driver. But system would hang when I used arandr to set output to HDMI only, no display on the projector. So tried restoring back to Android.

As noted earlier, used the technique and the files as given earlier, and went back to Andoid. At first, I tried restoring only partitions 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 12 - the first few, and the biggest ones. But when the AC100 booted up, it went back to Lubuntu. Then I saw that in my previous post I mentioned partition 6 is the boot partition. So I restored partition 6, and hey presto, Android booted up.

With Android also, the HDMI out was not displaying on the Optoma projector. Suspecting the cable and order of switching on of devices, got the working HDMI cable from upstairs, switched off and disconnected both devices, connected the cable, powered on the projector and booted Android. Then the display came on flawlessly. Hopefully Documents to go will serve V's projection needs.

review of DMProjector from pineappleware

Pineappleware.com has a set of fulldome tools. Trial versions are available for download, unfortunately the contact email for pricing info and purchase elicited no reply. The trial versions are limited to 1K resolution. Passable for our dome, not optimal. The tools save Alpha channel, so stitching together multiple frames with different images on them easier.

DMPanorama has nice features like fill upward, for filling the "sky" part of the panorama automatically.

DMProjector exports a single image (or an image sequence) to a specific part of the dome. Perhaps I can try it for video sequences - doing this would be faster than rendering in blender.

Field of view in DMProjector can be specified either vertically or horizontally. Giving a  vertical field of view double the altitude makes the image just touch the horizon at the bottom, since the altitude is defined at the centre of the image. Anti-Aliasing with a sample level of 3 gave good results for me.

Choosing a panoramic image and a 120 degree field of view gave similar results from DMProjector as with DMPanorama, except without the "fill upward". But DMProjector doesn't seem to do panoramas bigger than that properly.

filing income tax return online in 2013

My previous posts on filing the Indian IT return online dealt with the gotchas for Assessment year 2012-13. For this Assessment year 2013-14, the technical issues regarding email attachments of last year are solved, but there was a new issue.

I had downloaded the excel utility from the IT efiling website and started the process of filling it in May. It had the feature of importing previous year's return, so I could avoid typing in lots of info. There was a small confusion regarding salary income, since at first we had been issued only part A of Form-16 - employer's TDS form and salary certificate. Once part B was issued, my queries were answered.

Then the excel utility was used to generate the xml file which we upload. But after uploading, got an error, complaining of wrong country code.

Tried generating the xml with another version of MS Office, still the same issue. Finally called their tollfree helpline, immediately got the answer, that an updated excel utility has been uploaded, I can download that and use it to generate the xml, since the country code for India had been changed from 11 to 91. OK, tried a shortcut of just editing the xml file to make that change, it worked. :)

probable reason for live broadcast problems

Once or twice, while starting the live broadcast in a hurry, BUTT has shown no input. Restarting the system had been the solution. Today also I experienced the issue, but instead of restarting the machine, tried restarting BUTT and then reloading the JackPilot saved session - no go. Restarted Reaper and reloaded JackPilot saved session - that worked.

So I surmise that the problem is caused when BUTT starts to broadcast before Reaper has focus, when Reaper is in the background. At that time, the Reaper output to Jack is probably not available, and later when Reaper gets focus, it does not connect to Jack for some reason. So the solution is to restart Reaper and reload the Jack session.

Edit Dec 2013: One more possible reason: if Reaper is paused - audio does not come out even from live mics through the insert send! Either REC or STOP or PLAY is needed.

updated Twitter widget

Our schedule page and on-demand audio page Twitter widgets stopped working a couple of days ago. Apparently Twitter API changed. Updated with their new widget. Unfortunately font size is a bit too big, and is not configurable.

frame blending for low frame-rate clips with avisynth

Finally got a solution for frame blending with avisynth. Using Convertfps after importing the clip at the required low framerate, when no "zone" parameter is added, frames are automatically blended.

Imagesource("Sequence_%05d.png", 00163, 00251, 5)

#This is at 5 fps

Convertfps(30)

distorting video using After Effects instead of Blender

Checking out if I can use After Effects to distort flat videos to be projected onto the dome (wihout buying the Fulldome plugin, of course :) - found this tutorial which does a bezier warp, which is probably what I need. Unfortunately this effect is not available in AE 4.2 which I have. AE 4.2 does have a "Basic 3D" effect, which can make the video trapezoidal.

I can make do with that for some videos at some locations, I suppose. Will explore using a "Cosmic Colors" frame as a reference.

moving the Sun and Moon against the fixed stars in Stellarium

Wanted to mimic the "Annular motion" of the planetarium instrument, where the stars remain fixed, but the Sun and Moon move across the Zodiac along the ecliptic. Googled Stellarium move sun moon fixed stars and so on, finally hit upon the setDate("+1 days sidereal")

function, which moves the time ahead by one sidereal day, i.e. stars will be at the same spot. Keyboard shortcut Alt + + and Alt + -

Trying it out, found that my Stellarium version 0.10.2 is quite finicky. If a function call is wrong, the script just doesn't run. setDate is case sensitive, and can be in the format
core.setDate("1926:11:23T04:21:01");

as also "2008-03-24T13:21:01" as given in the documentation. But got it working, finally, copying the syntax from the working landscapes.ssc script.

selecting a single constellation in Stellarium

Tried out the single constellation display option. My Stellarium version 0.10.2 behaves as follows when I choose the "Select single constellation only" option in Configuration/Tools :

When I select Sirius, Canis Major constellation lights up. If I then click on Betelgeuse, both Orion and Canis Major light up. Then if I select something which is not in any constellation, like the Moon, all the constellations light up. Next, if I click on Betelgeuse again, only Orion lights up. So, if I click on one star after another in successive constellations like in the zodiac, only those constellations will light up.

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.