Pixiq

Sometimes you just have to think big and that’s what the folks at 360World did. They are a group of young, Hungarian engineers, photographers, artists and environmental designers who specialize in panoramic images that are very big and very detailed. 

For this project they used two Sony A900 (25MP) cameras (supplied by Sony) with 400mm Minolta lenses mounted on 1.4X converters and secured in tandem on a motorized tripod. These lenses gave the team a 2.4˚ horizontal field of width. They estimated that to make a multi-gigabyte image would required 5400 photographs—24 rows with 210 frames in each. Figuring 4 seconds per frame-time to move and align the robotically controlled robot tripod head, they were looking at a minimum of a six hour photo shoot. 

World record breaking panoramas need good weather. As you can imagine atmospheric haze and moisture in the air can play havoc with the images. The best times to shoot are after a cold front has moved through with low humidity for maximum visibility. 

(The arrow in the photo above points to the church you see in the photo below the headline.)

But this was Springtime in Hungary and there were weeks of near constant rain and flooding that lasted well into May. When the weather finally improved, the team set up the dual cameras on the deck of the Observation Tower on János Hill outside the city. The day started perfectly with no clouds and very low moisture in the air. The team set up the camera and laptops and began to make exposures. Two hours into the shoot a thunderstorm struck bringing heavy rains to Budapest and ending the shoot. The next day the weather repeated this pattern and it did it the next day too, Then on the fourth day, after some 20,000 “test” pictures the team got the images they needed.

Micorsoft Hungary supplied the team with a Dell Precision T7500 Workstation with twin 4-core Xeon processors, 24 GB memory and 6TB hard disk for the post-processing. The final dimensions of the image were 590508 x 120750 pixels or 71.3 gigabytes. It took 55 hours to compile the image and the result was a 350 GB PPM file.

Posted on the web, the image is extraordinary. You can pan through the entire 360 degrees and select any section to zoom in on and see the amazing detail.  To see the full panorama of 70 Billion Pixel Budapest go to : http://70gigapixel.cloudapp.net/