Apple has done some testing to help you get an idea of the performance and time needed for post production work on a VR project. Here are some typical times for the steps that you perform creating a VR movie.
The estimated times for each command are from a Power Mac 8100 and a 33 MHz RC68040. The numbers indicate that native tools really benefit the Power Macintosh user.
| Processing Time Required On... |
| VR Action | Power Macintosh
8100 | 33MHz 68040
w/FPU | Notes |
| Stitching 2 PICTS together | 2 minutes | 20 minutes | You could have as many as 18 stitches for one panorama, typically 12 for a 15-18mm lens. |
| Dicing one panorama node | 2 minutes | 20 minutes | Time is per dice. One node might require 24 dices. |
| Linking | 2 minutes | 20 minutes | To link nodes, time per link. You need to link twice to move back and forth between nodes. |
| Compression per node | 2 minutes | 20 minutes | |
Power Macintosh Example
If you were stitching 12 PICTs for a single node, that computation could take 24 minutes for the entire node.
If you then diced that node, it would probably take 48 minutes.
For linking this node to another, 4 minutes.
Compression of this node, 2 minutes.
The grand total for post production time on one node is around 78 minutes. This doesn't include planning, shooting, or learning the tools.
A QuickTime VR movie of rotation around a stationery object would require similar steps to those shown above, but may include many more shots. To do a complete rotation of an object (24 shots around the object at 0 degrees, 24 shots at +10 degrees, 24 shots at +20 degrees, and so on) the movie would consist of over 600 PICTs.