- Well up until now we've been processing
a single 360 degree image.
But what if you've shot many of them,
40 of them, 100 of them or more?
Well PTGui has a great feature called Batch Builder.
- [Voiceover] The first type of batch we're going to build
is going to be from this folder of images that contains
enough source images to create eight panoramas.
So you see here is a folder of 128 bracketed photos,
and again those go together to create eight full 360s.
Now the first step in building a batch,
which is actually optional,
is to create a template or a project from which
the rest of the panoramas are based.
Now if you skip this step,
that's okay.
You're just going to get all of the default values
created by PTGui.
But I want to give it a few of my own settings
for my own uses.
This folder of bracketed panoramas is from one location
and I want to see what they look like so I can choose
which ones I want to use.
Maybe I can also identify some problems,
and if they come out great,
then I'm already done.
So if I choose the settings I'm used to using,
I'll be able to most take advantage of that.
First, the type of panorama that I want to create
as you've seen me using in this tutorial
is the Blend Planes.
So I'm going to check the option for the Blend Planes
and also the Exposure Fused Panorama,
because I can get a really great quick
look at it immediately.
So in other words,
when the batch is done,
I can take a look at the panorama.
If there are any glaring problems,
I'll be able to identify those right away.
So I'm using TIFF as usual.
You might notice the width and height
is a little bit smaller.
These are a little bit older project using
a different camera at the time.
The output file I want to leave as a default
because I'm going to define something else in just a moment.
We'll be able to use our same lens settings
for all of the projects.
We'll be able to use all the panorama settings,
and the same crop.
All these will be applied to each
of the panoramas in the group.
The Mask, however, we don't want to apply.
If I were to apply a Mask to one panorama,
that would certainly not apply to all of them
because they're taken from different locations
with different people moving around.
Okay, the Optimizer settings will be also applied
and the place we do that is in the Project Settings.
If we scroll down just a bit,
we see Batch Stitcher actions.
Now I do want to have the Batch Stitcher
automatically align the images,
and basically that means to create the control points
between the images.
I do want it to create the panorama,
but only if there are enough control points
for it to be done.
Okay, here's the file naming section.
This is where I'd like to take advantage a little bit
of some file naming options.
Let us choose something simple with the project file
using the folder name.
So each one of my panoramas is going to start
with the same name because they're in the same folder.
But it does help me identify later
which ones I'm looking at.
I'll have it saved in the same source folder.
Now those are the project file settings.
Just below here are the panorama file name settings.
And I'm going to leave them to be the same as above.
In other words,
my panoramas will have the same names
as their project file names.
Okay, and just looking really quickly at
the template behavior down here.
Since this project will be used as a template,
these are the things I mentioned a minute ago.
Most correspond to one of the tabs above.
We're going to go ahead and apply all
of these Lens Settings, Crop Settings,
HTR Settings, Optimizer Settings, et cetera.
We'll un-check Image Masks,
and we can go ahead and leave this unchecked.
Where it's asking if we want to use
the EXIF data for the first image
to set the Lens Parameters.
Since we're using the Lens Settings above,
we don't need that.
Okay, we're ready to go ahead and create our batch.
If we want to,
we can save this project as a template
if we want to use it later in the same kind of situation.
So I can save this template as 8mm because
that's the type of lens I was using,
and that's how I'll identify it later.
Okay, but let's get to the good part.
We can go under the Tools menu and choose Batch Builder.
Starting down here at the bottom,
we can use the currently open project as a template.
Or, since I've saved it,
I get the same result by choosing the 8mm template.
I have the option of saving my Batch List,
which I'll go ahead and do in case I want to
share this Batch List later.
Or I can also open it again and run it again
if I've made adjustments to the projects.
I'll just call it Batch List Folder because
the next batch we're going to do is going
to be a little bit different.
And I can click Generate New Projects.
Okay, our method is going to be multiple panoramas
per folder with a fixed number of images.
That's correct.
You see here the other options,
which is one panorama per folder which we'll do next,
and group images taken around the same time.
We're going to choose this middle one with all
of the images in the same folder with a fixed number.
The location of those is in this
Palace of Fine Arts folder.
We don't need to add a file extension because
we have only TIFF files in the folder.
And we have it already set to 16 images per panorama.
That's correct.
Let's go ahead and click OK.
And the Batch Builder gives us its proposal for
how the images are grouped.
We can see that there's 16 images in each one,
which is correct,
but we told it that,
so we would expect that to be correct.
And all the images appear to line up quite nicely.
Now if they didn't go together very well,
we can open up the section by clicking
that number at the end.
It shows us the number 16 because it doesn't have
enough space to show us all in one row.
So we can expand and collapse that anytime.
If some of the images were not in the right place,
we have some of the options to move them around.
If I move my cursor between images,
I see a little scissor icon.
And when I click on it,
it moves the images to the right through their own line.
Let's say those three images actually belong
with the next line.
I could just click on Combine With Next
and it will add those to that line.
But as we have it now,
they belong above.
So I'll click on Combine With Next on my first set,
and it moves those three back up.
Click that last image to give us back our normal view,
and we just make sure that we're looking good.
As you see, it takes a little while
to load all these previews,
but we're used to getting to wait for things
when we work with panoramas.
We're looking good,
so I'm going to go ahead and click Generate Projects here.
And what it did very quickly there was it just created
the project files.
In other words,
the PTGui file that defines our project for each panorama.
It hasn't stitched them yet.
But it does ask us now,
would you like to send the generated Batch List
to the Batch Stitcher?
Why yes.
That would be great.
So now it opens up the Batch Stitcher
and all the hard work is being done behind the scenes.
And we'll be back when this batch is finished.