Experimenting with some new tools in MMB to make panorama movies, I made a long Victoria Crater drive movie. I've posted it to YouTube here. The picture quality on YouTube is terrible, but you may sort of get the idea. Unfortunately I don't have bandwidth to post a better resolution version. Comments welcome (other than 'the video quality is terrible').

Very, very cool. I felt as if I was watching someones home video of their outing to Victoria Crater.

"... and here's the panorama from Cabo Corrientes ..... and here's where Joe just had to do 'doughnuts' in the Martian dust..."

Very good stuff. My heart had hiting more and more along viewing the video. This gave me a lot of remembers.

Thanks Michael

Very very enjoyable indeed, Mikael.
The drives seams to be seen through a window, then she stops, and a new panorama appears.
I understand you'd need to put this on a DVD for a better resolution but, it's realy nice like this.
Thanks a lot.

That is an extraordinary document. I think NASA should do you the honour of hosting the full version.

That's great! The only thing that bothers me is the constant panning, it's slightly distracting. There are some really cool moments though when the horizon stays still and the images jump around.

MHoward,

Way cool. When I first started watching the video I thought, "This is crap!" Then all of a sudden my brain began to grok the point of view and began to be able to fill in the gaps, and I thought, "This is extraordinary!" In agreement with NGunn, I think this is exactly the kind of thing that people 50 years from now will be looking at to get a sense of the MER missions.

I hope you didn't consider my earlier comments flippant. I think this is a really great video.

I disagree with Pando about the panoramas. I find them revealing. They reminded the feeling I sometimes get when hiking up a mountain trail. I'm huffing and puffing staring at the trail trying to make sure I don't misstep. Then I stop to catch my breath, and suddenly I realize that there is this beautiful vista all around me and I just have to pause and look around.

Flippant? No, I appreciate all the comments. The basic rule I followed was to take all the sequences of Navcam drive images, or at least all the ones that are somewhat coherent, and link them by the pans. I tried not to change the camera direction without telegraphing that through movement. But it would be easy enough to do a version without the pans, or spending less time on the pans, and I might try both those to see what they look like. There are many options; it's hard to choose, which is particularly why I was interested in feedback.

What a perspective. I wish I could see the full res version, but that was beautiful and amazing. I'm trying to decide if it is a ballet, or an opera, seen through the performer's eyes. Awesome work, Mike.

Thanks for the comments. I'll try to churn out some new stuff eventually. There is some really nice stuff out there; one could eventually do a similar movie for almost the entire mission(s), although I'm getting tired just thinking about it. The sequence right after Purgatory is one of the best. They were thoroughly covering the drive imagery for awhile back then

Michael, I think the pans work well conceptually. The problem Pando had (and I had to a lesser extent) is that your panning isn't following a natural eye-scan process. When we, as humans, stop and take in a scene, we actually move somewhat quickly from one interesting point to the next. If you sped up the movement from, say, ground to horizon, or from far wall to nearby cape, and then lingered on quick zoom-ins of interesting points, it would follow the pattern of human scene-scanning a little more closely.

Also, people have consistent patterns as to how they scan their visual scene. In most western cultures, we start scanning a scene from the upper left to the lower right, and our "hot spot" (where, interesting points notwithstanding, the eye tends to gravitate towards) lies about two-thirds of the way up from the bottom of any natural framing. (If you analyze how the eye scans a page of text, for example, it starts at the upper left, scans down diagonally to the lower right, and then bounces back to a point centered side-to-side and about two-thirds of the way up from the bottom. You can apply this general pattern to most naturally-occurring visual frames.)

Part of the reason western cultures use this large-scale scan pattern is due to the way in which written language is formatted on a page. Many oriental cultures scan their visual scene somewhat differently. But we all share the pattern of jumping from one interest-point to another and letting our peripheral vision fill in the "background."

-the other Doug

I have to say I like the format just the way it is. It's a machine's eye view, not a human view, yet the place seems to become real as you watch. For me that's what makes it both authentic and dramatically compelling.

Here's a movie from back shortly after the escape from Purgatory.

Wow We really have the impression to be on the rover and move with her. Very impressive, particulary the begining of the movie.

Great as always michael