@Gen Lee

Many thanks for your in-depth feedback buddy - much appreciated.  I've been away on biz so appologies for the lateness of this reply.  I had come to the same conclusion as what you've said via trial and error.  YES!  Thanks you for confirming that it is indeed not possible to take that second shot before the camera has finished processing that first one (I was beginning to think my camera was faulty).  At least it cannot with my 8700 - perhaps it can with the higher spec DSLRs.

I've just been asked to do a series of VR's for a local concert hall.  I will certainly have to take the images at a lower res to avoid having the performers at two places in the same same pano.

Also get this. Nikon has informed me - after a great deal of hesitation - that it will make little difference to the performance of my 8700 in upgrading to a San Disk Ultra II from my original Lexar 4X CF card.  Apparently it all comes down to the inner workings and limitations of the 8700 itself.  Oh well - at least I've moved from a 256MB card to a 1Gig!

Cheers

Steiner

I did some crowd shots at a football match about 2 years ago with my cp 990 fce8 in fine jpg = 1.1MB per image... It was a nightmare even with this setup and comparativly fast writing speed of a couple seconds per exposure. Especially as I took 3-5 shots per direction for 3 shot stiching. I had to do plenty of cutting and pasting for this. Most of the guys I know who do crowd work tend to do multirow wideangle lens work due to movement and lighting issues with 36 shots for a sphere no uncommon. Obviously PW ain't the tool to use then.

Steiner... matter of interest... do the tiff shots compare favorably to the jpg??

Hi Pheonix

I would say yes.  Even though the final pano will always get reduced to a small scale jpeg - it tends to benefit from coming from a high res TIF as opposed to a high quality JPG (especially when it comes to zooming in).

If you'd like to see crowd samples using the 'Fine' setting (high res jpeg) for my hemispheres, have a look at the 'Milton Keynes Gallery - Buckinghamshire: UK' panos on my website.  By no means perfect but the speed of this setting allowed me to get workable shots where as the TIF setting didn't (albeit with a good deal of post production work).

Cheers

Steiner 

Hey guys you are very welcome

I would like to make one correction to my earlier post.

When shooting RAW this is a totally different scenerio. RAW records ALL of the image data. Shooting other than RAW results in the camera "processing" the image and rendering a TIFF or JPG.

RAW is just data not actually an image. So If you shoot RAW as everyone here suggests, you can "develope" you images using a RAW converter program. Therefor you can choose to "develope" into your chosen format and quality. After the developing then it as I stated.

Gen. Lee.

Hi All, I thought I would dig out  link to some old shots I took with a cp950 a couple of years back. I output these to fs qt movies beacause I like the shots, though the clarity is not there as with a dslr compilation I have had immense feedback from clients and sold quite a few vrs from using these as an example.
http://www.technosphere.com.au/demo/fsvr/mainpool.htm

Cant wait to get my sigma 8mm slr fisheye!

Cheers,
Craig

I would think that you might go back 1 step before converting to QTVR format and tweak these abit for added sharpness.  The fisheye lens is naturally 'soft'.  By UNsharpening you can remove that soft feeling.

Great shot by the way.

Dave

found this today adn wanted to share with u guys

this website allows u to see the speed of ur camera with different flash and sd cards.

only shows canon and nikon top dog slr cameras.

has many popular cameras, in my case my Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II

but you can select any camera from the dropdown list

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-7344#sd

Thanks that was interesting.

Also I noted that current digital camera Firmware updates can be checked.