Transcript: WGAN-TV | iGUIDE Stitch Post Production Software Training15201
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| 109-WGAN-TV | Deep Dive Training | iGUIDE Stitch Post Production Software with Planitar (iGuide) Marketing Manager Chris White (@Chris_iGuide) | Thursday, 1 July 2021 iGUIDE PLANIX Sample 3D Tour and with Interactive Floor Plan courtesy of iGUIDE | 2D Schematic Floor Plans https://youriguide.com/pla_1_608_jones_st_e_st_marys_on/doc/floorplan_imperial_en.pdf Transcript: WGAN-TV | iGUIDE Stitch Post Production Software Training Hi All, Transcript below ... You bought - or are thinking about buying – an iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit or iGUIDE IMS-5 Camera. After you shoot your first iGUIDE 3D Tour, what post production edits are possible – with iGUIDE Stitch software for Mac and PC – before creating an iGUIDE? (iGUIDE Stitch is the software used to edit the iGUIDE 3D Tours.) Watch this recording of WGAN-TV Live at 5 that aired on Thursday, 1 July 2021. ✓ WGAN-TV: Deep Dive Training: iGUIDE Stitch Post Production Software My guest was: Planitar (iGUIDE) Marketing Manager Chris White (@Chris_iGuide). Chris shows us two iGUIDE Stitch software workflows: 1. fastest workflow (under two minutes) 2. typical workflow (under five minutes) Additionally, Chris also shows us: 1. What other iGUIDE Stitch software tools are available (including exporting photo spheres to remove the camera from the mirror and imagine enhancement; including how to set presets for color correction to match your tastes 2. iGUIDE Stitch software shortcuts; tips and tricks Worth noting that before you buy an iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit, you can: 1. Download the iGUIDE Stitch software (PC | Mac) 2. Sample iGUIDE Tour: Download 360s of a house to "play" with the iGUIDE Stitch software Deep Dive iGUIDE Stitch Software Training Includes 1. Downloading the iGUIDE Stitch Software for PC or Mac 2. Downloading sample data to practice with iGUIDE Stitch Software 3. How to import the Project Folder from an iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit or iGUIDE IMS-5 Camera 4. How to move scans to reposition (if necessary) 5. How to align scans (if necessary) to look like a finished floor plan 6. Tips: when and how to shoot scans that are not contiguous 7. How to select panoramas (panos) 8. How to adjust panos 9. What adjustments in panos are possible (remove the camera from a mirror; contrast, saturation) 10. Review of the adjustment screen 11. Discussion of iGuide auto-adjustments 12. How to hide panos from the tour (without deleting the panos) (and how to change your mind later) 13. How to add notes for the iGUIDE drafting team 14. How to export to iGuide Portal (to order an iGuide) Hint: Sign into: https://Manage.YouriGuide.com 15. iGUIDE Stitch Workflow Best Practices (such as copying USD Drive data to your Mac/PC first) 16. How and why to rotate floor data so that the main entrance faces toward the bottom of the screen 17. How to set the orientation of all floors to be the same 18. Reviewing mouse click options 19. Reviewing keyboard function key options 20. Where to locate the export file on your Mac/PC Advance iGUIDE Stitch Workflows and Tips 1. How to add - and location to place - a 360 drone pano to iGUIDE Stitch (or any 360 from any 360 camera) 2. How to sort panos by file name or date 3. How to arrange all scans 4. How to arrange selected scans (and how to select scans to arrange) 5. How to fine-tune scans 6. How to square-up floors Best, Dan P.S. Emily at Hopscotch Interactive (@Hopscotch) Thank you for inspiring this WGAN-TV show. WGAN Forum Related Discussions ✓ iGUIDE PLANIX is the 3D Camera Kit Matterport Wished It Created ✓ BIG NEWS!! New iGUIDE camera available in April. ✓ Transcript: WGAN-TV | Introduction to iGuide: a Deep-Dive Demo & Discussion ✓ All WGAN Forum discussions tagged: iGUIDE | iGUIDE PLANIX | iGUIDE Stitch ✓ Free WGAN Cheat Sheet: Which Virtual Tour Platform is Best (for Me)? ✓ WGAN MarketPlace: iGUIDE --- Transcript (video above) - Hi all. I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, July 1, 2021, Canada Day. And you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. Our guest today from Canada is Chris White, Marketing Manager from Planitar Inc., the maker of iGUIDE. And today's topic is: Deep-Dive Training of iGUIDE Stitch Post-Production Software for PC and Mac. This is an awesome show. Chris, I'm so excited to have you back on the show. - Cool. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be back. - Chris, before we do a deep-dive into this topic, how about we take a look at an iGUIDE so that we kind of know where we're headed when you start showing us the post-production process for iGUIDE? - Awesome. And I'm glad you asked that. That way people will know what you get in a final product and then we can show them how to get there. Amazing. All right. I'm going to share my screen. Let me know if it works. Okay. Can you see my screen? Yes, good. Okay. So here's an iGUIDE. So, an iGUIDE is essentially a virtual tour, a 3D tour, but what makes it special is this floor plan over here. So as you can see, there is an integrated floor plan. It is interactive, you can click on it. So all the little dots you can see here are clickable and they'll take you to different positions in the property so you can look around. You've obviously got 360 degree visuals, that's how you can look around. You can click and look up and look down and look around or whatever you want. Fun fact, if you click the button in the top left-hand corner of the floor plan, you can zoom in on the floor plan. That's actually a new feature that just got added last week; something like that. - Okay, cool. So we have an interactive map, we have the 360 tour, which gives us kind of just the highlights of the things that we're going to touch on today that we're actually going to change in the post-production. - Gotcha. So, you can configure this iGUIDE in a lot of different ways. So the most, I would say, common way to configure this is to turn visuals on and off. So when you're shooting with the iGUIDE PLANIX Camera System, you're capturing LiDAR measurements, but you're also capturing 360 degree visuals. So, the 360 degree visuals are pretty obvious. You're looking at them right now, but the LiDAR measurements are used to draw the floor plan. So what can happen? And this is a perfect example you see on screen here. Sometimes you'll have less than ideal visuals. So if you're a real estate photographer and you've been in a few homes you'll know that not every room is pretty. Some of them look like this. You don't need this on your virtual tour. So the most common thing people configure is what's seen and what's not seen. So they're going to turn the panos off. Now, the nice thing about this particular setup with the iGUIDE is that, if you turn a pano off, that space still has value outside of just the visuals alone. So it's still on the floor plan and it represents something that people can see on the floor plan and can interact with and that also contributes to the property data in terms of room dimensions and square footage. So something nice, something positive I would say about the space is, they are less than marketing worthy, will say, is that they're still part of the presentation. So you still get some value out of those by measuring them and they're still featured in the floor plan. 99% of the time, what you're going to do is turn panos on and off. But you can also do all sorts of stuff. You can change room labels, you can add a video. This one doesn't have one, but there'll be a tab at the top, it says, video. You can configure the UI elements to be visible or invisible, you can have the tour start with a shrunken floor plan and have the visuals up larger if you want. And you can basically... - And I'm looking for a marketing panel, maybe for a real estate agent. Perhaps this tour doesn't have that. - No, it doesn't, actually, it doesn't have branding on it. But I'll get you one that does. - Okay. So we'll see how that's done too. So Chris, awesome. For the purpose of our visit today for this deep-dive into iGUIDE Stitch, let's assume that I'm a real estate photographer. I'm researching buying an iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit. And before I do, I really do want to see the back-end of iGUIDE, the post-production and workflow. And I'm looking for two different workflows, Chris. First is, what is the fastest workflow from camera to going live? What's the fastest workflow from the post-production standpoint? And then second, since you have probably done hundreds if not thousands of iGUIDE tours, what's the workflow that you recommend; taking us through an actual project? - Okay. I'm going to answer those questions. You're going to love this. And if someone who's watching this has been wondering, what is it like to do this post-processing process? I'm going to do exactly what you just said, which is show it from start to finish and then show how easy it can be. As in terms of time, if I'm just going to quantify it real quick, you can be in and out of this software, this post-processing part of the whole iGUIDE creation in two minutes. It could be so fast, sometimes it takes longer to boot your computer. But anyway, okay, I'll share my screen and I will show you. - Great. So first up is the iGUIDE Stitch post-production software. Assuming we've already shot the job, how do I get the job into Stitch and publish it? In fact, do you want to show us how to install it or talk about that? - I can show. Actually, yeah, that's a really great point. Let me show you. Can you see my screen right now? - Yes. - So, Stitch is actually downloadable by anyone right now. There's actually sample data as well on the website if you wish to download and play with it. If you go to GoiGUIDE.com and then go to resources, there's going to be a page that says downloads. If you go there and then you scroll down just a wee bit to where it says Stitch, anyone can download Stitch right now. And you can try it out if you want. - And as I recall, there's example data there as well. - That's right. There's sample data for you to play with. - So I don't even need to have an iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit today in order to play with Stitch? There's already a sample tour and download the software either for my PC or Mac and then I'm off to the races? - You got it. Exactly. And that's what it was for. It was because people had questions. They said, "how does this work? What does it look like?" Well, you can try it out for yourself and then I'm going to show you as well. - Okay. So, we'll just assume that we've already gone through that process of downloading the software. Is this a Mac or PC version? - So, I'm on a PC. They're going to be nearly identical to be honest. In all likelihood, just FYI for your listeners and it's probably technical, so I'll just say it straight up, I'm working on a 4K monitor right now, so my UI scaling is a little weird. So it probably wouldn't look this small on your computer if you're scaling is good. I'm editing right now on a big screen television which is a bit unusual. Typically, the icons are larger. Either way, Mac/PC, it looks nearly identical and behaves exactly the same on either one. So when you go collect the data, what you're doing is you're storing that data on the camera. So unlike other systems, it's not on your smart device, your phone, your tablet or whatever you're using. It's on the camera, on a USB drive. So if you're a professional photographer, think of it like an SD card. You pull it out of the system and you plug it into your computer, copy the data off. That's the best way to look at it. When you do that, what you do with it from there is completely up to you. But to just show you an example, I just copied it onto my desktop. People have all sorts of fancy files, systems and shared drives and RAIDS and whatever, but you can get as sophisticated as you like and put it into your workflow however you want. I just copied onto the desktop... - I can put the data where I want, but all I did was move it from a thumb drive to my computer before beginning using iGUIDE Stitch? - Exactly. That's exactly right. So it's just a folder, that's it. So I'm going to click it from Stitch, sorry, to just back up a touch. This is what Stitch looks like. It's a little boring initially because there's nothing here to look at. But if I click the open button and then I click a folder from the camera, what will happen is that it will load the data in Stitch and now I can see some stuff. So let's talk about the fast workflow, the easy one. The easy one, the fast one, is pretty much me ignoring all this stuff. I don't look at the data. I don't look at the images. I don't click on anything, although I just did. All I do, there's only one thing I have to do and that's click on the floor and I have to choose a grade level. Now, this is only if I didn't select it when I was shooting. But this is a requirement. So there's a very good reason for this. So part of the core of the iGUIDE system is measurement and determining square footage. So, the people who draw the floor plans have no idea if something's above or below the ground. They can guess, but they don't like guessing. So, you have to specify. Now, if you've done it on site, you don't have to worry about it. But above or below grade means above ground or below ground because in most places in North America, when square footage is reported for a property, below grade is not included and above grade is. I'll show you this later. You can configure it, but that's something that's required. And you change that by just clicking on the floor and choosing one. Again, this is just if you haven't done it on site. But when you click on a floor, you get some options. So if that's configured, all I have to do, this is the fast workflow, let's click on the little globe button up here and it's going to, I'm just going to change one setting here. Here we go. It's going to give me warning messages if there are any, but there shouldn't be. Oops. There we go. So I'm going to click the little globe button and it's going to say, it's going to give me these little warnings here and I'm going to click ignore. So these warnings are, in the fast workflow you don't need to worry about them, they aren't important. All this stuff can change later. I click ignore and it's going to start working. Now, hopefully my feed still works while this is happening. Can you still hear me talking? - Yes. - Okay. Sometimes it takes advantage of the CPU cores and it can mess with video calls. So that's good. Either way, what it's doing right now is, it automatically is exporting all the data. And what I mean by that is, it's making 360 degree images if there aren't any and it's auto adjusting all the exposures and white balances and everything. So essentially if I just click that button, it does everything for me and it spews out an output. So think of this in terms of a Lightroom workflow if you've ever used Lightroom. Lightroom doesn't do anything until you tell it to. If you select a few images and you say, export these as JPEGs, it goes, okay and it makes JPEGs. This is the same thing. If you click that export button, you say, export, it takes all the data and makes a file for you. - And is it going to iGUIDE when it does that export or is it just going to my desktop? - It just goes right onto your desktop. It doesn't go anywhere. So this is a very comfortable workflow. So what I mean by that is that, if it's 3 AM and you shot five houses, and when you're doing this process you make a mistake, it doesn't send it to anybody. It just puts it on your desktop. And if you realize, oops, I messed up, no big deal, you can go back. So once you've exported it, it creates a little summary. Again, you can ignore this. And Stitch, you're done, that's it. So, I'll recap the first workflow. Open the folder. Wait 30 seconds for it to process all the images. Click the globe button: that's the export button. Click any button that says ignore, okay or whatever. And then basically, however long it takes to process is how long it takes to export. And then you're done in Stitch. That's how fast it is. - Okay. You're done with Stitch, So, what do I do with that file that I've just created? - Excellent question. So, you have to send it to somebody for anything to happen. So, think of this like a separate process for ordering. So if I want something, I have to go fill out a form to essentially order it. Because this is a transaction. You're kind of paying for something here. And with an iGUIDE, what you're paying for is very obvious. You send the data in and then draft people, draw the floor plans for you. - Okay. But where do I go to place this order? So, I don't yet have an iGUIDE account, so maybe take us through that. How do I set up an iGUIDE account and then actually place an order? I know we're kind of jumping out of Stitch at this point, but I think for the purposes of, hey, okay, I get it, that was easy. Well, what's the next step of publishing my iGUIDE ... to see that upload step? - Right. So, when you buy an iGUIDE camera, we make an account for you. So you can't make one ahead of time unfortunately. It would be nice if you could. Maybe that'll come in the future. So, I'll show you what the process would look like. But this is something you can't try yourself. So you can absolutely go get Stitch and play with sample data. But during this process, you'll have to wait until you actually buy a camera to... - Which is fine. I'm going to assume that I buy a camera, that Planitar creates an iGUIDE account for me, probably sends me a link to say, "go set up your account here." And let's now assume that I've done that. Perhaps we could do that with your account or your test account? - Yeah, we're going to do it with this one right here. You got it. - Okay. - So imagine that you've shot your first iGUIDE and now you want to submit it because you want to order an iGUIDE. What you would do is log into the iGUIDE portal, which is the very screen you're looking at right now. The iGUIDE portal, it's going to show a bunch of stuff here. Obviously these houses aren't... - I don't think I'm in the right spot. I'm staring at a screen that has the Stitch. - Ooh, because I didn't... Okay, hold on. Let me switch it over. Here's the ones that look more like a UI. There we go. Okay. So this is the iGUIDE portal. - Okay. manage.youriGUIDE.com but I can't get there unless I have an iGUIDE account and that's actually set up by iGUIDE when I buy the iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit? - You got it. Now fun fact, these are always super-fun. You can go to manage.youriGUIDE.com and you can totally create an account. Anyone can. If you do that however, you won't have anything to work with or do anything with because you don't have any data and you won't have this button at the top. So there's a reason for that, it's really interesting. So we have different types of accounts. Some are accounts for creators and some are accounts for managers or editors. So an editor would be someone who you would give access to your iGUIDE to so that they could make the very changes that I'm going to show you later. And it's very common to have a brokerage or team or they've got an administrative person and they don't want to call you to change the floor plan label. They just want to do it themselves. So if you want, you can give them access and they can go in and change it. - Got it. So assuming that I have the iGUIDE account, I've logged in, how do I upload that file that you just created in the iGUIDE Stitch? - Excellent question. So, you click the button at the top that says, create iGUIDE and you're going to get the order form which I referred to earlier. There are some options you can configure. These are all free. You don't need to do anything, you can just leave them checked. - Okay. So, you went a little bit fast and the print is a little bit small. So the add-ons include adding Google Street View; adding Floorplanner; those are two third-party services and advanced measurement, I'm not sure what that is. - Right. So, just off the top, those are all free. None of them cost money. Why you would uncheck them, I have no idea. But they're all there checked by default because they're free. But Street View is exactly what it sounds like. You can export things to Street View. When you are doing that, you typically don't do that for regular residential properties, but it's very common for people to every so often shoot a business with the intention of exporting to Street View. So that's an option, you can do that. Floorplanner; yes, you're right. Third-party service, that allows you to customize your floor plans, do some 3D renders, there's all sorts of fun stuff. That's not really a conversation for today so much. But again, free, you can play with it for free. It's awesome. Advanced measurements is a feature in the iGUIDE that allows you to measure in 3D space. It's really not for residential real estate. There's nothing wrong with using it in that scenario, but that's really more facility management or AEC or insurance restoration; that kind of stuff. Because those are scenarios where you need to figure out how long a pipe run is or how big a platform is to put a piece of equipment on or something like that. - Okay. Got it. Paid add-ons. - Yeah. The only one there is VR. Now, I don't know if anyone still uses VR, but it is still there. And the experience is actually quite cool. You have someone interested in VR, you can totally add it in. There are actually two iGUIDE packages. One is Standard and the other is Premium and they're accessed from this dropdown up here. So the only difference between the two is that Premium iGUIDES have fancy floor plans. So they have toilets, fixtures, sinks, things like that, appliances and they have VR. So if you really want to add VR to a Standard iGUIDE, you can totally do that. That's an option. - Could you just toggle for a second on Standard just to see that? - So, you'll see there's a few options here. The only ones that are relevant to this conversation are really Standard and Premium. - Standard and Premium. Okay. So, how do I upload it? - A good question. So there's a few steps you have to do, well, there's one step you have to do before you upload and that's add an address. So you basically have to give this iGUIDE a name before you send data because we need to know what it is. But it's exactly what it sounds like. You just put an address. I'll just make a fake one. Typically what happens is that it's just an auto-complete through Google. So you start putting the address in and it'll just auto-complete it for you. So I've done it, that's it. And then what I do is, I go to the bottom. So I'm skipping all this stuff, I don't need any of it. You can do it if you want. But we're going to skip it because ... - Let's just see what it is though. So we'll go slowly. Add agent branding. Okay. And that's where you could go off and create a kind of a banner with their photo and their contact info. - So, I'll try to find one for you real quick. - And just to be clear, where you've checked the Google box, I want to be careful we're not submitting something to Google by accident. - That's a very common question. So, you won't be. The checkbox at the top is meant to enable Google and in order to send it to Google, you'd have to manually go send it later. There's a whole separate UI for that where you basically configure the tour and then send what you specifically want to send. - Awesome. Maybe we'll do a different show on that. That's cool. - Yeah, that's a whole other topic of discussion. It's fascinating. - That's awesome. Okay. So, it looks like you already have a banner that's been made up specifically for you. - Yeah. Look at that handsome guy. So, a banner is exactly what it sounds like. It's an agent or branding for whoever you're creating the tour for. It doesn't have to be an agent. But it's just name, contact information, typically a headshot and a logo. This is highly customizable. It's one of the advantages of the iGUIDE in general. If that, you can brand the heck out of it. So you can do custom images. You can have whatever the limits are of your own creativity. But this is critical to branding. It's kind of funny. People overlook it a lot. But when you have a tour that is part of a real estate listing, if people can't connect to the person who's listing, that is, then, well, the whole system is kind of broken. So branding is actually pretty important. - I got it. But let's keep moving because I know we've got a lot to cover on the show today. All I want to know is, I can add an agent, branding, boom, done. Okay. Got it. - There's one other thing in here though. So, iGUIDE has automatic delivery; should you want it. This is kind of a weirdly overlooked thing. So, whoever's on the banner, I can have that person have the iGUIDE automatically sent to them when it's done. I don't need to send it myself. But that's just a checkbox, it's easy. People, I mentioned earlier there were editors and there's different roles here. So I can assign other people access to this iGUIDE should I wish to right from here. So if I've got an agent and I know, oh, they're going to want in on this, I can give them access right here and then they can go in and edit things and make some changes. And then at the bottom I can upload data. So part of the iGUIDE experience is adding additional information in the form of say photos or video or other things like property description. So there's two upload boxes here. There's one at the bottom for images. And then you can skip this completely if you don't want to do it. But if I had gone to a property and shot still images, I would upload them as well because I want them to be included in the iGUIDE. But we can skip that for now. - So, we're looking for a file called Stitch TAR? - You got it. That's right. So mine's on my desktop. So all I did, I probably was too fast. I clicked on the dotted box and then I clicked on my desktop and there's only one folder on there because I'm a tidy guy apparently. And when I go in here, there's an export folder and then, I hope you guys can see this. And then there's a TAR file which is just kind of like a zip file - Okay. That's super-clear. Okay. So then you hit open. - Okay. So here's something that's fascinating. So then, it shows you what you just attempted to upload but it doesn't do anything. So you might think to yourself, wait a minute, why is that? Why doesn't it just upload it? There's a very good reason. So what we've noticed over the course of seven or eight years of doing this is that, people often go out and they shoot at, will say, 9 AM, they shoot another house at noon and they shoot another house at 3 pm. And by the time they're uploading this data, maybe it's midnight. Maybe you had a really full day. It's very easy to make a mistake and upload the wrong data to the wrong house and to make an error. So this is meant to protect you and to show you, look, you chose 301 King Street, you're uploading, well, in theory, it can be 301 King Street. And then it tells you the size for reference. We have people in rural communities where their internet is not fabulous. So if you know how big it is, you can kind of ballpark approximately how long it's going to take so it's a convenience thing and then it tells you how many panos there are just for fun. You can also delete the file if you chose the wrong one. So that's why that button is there. But supposing that you got the right one. You just click the button at the bottom and you wait and it just uploads the data for... - Okay. Where do I add my video? - Good question. So, we skipped it, but I'll go back and I'll show you. Actually, maybe I can click on it ... - That was under advanced options? - Correct. So advanced options, the very first thing under here is video because that's the number one advanced thing people are going to change. The advanced, sorry, video is fascinating in that there are two versions. So, iGUIDE is really-really well optimized for real estate. So, it's got two different videos that you can add: one branded and one unbranded. The branded one obviously has agent branding. So that will not appear on the version of the tour that you place on MLS and also on the local listing service. So you've got a separate one, separate video link for the unbranded version. So should you wish to create a completely separate video with no branding, you can still take advantage of that on MLS. It would be a real shame often if you, especially if you do your own videos. It's a real shame if you create this whole video and then the agent can't use it. So ... - We're clear on that. Reminder, let's assume that I'm a professional real estate photographer and I'm already with you on this. We can move through it quickly, but I do want to know what features were under that advanced setting. - Yep. So, in addition to the video you've got, you can change the URL, you can change the start options and units like metric or imperial, you can configure the measurements. Often people have a specific thing that they want to change every time. So you can actually set these up as default for your account as well. You don't need ... - Chris, the print is super-small. How about just reading off the different options? - Okay. They're very exciting. Hide room areas. That hides some of the areas. Hide the on-screen measure feature, if you want to hide that. Actually this is a good one: include below grade in total area. So you're going to have the total square footage of the house. That's a really important number. In some areas, it's everything. Below grade, above grade, everything. In some areas it's not. So, you can configure this tour to be exactly what your client wants. And there's a small amount of learning that you need to do to figure out what it is your client wants, but that has nothing to do with the iGUIDE so much as it has to do with understanding your client's needs. - Okay. So I'll figure, the print's pretty big at this moment. We'll figure if somebody wants to watch the recording, stop the screen, they can read what the other options are. So, that sounded super-important that you just went by which was, I actually could name the URL. It looked like the default setting was actually the property address with underscores, but I could put something super simple in there like 301_king. - Most of the time what people do with that, Yes. You can make it whatever you like really. The only problem is if you've already got one, you're going to get a duplicate. So I've already done 301_king, so it gets these weird characters at the front. Most of the time people totally ignore this because it's not super-relevant. Very often you'll do an iGUIDE for someone like a builder and the URL does matter. And they want something simple: homes. And so you can change it to a simple set of words: 100% - Okay. That's awesome. Okay, I can control the URL. - What else did we get in here? So there's a few other options. We can go into them later, they're not super-exciting. But basically, you're done. That's it. ... - So it says, create iGUIDE and upload: have I already done that? - Oh, we have indeed. You can see it says, 100%. So if we had just stuck on this particular part of the screen, you would have seen there's a little progress meter and it does little check marks one by one and then a 100%. The progress bar will gradually go up to 100% as the file is completed uploading. - So when do I get my floor plans? When do I get my iGUIDE? - It's a good question. So, we guarantee that you will get your tour and your floor plans and everything the following day. So that's a vague way of saying, if you upload it on Tuesday, you're going to get it on a Wednesday. But often it's significantly faster than that. - It's 5:30 ET now. If I uploaded it now and I get up at 8 AM in the morning on the east coast, is there a good chance it's going to be ready for me? - There is. It's a little bit tricky to explain. But I'll put it like this, we have something in place called continuous delivery which just means that we get it done as soon as we can get it done. So the unfortunate thing about that is that if I'm being honest, I'm not in sales, I'm allowed to be honest. There are differences in activity and load based on season or just random... So, the drafting team might have to process 50 iGUIDES one day and then 5,000 the next. There's no ... - So, what's the commitment level? Is it 24 hours? Not longer than 24 hours? - Right. It is the following day. - Following day. - It's not 24 hours, it's not business days or anything, it's... - Ah, it's the following day. So even if I uploaded it at 6 AM this morning, it still could be 11 PM tomorrow. - It could be. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty, it's a bit weird. So it's actually prior to a very hard deadline of 7 AM. So if you uploaded it today at 6 AM, you actually would get it back today. - Okay. - Just to make things super-confusing. - Okay. I'll defer to our viewers to pursue that with an iGUIDE sales team person if that's super-important to ask deeper questions because today was really about iGUIDE Stitch uploading and I diverted you, I apologize. But I really did want to see the back-end of the actual upload. - It's a good question. - If you don't mind, let's go back to iGUIDE Stitch, the post-production software for PC and Mac for iGUIDE. And the first thing that you showed us was, here's the super-fast, under two minutes to move the data from the thumb drive to your computer, import it into Stitch, then export it and then upload it to iGUIDE. That was a super-simple workflow. - Yeah. All in all, we're talking for like five, six minutes to go from the camera to uploaded, you're done. - Okay. And that's awesome. The second workflow I'd like to see, and again, I want to take advantage of your expertise as a photographer that literally has done hundreds if not thousands of iGUIDEs, what is really a typical workflow that you would recommend? And let's maybe begin with, okay, the files are now on your desktop, now what? - So, there's an excellent way to put it. So, I'm going to be honest. - And we're probably looking at the wrong screen. We're back to looking at the iGUIDE upload screen ... - Let's literally go from scratch. So I'm going to be honest, I am super-duper-lazy. And I don't want to do even one tiny bit of extra work more than I have to. So my workflow... - Okay. But I can't see your screen Chris and so I need help there. - Hold on. - Tell you what, I'm going to stop sharing and then let you share again so that we can see your iGUIDE Stitch screen. ... Okay. That's awesome. Thank you. Okay. So let's start from scratch. What's the recommended workflow by Professional Real Estate Photographer and Marketing Manager at Planitar : the makers of iGUIDE, Chris White? - Chris' Pro Level workflow. Okay, let's do it. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to load the data into Stitch just as you saw in the previous example. And then the first thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to click on my first panorama over here in this list. So, you have a big list of all the work you've done for the property, easy. And then I'm going to use my keyboard and I'm going to cycle through it like this. So I hope this is coming across. You can see the changing images. So what this does for me is, it allows me to scan all of my work real quick. Just going to go through the whole property real fast and look at the images. So what I'm looking for is anything out of the ordinary. So this software is really, really good at adjusting the images and making them look good. There's nothing I can do about the property in a lot of cases, but sometimes the images will have flaws. They'll be too bright or too dark or whatever. So, all I'm doing is just going through the whole list looking for anything that's a little off. So if I find something, I'm going to intervene. If I'm not, then I'm not going to do anything. So, it's just like when you're shooting with any automatic camera system. The camera does the heavy lifting and then if it screws up, okay, you have to manually intervene. - That's fine. I'm going to ask you for exceptions and tips and things to know and shortcuts. But at the moment, I really do want to just go through your workflow without any diversions or side cars / side tours. What's your workflow? - Yep. So that's the first thing... - Thing is, going reasonably well, what is it that you're doing? - So everything checks out, okay, we're good. I'm going to go to my floors, I'm going to change the above and below grade so that they're correct if I haven't put them in at the property, sometimes I forget. And then what I'm going to do is, I'm going to click on the export button and I'm going to see some issues here. So I'm going to - for me - I have to look at those. So I'm going to look at them and I'm going to say, "okay, so I've got the wall thickness is a bit off and I've got some other issues." So there are two panoramas here ... - I'm sorry, you went a little bit too fast for me. How did you know there were issues? - Right. So, if you click export, what happens is that a screen comes up, well, maybe you can't see it because I can't ... - I can see the popover. It's small, that's all. - So the software is very much designed like the iGUIDE portal. It's meant to warn you whenever there's an issue. So it has identified a couple for me. I've got panoramas too close together and they're highlighted here. I hope you can see this, the two yellow sort of things. So, I'm going to go through here again and I'm going to turn off anything I think is ugly. So here's an example. Here's a closet. I don't want to see that. So I don't want people on the tour to see that. - Why'd you shoot the closet if you're not going to use it? - Good question. So why would you shoot something if you're not going to use it? So I mentioned it earlier. Sometimes you want to measure something and you want it to appear on the floor plan, but you don't want people to necessarily see it. - Great. Noted. Totally makes sense. - What you show and what you don't show is up to you and your client. So for some people, a messy bedroom is fine. They don't care. Maybe it's a student rental ... - I'm with you. Okay. So you've highlighted that panorama and then there's a feature that says hide in iGUIDE. - You got it. So when I do that, basically I've said to the software, "hey, turn this off." So in the quick version, I can do that later, I don't need to do it here. I can worry about that later. But here I'm like, well, I've got time and I don't want to go back later to be honest. So I just want to get it done now. So I'm going to go through here and I'm just going to, I'm going to look for anything that, there you go, there's another one. So I'm going to disable that one. Fun fact, if you hit the middle mouse button on your mouse if you're using a PC or a Mac with a mouse, disables it real quick, you don't have to use the little menu there. Oh, that's a pretty one ... So I'm going to go through here. There's another closet. No, that's a bathroom. Okay. Anyway, good enough. There you go. We've gone through, we've disabled everything, we're good to go. The next thing I'm going to do is click on the export button and I'm just going to confirm that wall thickness is actually real quick. No, it's fine. Okay. So, that's it, I'm done. That's my... - Whoa! You went a little fast for me. How did you know that the thickness of the wall was okay? - All right. Well, that's a good question. So, it's going to depend on your area. So, people calculate wall thicknesses in different ways. So the wall thickness is really important. Basically, it's the thickness of the wall as measured by the photographer onsite using a tape measure or a ruler. Basically, if you stand in a doorway and you look at the exterior wall of the house edge on and you were to measure that, that's the wall thickness. And the reason that you want to put that in, sounds complicated, but it takes one second to get. The reason that you want that is, that allows the iGUIDE to contain what's called the gross floor area or exterior area which is a fancy way of saying, the whole footprint of the house. As in the interior measurements plus the area occupied by the exterior walls. In most places in North America that's what agents want to list with, that gross floor area. So, we allow you to measure that if you want to. - literally just go to the door ... - Yeah, you just do that with a tape measure. - And the tape measure and boom and then it turns out it's likely to be standard in my area. - It varies widely from place to place. So I used to live in an area with triple brick homes so the walls were 11 inches thick. Most of them are two by four stucco. - If we go back to the little mini-map there, I thought one of the error messages that you got where some scans were too close together, but I didn't see how you fixed that. - Oh, right. Okay. So that's what we were supposed to talk about. So let's go back there. So if you look, we've got two different scans, one that we want and one that we don't. It's very common to overshoot with an iGUIDE camera. You go into a space, you shoot a bathroom and then you realize, oh my gosh ... - I got it. I'm a professional real estate photographer, I've studied virtual tours, maybe I'm using a different platform. So I immediately get it, but how do I get rid of that extra scan? How do I hide it? - You disable it. So you do that thing we talked about. - How do I know which is which? - Ah, right. So, there's lots of different ways. One way to select it would be to just mouse down until you get it. Now, I'll show you this as clearly as I can. Can you see that this is green? - Yes. - So that is the highlighted scan. So this circle that's green. That's the one I've selected essentially in the list here. So if I want to turn that off, I would right click and choose hide in iGUIDE and it would turn that particular one off. ... So when you have this scenario where you have more than one scan... - Okay. There is actually one on the door jam that I want to get rid of. So how do I find the door jams? - Right. So I already found that. I just clicked on the first one and it just showed it conditionally and then I hit it already. I'm too fast. Chris ... - It's okay. You're using a mouse click to do that. And so that mouse click actually called up a menu and then selected hide scan. - Yep! You got it. - Okay. So, are you done now and you're ready to export? - Yeah. - So this workflow is almost identical to the super-fast workflow. - Well, yeah, pretty much. So if there are no hiccups, then there's nothing to do. Do you know what I mean? If everything went smoothly. It's very common to have this be a real world scenario where I load up the data, I look through everything, it all checks out, I turn the panos off I don't want people to see. Export. Done. - Okay. Just remind me. I'm done. Where am I going to export? I'm looking for an icon that's of a globe. - Yep! You got it. - Like that globe. So can you go ahead and select that? And then it looks like you've eliminated your error messages. - Correct. So there's only one left. And so I'm going to ignore this one because it's still acceptable. So this is a message that's meant to protect you. So let's suppose that you were to enter a number that doesn't make sense. You're tired on-site, you accidentally put in one inch for the wall thickness, it's going to say, "hey, are you sure about that?" Because that affects the square footage of the property. So you don't want to misrepresent the house by saying the house is too small. So it just warns you. You can just click ignore and move on if you realize, okay... - Okay. So, go slow. Go slow. Go slow here. So if you hit ignore, will that export the file? - Yep. - Okay. So let's not do that. We've seen how to do that already. That's great. So I think at this point, there's probably, I'm imagining 10 things that are super-important just in case. Let me start asking just a couple. So, it didn't look like you set the first image of the tour. Why was that? - Because you don't have to. - So which image is the first image in the tour? - Right. So if you want to set it and if you choose, hey, basically let's suppose for a moment that this particular pano that's the one. We want people to see this first. If you right click it and you can see the little menu that comes up, there's a set initial pano option and it will set the initial one. But you can always set it later. - Which one was the default setting without setting that? - Right. So if you don't set it, it'll get chosen for you. - It'll get chosen for you. It's not necessarily the first one. - No, not necessarily. So in a perfect world, most of the time what happens is that, when you go into a property, you just shoot it in order. You wouldn't go out of your way to be leapfrogging over the... - Yes. So, does iGUIDE take the first shot? Assuming that that was the first one I shot because it is where I want the tour to begin? - They may. Yeah, probably. Unless it's really bizarre. Like obviously, way out of whack. - Okay. So the short answer here is, I really do care about where to start images so I want to be able to select that, I highlight it, it brings up a pop-up menu and I set that as my first image. - You got it. - I noticed that there was nothing, you haven't talked at all about, when I enter a 360, what the view is that I see first. So is that a function of how I use the iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit or post-production or combination of both? - Right. So, it's both. With a good workflow where you are operating the camera correctly, you shouldn't have to configure the start positions ever because the first thing that people will see, the start position, will be the center of the lens on the opposing side of the camera. It's just as if you were to shoot with ... - Well, the camera is 360. So what's the ... I don't understand. - Well, that's a really great point. So when you're referring to the front or the back of a 360 degree camera, there's two lenses. So which one is it? So the way we define, the way we've chosen to define what's the front, what's the back, is that the side with the view screen is the back because on a typical DSLR, the screen is on the back. So when we refer to the front, you can call it whatever you want. But when we refer to the front, we refer to the opposing side without ... - Okay. Totally makes sense. I got it. So as long as I get it that when I shoot and I face the front of the camera towards what I want people to see, then I've saved a workflow on the back-end of having to manually set that. - Yeah. A hundred percent. And there's a lot of things like that. - Now, as I've said that Chris, I know using a Ricoh Theta Z1, there's going to be times where I'm actually not going to want to face it a certain way because of lighting, then I need to kind of have half the lighting be this lens and half the lighting be this lens. So now I know I'm going to have to set the view for that 360 and post within the iGUIDE Stitch software. So, how do I do that? - Right. Easily done. So, you select your pano there on the left and then you click the button at the top that looks like a weird, sort of creepy looking blue Pac-Man. It's meant to be a circle representing 360 degrees with a 90 degree chunk out of it. And then what you do is, you hover your mouse over the image. And you see, I don't know if you can see the white box that's following? - Yes. - So wherever I click, is now the first thing that people will see and that's contained within the blue box that gets set. So if I decide, okay, that TV, that's the money shot. I can click with the box surrounding it and that has now been selected within that blue box as the very first thing that people will see in the initial pano direction. - I'm sorry, how did I select it? Did I click someplace? - Yep. So, left click with the mouse anywhere on the image and it will move that blue box. - Okay. Okay, got it. Now, on the iGUIDE, where I want to see, I want to go to the kitchen, bedroom, one bedroom, two bedroom, three master bedroom, master bath, how do I communicate that for the floor plan creators, the people on the back-end at iGUIDE so that they label the floor plans with the names that I want? - Yeah. That's a good question. - Where will I do that? - So, you never have to do that. So they'll label everything for you. ... - I live in Atlanta and something is a sun room that in Canada you might call a living room. So I need to be really clear so that, presumably, your post-production floor planners are in Canada? - Yeah. Well, you're right. It's going to happen from time to time where they're going to ... - Okay. So, I really need to label something as a sun room or a game room or a carport. Not a garage, not a living room, not a playroom. - Yeah. So there's a button up here that looks like a notepad and it's for exactly what you just asked for. - I don't see it. - So, up here on the toolbar it says, add notes. - Toolbar, okay. - So if I click that icon and I double click anywhere on the floor or on the data there, I can add a note. So if I write the word for the room there, the drafting people will read it and then they will name the room. - What is a conservatory? - It's like a British like sunroom. I picked a weird one. So what typically happens on site from my experience anyway, is that you have an agent ask you, "hey, can you call this [some weird room]" you've never heard of? And you say, "yeah, okay, sure." So the nice thing is, you can actually, when you're shooting, you can put that data in and it will appear here in the notes. So you can actually see what you've been asked ... - Okay. So these notes are specifically for the people at iGUIDE that actually draft the floor plans so they put the correct name or the name that you want on that room? - You got it. ... - Okay. But I notice on the left side, the numbers are not changing. - Correct. So the numbers are there for reference. Now, you can technically change those should you wish to. And that was the old way that we used to do it. Would you re-label the panos with that name? And there's nothing wrong, you can still, that functionality is still there if you really want to use it. But this is sort of the newer way. You actually put a label directly on the data and it's clear to everybody that you want this called the carport - Okay. I get it. Now, when I was on site, let's assume that I shot a big house but on that property, they had a barn and that was not contiguous space. So, I shot both spaces. Where did it end? Did I create two iGUIDEs when I shot it with the iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit or did I shoot both within the same space? But how did I do that? And then what does it look like on this end? And then presumably, I got to fix something because it's two standalone buildings. Is that a messy enough problem to help me solve? - Absolutely. So this is a very common scenario. You've got a barn or a garage or some other structure on the property. So you have the choice with iGUIDE to either have it drafted or not. So drafting an 8,000 SQ FT barn might make no sense. So in that scenario, you don't want to have to pay for that. So what you could do is you could take that data and not have it drafted essentially. You can have it be a separate floor and that floor will appear as a series of panos. But let's suppose for a moment that you want that space to be included in an iGUIDE as something that's drafted. You would treat that as a separate floor. So you can see here we have, over on the left in our list, we have the main floor and then we have the basement. So when I was shooting, I'd have an additional floor. We call it a barn . - So that I can name? - Exactly. You can rename anything in this list by right clicking and choosing rename. But you could name it on-site as well. You'd probably name it barn to be honest if you were there. If you forgot or you messed it up ... And then what you would do is, you would choose to align, to treat it just as you would a regular floor. But because it's in a separate building, you've got some extra options. So if you right click on the very top, that's what we call the project name, you can choose to add a building. So if you add a building, this is supposing you didn't do it on site by the way, you can then rename that building to be a barn and then you can click and drag floors from one property to ... from one structure to another essentially. So you can see this says main building hopefully. It's really small probably. I've moved the main floor of the main building to the barn. That's not, doesn't make sense. But if I had a barn, I would have moved it instead. So, here's the nice thing, real-world scenario. You go to a property and it's a split level house and it's one of those weird ones that has six different levels and you have no idea what the floors are. So you don't know what you're doing and you're; is this the first floor? Am I on the third floor? What is this? So what you can do here is, in this scenario, just not really worry about it when you're shooting. You go and you shoot it and you just guess and think, okay, this is probably the second floor and you share all your panoramas. And when you bring it into Stitch, you have the ability to create floors. So I'll show you, if I right click on the main building, I can make a floor just like I did when I made a building and I can move panoramas by clicking and dragging them from one floor to another. So just as I can move a floor from a building to another building, I can also move panos from one floor to another. I can also change the order. I've got a lot of flexibility here. - Okay. So for clarification, if I was shooting a main house and a barn, I might be calling the main house, main house, and I might have floors one, floor two, floor three and then I got this barn which I'll just call floor four. And when I get into Stitch, that's when I'm going to say, add building and then move that fourth floor which is really the barn to this new label called barn. And I'm going to imagine on the new label, barn, I'm going to put a note to the drafter to say, I don't want the measurements for the barn. - Yeah, precisely. So, you have, again, quite a few options. But the one that most people use is that they just turn the laser off when they shoot it. So they just don't measure it at all or they don't align the data in any way. - Ah, and then you don't have to worry about... Okay. So the camera is shooting the 360 panorama plus the LiDAR scan data and if I really don't want any measurements, then I can just turn the data off. But if I change my mind later, maybe I want to keep that option in case the real estate agent comes back and says, "hey, could you draw us a floor plan for that barn?" So maybe I really do want to have the LiDAR data, but I'm going to ask the drafter not to include it ... - You got it. I got it. Nailed it right on the head. Often it's better to have the data because you don't want to go back for it. So if you do need it later, yeah. Absolutely. You got it. - I'm totally clear on that. We've been working here and making some changes. If the computer was to crash right now, would I lose all the things that we've been talking about? - It autosaves every few seconds or so. So there is a save button in the top left-hand corner. Should you click it, it will save your progress. And there is a lot of work that you can do here. So, it's a good idea to save that work. But if you don't and your whole computer just stops working, no big deal. It'll ask you the next time you log in if you want to just pick up where you left off. - Okay. So, I noticed when you imported, I guess with the LiDAR data, it actually knew how to assemble all the rooms together. --- (Continued below ...) |
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| (Continued from above ...) --- - So, auto alignment is, it is built into Stitch but you'll rarely need it. So with the iGUIDE PLANIX Camera System, it's going to auto align the data as you go. So something I didn't mention because it doesn't have to be part of your workflow here is that you can move data around. So I hope you can see this on my screen. - When you're moving a room, what would be an example of why I'd want to move a room outside of this space? - Right. So let's suppose that you have a scenario where a property is not ready yet. It's not ideal. You don't want to show up at a house and have parts of it be inaccessible. But it's just: that's life! - So let's assume, and I've heard that. They've showed up and then they call you afterwards and say, "the real estate agent decided that the kid's room needed to be painted pink instead of purple." - Or "we're installing a new door here, can you go shoot somewhere else?" And they're like, yeah, okay. So here's the scenario visually. - So that's happened, so now what? - Here's a piece of data that's not where it's supposed to be. So this is on me as the photographer. I have to remember that that data is not where it's supposed to be. But usually those particular pieces of data are burned in your mind because they inconvenience you. So in this scenario where I load this data into Stitch, and I know this is out of place, I need to put it in place before I send it to the drafters. If I send it in like this, in all likelihood, there won't be a problem, they'll just fix it. But you don't want to be taking that chance because on rare circumstances, data can be rejected if it's messed up for some reason, which has very rarely, but occasionally happened. So, I want to fix this before I send it in. And I do that by moving the data into place. And it's as simple as, left click with my mouse and drag. And so, I hope you guys can see this. I'm moving the data with my mouse. And right click and drag to rotate. So this is like putting together a puzzle. For some people it's easy, for some people it's hard. There's lots of different ways... - Have Stitch do it for me? - There is. Yeah. So I'm glad you asked. So if I click on the button up here that looks like a sparkly magnet, it just does it for me. That was so fast. I hope that you saw that. But I basically just... - I didn't. But I know there was a before and after. - So here's the before and then if I click the magic button, there's the afterwards in place. - So, let me break it down because I'm still struggling with this. I think you've solved the two problems here for me. So the first is, I go to shoot and I'm on the second floor which has three bedrooms, one of them is a kid's bedroom and that kid is not up; dressed, out. And the room is [Not] staged for me. So I got to skip that room and come back. - Yep. - So, is that an example of where that room is... - 100%. Sorry, I'm nodding. Yep, you got it. So, and you go into a... - So that means that the camera's not going to be able to auto-Stitch that because it's shot later in the day and it really didn't know where to put it. - So the funny thing is that it probably will know where to put it, but there's no guarantee when you're shooting really far out of order. So the answer is absolutely. You shoot the whole house and then instead of shooting that room you skip it. To your point, what you just said, and then you go back and you get it maybe last, there's a higher probability that it won't be auto-aligned. - In the iGUIDE app, can I just drag the room and put it in the right place? - Yeah, you totally can. So unless you're in a big hurry, there's not really any excuse to arrange data here at all because you can do with one exception. - Sometimes you're on site and you can just tell the agent, the homeowner, they're like, as soon as you could get out of here, please, please, please. So, you may not even take that moment. But if you have the time, you could come back later in your shoot, shoot it and if the iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit paired with the iGUIDE app didn't place the room in the correct place, I could take my finger, drag it into the right spot or close enough, and I imagine if I'm close enough, then in Stitch, it's going to finish the process of putting the room exactly in the right spot. - You got it. Now, this is an absolutely lovely process if you're someone who wants to move fast on site. Because it means that if things don't go smoothly when you're on site, no big deal. You can just fix it here if you really want to. - Got it. And then the other scenario I wanted to ask because this has happened to me is, we got to go back because they literally have changed something in the house. It's now different from what they want to show. And that literally, that could even happen a year later. - Yeah. Oh yeah, there's seasonal changes. They change the carpet out in the hallway or something or... - Yeah. Well, first question, do I need to be back in the original tour to do that? - Oh, no. Actually, that's super-easy. That's a common question. That's a good one. So, let's suppose there's some update. Agent calls you or whoever and they say, "hey, I need you to come back to the property and shoot something new." And you say, "okay, sure." You go back, you don't need to load up this data. You could if you wanted to, but that's overkill. You just shoot exactly what you need and nothing else and then you just send it to the drafts people and ask them to update it and they do it all for you. They place it all properly and everything. It's super-easy. - Oh, you don't even need to go through this backend process? - All you have to do is basically load it into the software, you remember the first workflow, it's really fast. You don't even have to look at it. You basically load it in, click export, that's it. You just have to create that file and send it to them. That's all. - Okay. But if I wanted, let's say I shot it, I haven't yet ordered the iGUIDE, the agent told me on site that I was going to have to come back over three days later and shoot it. So now, I could still go back into the original app, but even if I didn't have the original model because it was a year later, I can still have it annotated by the drafters -- - Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'll give you two examples. I shot units that are multi-unit. So you go to the first one, the tenant knows you're coming, they let you in, everything's fine. You go to the second one, door's locked, locks were changed, you can't get in. You can't finish the tour until you get the second unit because they're all the same building and that's being listed. So, okay, maybe there'll be in this afternoon. So then you have to reschedule, you come back and yet you open it up and you just carry on just as though you had stopped shooting a few moments ago. We've done a few that are much longer scale. So, I shot a property once that was sort of before, during and after renovation. And I shot the property. I didn't process the data. I just held onto it. I came back six months later, I shot it with all the walls missing and then I came back six to eight months later and I shot it fully renovated and then I submitted it. Nothing wrong with that. You can totally do that. One of the nice things is that, because the data is not stored on your smart device or anything, you can just keep the data around for as long as you like and do whatever you want with it. It's very flexible. It's just like having images on your computer. - Okay. Awesome. I noticed that we're looking at a tour that squared up. Is that important for any reason? - So, it's funny. The answer is, not really. So, you can do whatever you want. So you can have it slightly askewed - Well, why would I want it one way or the other and then how are you making that orientation change? Does that affect how it's displayed? I imagine it does. - Sort of. A little bit. So to be honest, not really. So, there are conventions in place for how properties are displayed and they follow two basic rules for iGUIDES. And you can request whatever you want. But if you don't say anything, this is what will happen. Either the front door will face toward the bottom of the screen, so it doesn't matter how you send it in. So I'll just give you an example. If I sent it in slightly askew, it doesn't matter. The drafters are going to just rotate, it takes them one second. And they're going to point the front door toward the bottom of the screen. However, there is an interesting thing about iGUIDES. And that, they look a certain way. So you can see here that we have visuals that occupy the majority of the screen on the right and then you have this portrait style pane over here. So they'll often rotate the floor plan so that it just fits well in that white area on that sort of canvas if you will. And that's just a style thing. It just makes it better to look at when you're navigating. - Okay. So it might be easier just for me to rotate it horizontally and have the front door just mentally while I'm working on it, but it's not necessary? - It's not required. A lot of people like to square the data to the sides of the screen purely for their own sanity. It looks better. - Okay. Now, let's talk about image enhancement. What can I do with my panoramas? - Good question. Okay. So at the top here, let's suppose I come across an image and I think, "ah, that's no good, that needs to be brighter, darker or whatever," I can click on the little wizard icon on the top menu bar and I'm going to see this screen. So I hope you can see this. There's a big, huge image here. - Yes. - So this is the fully stitched panorama in equi-rectangular format, missing the bottom and the top but you don't need that for editing. - Okay. So here I can change highlights, brightness, contrast, saturate, so things I'm all used to as a real estate photographer that I can change. And I imagine that I slide it the way I want it, so how would I apply that to all the images? - So there's two different ways. So if you look down here, there's a bunch of buttons. So it's very common for people to like a very specific thing, just a preset basically. So you want all your images to be brighter than how the camera automatically makes them. So if you add brightness, you can then click copy and then when you go to your next, oops, you go to your next panorama. So there's a button here that allows you to just quickly cycle to your next one. You can click paste and it will just automatically paste that. So that's the first way. You've got something and you're like, I did it to that one. - I want to add that to all my images and that's too long. So how do I do the... Here are the presets I want to use for all my images in this job. - Yep. So if you really-really like your adjustments, you think, I always want to do this every time, you can basically choose a preset here under the presets dropdown. So let's suppose I've got; we'll just use set one. Right. So, these are pre-populated just as clipboard, set one and set two and set three. So that just means you have four presets essentially and that's no one's ever asked for more. So that must be good enough. So if you do set one for example and I click save, it will save the current profile and then I can click load and it will load it to this one or I can click... - Okay. Could you just do something really extreme? Just push the sliders all over the place. - It has lots of contrast. Juice it up. There we go. ... - Save that as a preset, no, that's too much. - Here we go. Here we go. - Save it as a preset. - All right. So we'll go to the next. - Let's load the next, let's get to the next one. - This is some serious editing here. If I couldn't load you can see it just applies it. - And it just applied everything. - Yep. You got it. - Now, how do I apply to all the images; that horrible setting that we just did? - So actually, let me explain what I just did. So I closed that window. I clicked on the little screwdriver and wrench up here on the toolbar and then I have an import option. So just like with Photoshop or Lightroom, I can choose to auto-apply any of my presets on import. So if I'm loading up my data, I don't want to have to go copy and paste and load or whatever. I just want to do it. So I set it automatically to set one on import and now the next time I load it, it'll just automatically apply to all images imported. - Ah! Okay. So as a photographer, I typically make the same changes to every job as a starting point. So even when I import it, it automatically does my flavor of editing? - Yeah. There's going to be a few where you won't want it applied to everything. So for example, I always boost the saturation on outdoor panoramas. I find the Ricoh Theta Z1 is a little... - Oh, okay. So, you might have a preset for outdoor; preset for indoor; there are other preset settings that... - Yeah, you got it. - We got preset for everything. - Typically what people do is, they have a certain look that they like. Brighter. Darker. More saturation. Whatever. So they'll just apply that preset to everything, all in one go. So, we chose our auto-adjustments in Stitch to be good based on what we think looks good, but what people think looks good varies because they have different eyeballs and also they're in different markets. So, your market probably will, for example, more saturated photos or less saturated photos, but you'll just want to do the same adjustments to everything. So what you'll do is, you'll just apply that one preset to everything and then you'll go through one by one and you'll make the changes that you already know you're going to make. So, you'll go to outdoor panoramas and maybe boost it a little bit more. - And then I might have a preset for my outdoors and then as I touch my outdoor images, I'll do that. - People almost always have presets for the outdoors when they have a lot of outdoor panoramas. There's no limit to the number you can have. So in California for example, tons of outdoor panoramas, people do a lot. And I'm in Canada, we have like one or two. It's very, it's more rare. - Chris, I'm confused on the preset where, let's say, if I go back to maybe one of the editing. So I'm going back to the toolbar. Yeah, that's where... Is that: toolbar? Is that correct? - Oh, yep. Toolbar, so you're going to click the wizard icon ... - So let's say that I just want to add brightness of plus 10, whatever that is, to every image, do I need to change any of my other settings making them all zero so that when I import, the only thing I want to touch is brightness? - Yeah, you got it. So basically it's relative. So anything that's added here is going to be copied in terms of the value itself and then will be added onto the next one or subtracted depending on how you look at it. So what I would do is, I would zero all these out, you're correct, and then I would add 10, click copy or load to a preset and then it would just apply that 10 brightness to all subsequent panoramas that the preset was loaded to. - Okay, cool. Now, I got the camera in the bathroom mirror, I couldn't avoid it no matter what I did. I needed the shot that's in front of the mirror. How do I get rid of this; as much as I like looking at the iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit, how do I get rid of the camera that's in the bathroom mirror? - I thought I had one, I guess I don't. Okay. Well, anyway, it's super-easy. So it was designed so that you could remove it. Okay. So what we're going to do is, we're going to pretend this is a bathroom or we're going to pretend this water cooler over here is the camera. And we think to ourselves, "oh gosh, why didn't I remove that?" This scenario can happen with more than just a camera in here though. There's a million reasons why you might want to edit a panorama in Photoshop. It's very simple. So I've identified that I want to edit this, I'm going to right click on the pano over here in that folder tree, the list on the left and I'm going to get some options. So one of them is open folder. If I do that, you probably can't see this now because it's off screen. But it just opens up the folder in windows and that just shows me the data that I collected. So unlike some other systems, iGUIDE just shows you all the files. You can just do whatever you want with them. So what we have is the original JPEG that you can see on screen. It's just stored on my computer and I can just load it into Photoshop. So I'm going to do that and then I'm going to switch screens and show you what I'm doing real quick. So hold on one second. Okay. Now let me... - So the only screen -- okay, thank you. - Yeah. Sorry, I'm just going to switch it for a second. Gimme one second here. Work for me. Okay. I probably don't need a Camera Raw tutorial just now. So this is Adobe Camera Raw. I don't need to do anything here. - Too much detail. All I need to know is how to export my image and bring it back in because I know how to use my editing software, whatever software I use. So, is that cool? - Yep. I'm not sure exactly what my computer's doing. Either way, load it into Photoshop, Lightroom... - Let's do this. If you take me back to where I find the image and then once I make my changes, how do I swap out my image that has been changed? - All right. So let me... - Is that cool? - Yep. I'll just do my whole screen for a sec. Okay. Can you see the file Explorer window? - Yes, I see it. ... It looks like the kitchen. So, where is that file, that particular image? - Good question. So if I right click and I choose open folder, what it does is, it loads up the folder on my computer that all the data is in, which is what you're seeing right now. Contained within that folder for that particular panorama, it has a bunch of files. But the main one I want is this, which is called H1.JPEG. And that is literally just the image. If I load that into Photoshop, monkey around with it and then save it, all I have to do is come back to the software, right click and choose reload and it will just reload the updated version. So that means that I can be in and out of the software and take like 30 seconds to get it into Photoshop and it didn't get it back out again. - So that kind of begs two questions. First, do I need to keep the file name the same? - Yeah. Typically, you wouldn't change it because in something like Photoshop, you would just click save and then it would say, do you want to overwrite? Lightroom's a little more complicated. I don't have to export it. ... - Do you have an image that you could import just so we could see that process of replacing an image? - Yeah, let's do it. Here. - I don't care what the image is. Doesn't have to be the same image, just an image. Okay. So, I'm in my editing software, I've exported that image. It's now on my desktop. - Yeah. Let's just add it in. There we go. A big smiley face here. Let's give him a nose for fun. And I'm going to click save. We're fun guys, right? - Yes. - So this is the tricky part... - I see the face, I could say, oh, you must have kids. - That's right. So I'm going to click save and it's going to say, "do you want to replace it?" So I'm going to say, "yes." And when I do that, I'm going to go back to Stitch and hopefully you can see this. There's no change obviously. So what I need to do is right click and choose reload and then... - Okay, cool. That's all I needed to understand. So the second part of the question ... even though I can edit all my images within iGUIDE Stitch, color, contrast, sharpness, whatever it is that I normally do in my workflow, if I'd rather work in Lightroom, Photoshop, some other software, I literally could. Can I batch export and then batch import? - Well, so, no. The answer is no unfortunately. Unless there's some clever way that I don't know of which is possible. Most of the time though, you wouldn't bother because Stitch does a really good job for like 99.9% of the panoramas. So there's no need to batch import/export ... - Is the only reason to remove an object? - So, removing objects from mirrors is probably the vast majority. However, there's all sorts of scenarios. So let's suppose you have a challenging lighting scenario where for some weird reason there's a chandelier and they replaced one bulb with a CFL and the rest are LEDs. Those kinds of challenging lighting scenarios require selective adjustments. So that's not something Stitch can do. So, hey, Photoshop and Lightroom. Or you're shooting and you look over and you realize the agent is standing over there and their elbow is sticking out around a doorway or something and you think, oh my God. It would take me longer to walk over there when I could just edit it out. I would say that the best thing about being able to edit from my perspective as a photographer was that I didn't have to worry so much when I was on site. Let's suppose I go to a bathroom and it's an edge-to-edge mirror. Okay, that's not fun, but no big deal. I just shoot it and I think, okay, I'll edit the camera out later. So I don't have to fuss around with figuring out where to hide it or whatever. I mean, you can certainly still do that. But not having to worry so much means I could focus more on getting what I wanted, which is working with my clients, getting the tour to look right and that kind of stuff. That's nice. - Okay. So, I'm just trying to think about this scenario: blur, do I need to export to blur? - So, very, very rarely. It really depends on the laws or the requirements of your client in your area. So, I've had people asking me for that. They say specifically, I need you to blur out all the family photos. Okay, blurring is easy. It takes two seconds. - Okay. So, can I do that in iGUIDE Stitch or do I need to export my software? - ... That was actually a much requested feature that may be coming in the future. But at the moment, that's Photoshop only or Photoshop Lightroom. - That's fine. Are there any other scenarios you can think of where we would need to export, touch something up, import it back? We mentioned taking the camera out of the mirror, the light bulb example, blur. Tell you what, I'll just defer to photographers because they'll immediately, our viewers will know, "oh yeah, I got reasons I need to swap out an image." - It's exactly the same as when you're working with still images. You have these challenging scenarios that you need to spend more time working on. And Photoshop and Lightroom, it works right in your existing workflow. So if you can use it on a still photo, you can use it on a 360 in most cases. - Yeah. So Chris, you went over hiding images. There's actually times where I need to delete an image because I can't take the risk that it's going to by accident be seen by someone for whatever reason. - Oh yeah. Security, privacy, absolutely. - Can I delete rather than just hide? - You can. Absolutely, yeah. So it is a button, it's on the same little menu. If you right click and you go down that little menu, there's a delete option as well. Delete is tricky though. You have to be very careful because it actually physically deletes it from your hard drive, which is what you want, but that often gets confused with hide. So sometimes people will want to delete and they'll hide instead or vice versa. - Delete means delete. Okay. Our audience understands that. Is there any reason that I want to reorder the images? And I think the way is just to drag them. - Correct. Yep. So the order from top to bottom of the panoramas is the same order that they were shot in. So, that order is the order that they will auto-play when you click the play button on the tour. So yeah, in a perfect world, you'd arrange them also there in the best... - So I may not want that auto-play to play the actual walkthrough, I might want to show the money shots. I got five money shots out of my 40 images, those are the ones I want up front, may not logically make sense in terms of a walkthrough. But if I only have the attention of somebody that might be my bias of what images I want to play first. So I have control over that. - Yep. You have total control over that. - Annotation, where is that done? - So, by that you mean the annotation in terms of, sorry, annotation? - I want to put some notes within the tour itself. - Oh, tags. Sorry. So, if you want to add tags, you don't do that in Stitch and you don't do that in the [iGUIDE] app when you're shooting. You do that later after the tour is finished. So, it's not outside the scope of this conversation, I could show you real quick if you want. - Yeah. I think it's important enough we should take a look at tags. - So, let me just load one up real quick here. A second. Okay. I'm sharing my screen. Let's find a property real fast. There we go. Okay. - And I see the tag editor. So I imagine you're clicking on the tag editor? - Yeah, it's not rocket science, you got it. Everything's fairly well able. Let's just find a good one that has something that we can use. Sure, whatever this is. So, yeah, you've got it. You click tag editor. When you click that, you have the option of adding tags, whatever that may be. So if that's texts, images, video links, you can put in whatever you like and add them in three dimensional space. I can even show you. We can add one for fun. So I'll just put one on this painting over here and we'll call it... Paintings are moving really fast. I don't want to ... - That's perfectly fine. - There you go. There's now a weird little ball that hangs on the surface there and it says ... - I can annotate, go to the tags feature in the iGUIDE content management system after the tour exists. - You got it. Tags are popular. They're usually used to identify real estate features of note such as granite countertops. - Got it. I want to see if we can wrap up. But I still want to ask you, are there some shortcuts of things that we haven't looked at that would just make my life so much easier if I just knew these three things. - Yeah. There are some tricks. So the first one I'll say is that, the more work you can do on the front-end, the less you have to do on the back-end. So if you shoot correctly, that's much less work in Stitch. In fact, almost no work. So every time I'm going to shoot something, I'm going to place the camera and try to capture something, I'm going to point the front of the camera towards something that's nice. So then I don't have to configure the starting positions of any panoramas. As I'm shooting, ideally, I want to move through the home in an order that makes sense. So then I don't have to reorder my panoramas because I don't need to do it if it's already done on site. And then while I'm shooting, I'm going to align my data, if it doesn't automatically get aligned, so that when it gets brought into Stitch, it's just done, I don't need to do anything. So all I really have to do is just bring it into Stitch, have a quick look through, make sure everything's good to go and then I can export it and send it on. Well, I guess you could call it, that was three tricks, but we'll call that trick one. Number two I would say would definitely be something along the lines of maybe taking advantage of the flexibility of the system. So sometimes when you're out shooting, you don't need to do things the same way every time. People get into these habits where they just do the same thing over and over again. But this whole workflow is dynamic. So maybe, yeah, I don't have -- I have less time on the front end. So I'm at a site and then the agent's [body language] says, "chap, chap buddy, you gotta get out of here." And the homeowner wants to get back in or whatever. So I can skip some of these steps and I can be a little confused about what floor is what or maybe some of the images aren't perfect, maybe the camera's in a mirror too. I don't have to worry. I can get all that stuff in Stitch later. It's not a big deal. And then the third tip is that, if there's ever an issue, you don't have to worry because you can always get back into the system later and you can make a lot of the changes that I showed you in Stitch. So you can turn panoramas on and off after the iGUIDE is already published. You don't have to do it onsite or do it in Stitch, you can do it later too. So often it's better just to get it in a form that's uploaded and then you can tweak it after the fact. - Are there any other shortcuts that would be helpful to know in using Stitch? - Stitch itself, yes, absolutely. I didn't mention this. There are hotkeys. So there is a little button in Stitch in the top right hand corner that's a help button. And when you click it, it shows you all the hotkeys. Often people use Stitch for ages without knowing they're there no matter how many times I tell them. And then when they find out they're like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." So for example, you can tap the space bar and it will just auto select the nearest thing to your mouse cursor. It doesn't sound like much, but it makes things go very, very quickly. It's really nice. You can also tap the F key on your keyboard and it will select the whole floor. So you saw me do that earlier where I tapped it and everything turned green and I could rotate the whole thing. - So, if you are typically a power user that likes to use shortcuts, there are many of those? - Yeah. There are actually quite a few and they're based on a lot of habits power users have. So, I didn't point it out because it wasn't relevant at the time. But when in the adjustment screen next to all the sliders for contrast and brightness or whatever, there are numbers. So often people will recognize the number, power users, and they'll want to use the keyboard inputs instead of using a slider. Now, they don't want to use a slider, they want to put in 35 and that, it gives you the ability to do that. You never have to use it if you don't want to, but it's there for someone who's really picky. - Okay. Just for clarification, there's not a bulk export of 360s. I have to look at each one to export them. - Oh, I know. Well, so you mean multiple properties? - No. I mean, I just shot a house, it's got 35 panoramas, I'd like to have all those panoramas downloaded. - Oh yeah. You don't need to look at them at all. So, it would be probably irresponsible to never look at your panoramas in a residential real estate scenario but sometimes... - Chris, I'm not asking the right question. So, let's say I do really want to edit all 35 images in Lightroom... - Oh, you want to bulk bring them in later, yeah, that doesn't exist. Not yet. - So, it's just one image at a time? - That's correct. - So, I can download all the 360s, all the equi-rectangular.jpg images, but I need to do it one image at a time? - Yeah. So there is actually a trick to this. I'll tell you, but it's not as exciting as it sounds. With an iGUIDE, you can actually download all of the 360 images at once. But you can only do it after the iGUIDE is processed. So we call them photo spheres. And the reason that the function is available is that people like to use the 360 images for just stuff. Like they post them on Facebook or they put them in a different viewer, put it on their website, wherever. So we give you that ability. So what you can technically do is just export it from Stitch without touching anything, send it in for processing. Then after it's processed, just download all the 360s just in one go, load them into Photoshop, Lightroom, edit them and then upload them back to the portal after you've finished uploading them and it's been processed. That's a little overkill, but people have used it for all sorts of weird stuff like AI sharpening and sort of stranger workflows. But that's not... - Yeah. But I want to understand. So I think that that tip is awesome. I just want to clarify. So, if I go order the iGUIDE, then where do I download all the 360s in one shot? - So they're in the deliverable. So essentially when you finish an iGUIDE, you get sent an email and in that email has a link that you can download them all with. The funny thing is, it wasn't designed for that. What it was designed for is, when you get the phone call from one of your clients and they say, "hey, I just looked at the tour and it's amazing, you're doing great work. But there's like all this weird stuff on the dining room table and can you Photoshop that out?" So, what you do is you go back to the iGUIDE portal. You download the image. You Photoshop it out and you re-upload it again. - That was one image. I still want to just focus for a minute on all the images. So in the deliverable, there is a button where I can select to download a zip file of all the 360 photos? That's exactly right. - Okay. Then, since the tour has already been processed, the floor plans already exist, I can substitute three photos spheres all day long? - Yeah, exactly. There's no limit. And you can go back and change them: as many as you like. - And that doesn't affect drafting; there's no change in price? And all I'm doing is substitute, reload and then export the whole megillah the whole tour, again, export it from iGUIDE Stitch then import it back into, do I say this is where it goes? Oh yes, you showed us that. That was it, it matched up to say 301 Main Street, I need to make sure I'm uploading it again, 301 Main street, so I don't overwrite the wrong tour. - The common reason to do that isn't to do bulk editing, it's to do virtual staging. So when people have a vacant house, sometimes they'll just go download all the photo spheres and they'll pick out a few nice ones, like the living room or whatever. Then they'll just send that to a virtual stager and doctor them up and then they'll go add them back in. - Awesome. But the way to do it is actually after the iGUIDE has been ordered and the floor plan exists. - Yeah. I would say that's the easiest way for sure. There's actually another way to say things super-complicated. So because the [Ricoh] Theta is shooting the JPEGs and you just have them right away, you can actually do any editing you want. Not necessarily in bulk, but you have all the files, you can copy them, you can do whatever you like with them. So if you want to load them all simultaneously into a Lightroom library, you have to go select them one by one. But it depends on how you define bulk. There's no way to go into the folder and select all the images in one go and click open, but you can go select them one by one. Depends on how many you have. - Okay. So there's nothing proprietary about the file that's created from the Ricoh Theta Z1 camera, as it makes its way onto the thumb drive, as it makes it onto the desktop. - That's right. They're just JPEGs, you can do whatever you like with them. - If you wanted your workflow to be, to do your post production on the images or your virtual staging before you uploaded it to iGUIDE, you could? - Yep, absolutely. - Awesome. I think even just that example, virtual staging, I think that, if there was a: I would say one word - two words for 2022 - for next year it is: virtual staging - as an add on will be really a big thing. - It's becoming more popular. It makes sense. Fewer people at home, it's safer. I mean, we're still distancing. to a lesser degree ... - Do you want to tease us at all about a technology roadmap that has virtual staging integrated into the iGUIDE workflow? - You want secret information about what we're, Oh my God. - It's just you and I here Chris. - Nobody can hear this, right? So virtual staging is already something that we have as -- it's not an option -- we don't provide it, but we provide compatibility for it and it's baked in already. So you don't even have to, I don't have to tease it, it's already there. But what it just means is compatibility with any system. What we found though, the challenge with virtual staging of 360s is that, it's difficult to do in a timely way and it's difficult to find someone who will do it for an appropriate cost. Everybody's got a different idea of how much this stuff costs. - I'll tell you what, it's a little bit outside of the scope of today's show. I think it fascinates me. But just knowing that there is a way to export all the images or to get them from the Ricoh Theta Z1 or to get them after the fact, from the [iGUIDE] tour, pick out the images you want, do whatever you want with them and upload it, that's awesome. Before we leave to go celebrate Canada Today... - It's our big day over here. ... - Yes, thank you for taking your holiday to be on the show today. Before we kick off our July 4th in the United States, any other questions that I haven't asked you on this topic of iGUIDE stitching that are really important to know? Have we covered everything or no, no Dan, here's some other things that we should talk about? - I guess we covered pretty much everything. I think the basic workflow is there. You take the data. You bring it into Stitch. You mess around with it. You send it in. It gets turned into a virtual tour. I think this is where people get confused, so if we're going to bring it back to the original question which is, I'm a professional real estate photographer, I want to know about this process. How much time is this going to take me? If I buy an iGUIDE PLANIX camera kit, do I have to spend four hours every night in the software? And the answer is no, not even close. The software is something that you can use to configure the tour before you send it in. And the reason it exists is that there are a lot of options on a tour that you may want to configure before it gets published. So if you just send the tour in without configuring anything, that means that if you have auto-delivery configured with the iGUIDE which is a thing, it would get sent to your client before you've configured it. So you don't want that. So, Stitch gives you the option. You can configure it so that when you send it in, you're done. Which is fantastic. So I'll go shoot, for example, five houses in a day And as soon as they upload them at whatever time, my kids are in bed and I'm working away at the computer. So maybe it's 7 PM. 8 PM. Actually, my kids: 9:30 PM. 10 PM. But you send it in, I'm finished. I've configured them, they're all ready to go, I've edited whatever I need to. So it's not so much that Stitch is extra work that you need to do, which it gets a bad rap for sometimes. It just gives you some extra control should you want it, should you need it. So, that just gives you a lot of extra flexibility in that whole process from start to finish. - I tend to overshoot. Is there anything in iGUIDE Stitch that would help me know that I actually have the 360s connected? I don't know how to ask you the question. - Well, yeah. So you're not alone. A lot of people overshoot because it's safer. And you're always worried that you're going to have a call from someone later saying, "hey, did you get a shot of that whatever looking into the whatever?" And you think, well, I don't know. - I'm thinking more like, "oh, I tend to shoot five to seven feet and maybe I'm going down a hallway and it's just not necessary." But I want to make sure that in post-production, that Stitch knows that shot one connects to shot two. - Oh, well, so that's... - Three. But I'm thinking that I tend to over shoot that. I'm imagining with the iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit in the LiDAR, if I'm going down a dull, boring hallway, that I know I'll never want people to walk step-by-step, that I want them to walk faster, how do I know in Stitch that, oh, I really am way overshooting? - Yeah. So there's actually a really interesting technique. Getting a little advanced here, but I'll tell you what it is. - Do you want to show us? - Yeah, I think I can actually. So when you're shooting any kind of virtual tour, is my mouse working? Here we go, share screen. So when you're shooting any kind of virtual tour, the question especially when you first start is, how many of these panoramas do I need and which ones do I not need? Because each one represents a certain chunk of time that you have to invest when you're capturing. And if you can shrink that amount of time on site you can in theory, make more money. So spending less time, making more money, it's whatever we want. So what you can do is, you can actually see hopefully my screen right now, you can see the data? - Yes. - Okay. So if I were to select one of the panoramas down here, just make sure I've got one of them selected, there we go. What I can do is, I can actually see what data is associated with that panorama specifically. So you would imagine that, if you were concerned about overshooting, you would look at this data and you would attempt to interpret it and evaluate whether or not any of these are superfluous or overkill. So I've got three panoramas in this living area. Do I really need three? Well, let's find out. If I click... - I'm used to looking at a lot of data and you just have one line of data. - Yeah. Well, it's very simple to be honest. So, if I were to pull up this one example. So here is one scan. It's just one, right? It's got a central point, so that represents where the camera was positioned and then it has lines surrounding it. So the iGUIDE camera scans with the LiDAR in a horizontal plane. So it's not 3D scanning the whole room. It's a common misconception. It's not doing that because we don't need that data. To draw floor plans you just need to measure the length and the width of the room. It's more complicated than that because it does thousands of measurements. But this is what it looks like. The final sort of end product of one scan is a bunch of weird dots and a camera position. So if you don't need that camera position, you can find out by just dragging it off the fully assembled blob of data there and then if it's still recognizable as a floor plan, well, you didn't really need it. Often what happens is that people shoot their scans, it becomes intuitive after a while, you have to think about it a bit at first. - Sorry Chris, I'm confused. Can you show us one where you really do need it and by removing the scan something breaks? - Yes. That's a good question. So I'm going to pull, so that's funny. We don't even need most of these. So, here's a scan where basically, I don't even need that one either. That's pretty funny. So, we've got the data there. Okay. So here's a living room that was scanned from the hallway, so I got all the front windows and from what is this? The dining area? Yeah, and from the dining area. So I got the whole thing without even doing a scan in the living room. So technically, I didn't even need these. But I'll pull it out if that's required. So here I'm going to pull this one away which is funny. I didn't even need that one. I still got it. Well, that's even funnier. Okay. I'll just pull them all out. - But you said that you didn't need it, you didn't need it for the drafter to create the floor plan. - That's exactly right. - ... walking around experience, but if we just focused on, well, what does the drafter need, is there one that you can remove and it breaks it? - Yeah. I can ... - How do I know that? - There you go. Perfect. This is the one. So let me just zoom in a little. So this is a great example of a room or a space with one scan because that was all it needed. So you can see hopefully the green data here is, it's a box, it shows this space. If I pull it away, there's not enough information there in order for a draftsperson to draw that box. They could probably do it because it's not rocket science -- - I don't understand how you know that. - Right. So, this is a tricky part. So what we typically recommend is that people, when they first started interpreting this laser data, they just shoot one scan per space because that's all you need. And you don't have to think too much about it. But you can see or rather... - I'm sorry, I took you off. - Oh, that's okay, I'll just describe it. If you were to, let's say you were to shoot an entire house and you skipped a room, you just didn't go in there, there would be no data for that room. So there would be... - Ah, okay. So that square house, rectangle, it was missing a corner? - Yeah. It would have been like a corner missing and then the draft people would call you up and they'd, well, not literally, but they'd send you a message and say, hey, there's a room missing, what happened? So in that scenario, you typically, to your earlier question, it's not about missing a space because you'd already know you need to go into every space. It would be having more than one, if you're overshooting, to have more than one scan. - Well, I think you answered it just by showing that the scanned data goes a long way. And so really, in a house, if you have an exceedingly long hallway, just do the shot in front of each of the bedroom doors and you're good. You don't have to worry about the in-between shots to get there because LiDAR sees really far. - The range of the LiDAR is obscene. In full broad daylight, it'll measure 60+ feet. It's crazy. So, often what happens is that you, the distance between scans, and then you'll get a sense of that in Stitch because you'll see all the little dots, right? Really has more to do with where you want people to see from in the tour. So if you want them to be in the living room, well, yeah, of course you scanned that. In the hallway, it's ... - shooting what I would call in between scans in order to be able have one connect to the other to connect to the other, but the LiDAR on the iGUIDE PLANIX Camera Kit see so far that in a house I don't even need to worry about it as long as I got the camera seeing line of sight, even if that run in the very long hallway on the second level of the house is super-long. Just do my shots in front of the bedrooms and I'll be fine. - I would say that's true. Yes. - Line of sight. Okay. Any parting last thought? - No. I think we covered everything. I think that was really great. I'm glad we got a chance to discuss Stitch. Stitch is really interesting and fascinating software and it brings up a lot of -- it answers a lot of questions when you get into the software because you actually see sort of the magic behind all the technology: what is it really doing? Sometimes with certain technology it's very hard to know what's going on. What is it doing? Is it scanning? Is it photographing? But in this case, you see the image, it's very transparent, you see the actual LiDAR data and then you see the connection between them. So I didn't show it, but in the image there's a simulated laser line that runs horizontally across the image and that is the place where the laser hit the LiDAR. So you can actually see what it is that you measured in the data. So, you probably noticed, the data's -- it's kind of wiggly and ugly and weird looking. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's perfectly acceptable because you can identify what is structure, what's a wall versus what's a potted plant or an appliance or whatever. - Yeah. That was totally clear to me. Oh! Good. That's exciting. My takeaway is three things: One, it's using iGUIDE Stitch post-production software for PC and Mac. If you do a really good job shooting on the front-end, it is a super-fast workflow on the back-end to upload the project, to create an iGUIDE. Second, if you have some reasonable amount of workflow that you want to do in terms of setting the start image; perhaps changing some of the order of the panoramas for the auto play tour, if you want to change the color correction on one or more panoramas, it's super-easy. And if you have a workflow where you typically apply the same settings to all images, then that's there. So, even your typical workflow on a job is still relatively short. And then third, there's probably a bell or whistle for a feature that you think you'd want if you needed it. And we did a couple of those examples such as exporting a photo sphere so that you could take the camera out of the mirror or export to do virtual staging and import it back. So, awesome. Chris, thanks for being on the show today again. - Thanks for having me. Happy Canada Day. - We've been visiting with Chris White, Marketing Manager of Planitar Inc. Planitar is the maker of iGUIDE. If you have follow-up questions: www.GoiGUIDE.com lots of help, videos, support tools, et cetera. You can also book an appointment with one of the sales team members. Chris is active in the We Get Around Network Forum, www.WGANForum.com And Chris is at, in the Forum is, in the WGAN Forum is: @Chris_iGUIDE For Chris in the greater Kitchener Canada area who is off to celebrate the remainder of Canada Today. I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum in Atlanta, getting ready to celebrate the July 4th holiday weekend. Thank you all for tuning in. You've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. |
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| Video: [How To] Process iGuide data files with Stitch | Video courtesy of Sparks Media Group | 13 November 2022 | ||
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