27 December 2011 ~ 13 Comments

Panoramas SAPO, making of…

English SAPO Tech stuff

Once in a while at SAPO we cross our path with extraordinary people with uncommon ideas and unlimited motivation. Ideas to which we just can’t say no, those with the right amount of usefulness, awesomeness and uniqueness, you know what I’m talking about.

The Panoramas SAPO project was one of those moments. When Basílio and Pedro came to us and the thought of making a record Tera pixel panoramic photo of Lisbon took shape, we sank our energy and resources into the project and put up an elite team working together in no time.

And what a team and project this was. During the months following, we planed the photos, built and tested bizarre equipments, literally climbed bridges and castles in the hunt for the best spots to use our gear, handled the right authorizations, learned a whole pile of theory about gigantic panoramic photos, developed software and stretched the known computing systems for this sort of projects to new limits in order to meet our goal. And we’ve done it.

More than 2000 hours of computing processing, 32.000 photo shots, 6TB of data and 5.000 hours of work later, we finally launched the Panoramas SAPO project at SAPO Codebits 2011.

I was lucky enough to be allowed to hang with these guys. My small contribution to the team is this “making of” video which I now make available. Best seen in full screen. We hope you like it.

Non flash, H.264 iOS/Android friendly versions here: HD and SD.

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  • Adam West

    And yet, you just copy what others did… like everything else on sapo.pt
    Reinventing the wheel every time.

    • http://pedromourapinheiro.com/ Pedro Moura Pinheiro

      Hum… Like posting comments with a fake name? Hasn’t *that* been done before too?

      • Adam West

        Sorry to hurt your feelings.

        I know this kind of things takes time, are a big effort but none the less they are just in the end a big fun to build from the ground up. 

        But for once would be great to see something *new* coming from the Sapo teams that is not just a cheap copy of what others did elsewhere.

        This spirit was is in there but lately it is just disappointing. I mean… if you guys muted the vuvuzelas… you can do anything.

        • http://arrifana.org/blog/ Celso Martinho

          Yada yada. Envy is bad for your skin dude. Show us your face, then we can talk.

          I know who you are though, the country has plenty of low life Adam trolling Wests.

          • Adam West

            No, you dont.

        • http://pedromourapinheiro.com/ Pedro Moura Pinheiro

          You didn’t hurt any feelings. As I post with a clear identity, you can see I’m not from SAPO. You post behind a limited if not fake identity – I don’t know who you are, and your post has very little value. This is a great project to be part of. We had different challenges that other panoramic projects didn’t, and we learned (and are still learning) from the many mistakes we did. If you want to contribute with something useful, go ahead. Otherwise you’re just increasing the universal entropy each time you post.

    • http://david.ragingnexus.com David Ramalho

      wow, holly-troll-cow Batman, shut everything down now, there can only be one of each in the universe lest we be copying someone …. 

      • Adam West

        Yes, you are right. Competition is healthy and it is good to have country and language specific contents.

        Just don’t use “uncommon” and “uniqueness” when you are describing something you did that others already have done.

        What about being honest and say “inspired by what others did, we did it also ourself and improved it (if you really did)”.

        • http://david.ragingnexus.com David Ramalho

          nobody’s exactly working in a toothpaste factory here, cloning this sort of thing for the sake of cloning doesn’t scale, not with the amount of work involved here, and I stipulate that “uncommon” is not the same as “NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE” and that “uniqueness” comes from the product of all the variables, not solely by the existence of any particular one.

          It’s not like someone is presenting a phone riddled with stuff we already know and claiming absolute uniqueness, so get your act together, consider what’s been said and 1) bloody change your name, nobody bites real humans, just fictional trolls and 2) consider the alternative, which would be the non-existence of any of similar looking non-linear projects, in this case, consider the non-existence of panoramic shots of the mentioned monuments and places, would you feel better for it? How does that math work?

  • Anonymous

    Congrats! This is amazing.

  • http://openid.sapo.pt/user/mariojg Mário

    Amazing. Great images, a lot of work, a great team. Congratulations!!!!

  • http://www.webhostings.in/ Web Hosting Provider

    Really great and looks amazing here.

  • http://www.titresimlivibrator.org/ vibratör

    Great video ;)