Recovering images from QTVR movies

Someone recently asked me if there is any way that they could convert their QuickTime VR panoramas into images that can be used in other panorama viewers. Here is a manual process.

1. Open the movie with QuickTime Player 7
2. File > Export… > movie to separate single-node movies (this step and the next are not necessary for single node movies).
3. Open up one of the exported movies with QuickTime Player 7
4. Window > Show Movie Properties
5. Uncheck the QuickTime VR and VR Panorama Tracks
6. Check the Video track that uses the JPEG codec
7. Close the Properties window
8. File > Export > Movie To Image Sequence
9. Close movie, but don’t save it.
10. Open the first tile in Photoshop
11. Image > Canvas Size … increase the height percent to accommodate all tiles
12. Assemble the remaining tiles (02-24) into a complete image
13. Rotate the image 90° CW and save as JPEG

That is for cylindrical panoramas. For cubic panoramas, you will get 6xNxM tiles where N and M are subtiling factors, and there is a different process instead of steps 11-13. If you get subtiled faces (e.g. 24=6*2*2) be it known that pixels on the edges are duplicated on adjacent faces. If you want to reconstruct the faces from subttled faces, you would want to remove one row and one column from (almost) each tile to remove the duplicates. For example, say we have a cubic panorama subtiled 2x2, where each tile is 256x256, i.e. each face is composed of a 2x2 arrangement of four 256x256 tiles. We remove the right column on the left two tiles (of each face), and the bottom row on the bottom two tiles. When we put these together, we end up with a 511x511 tile (for each face).

Note also that this edge pixel duplication happens between faces as well, e.g. the front edge of the top face is the same as the top edge of the front face. You may need this information if you use some tool to convert to equirectangular.