I have one of the virtual tour programs that you stitch together the pics & then post the tour on the original vendor’s web site for a monthly or per tour fee. Can a tour somehow be posted on my site along with the tour viewer? I would like to post virtual tours on my site with the software I already have but if that isn’t possible what options should I be looking at. Thanks

It can probably be posted on your website if there is a URL you can link to.

I know www.VisualTour.com is very good at making their tours easy to put anywhere you want along with a viewer.

I was thinking more on the line of skipping the vendor’s web site and posting the tour on my site (server) with maybe an auto run command to the viewer when you click on the tour?

-------------------
Ann Connolly ABR,CRS,GRI,e-PRO
RE/MAX Realty Marketing
mailto:ann@AnnConnolly.com
http://www.ElkhartCountyListings.com

Ann,
http://www.360dof.com/

I’m not sure what you are referring to as being “honest”? I posted a question looking for a way to post virtual tours on my site without using a 3rd party vendor’s site. I don’t call Fisbos dishonest, crooks or bad people. I can hope the Fisbo fails which statistics show 95-98% of them do. That just means I’m one of those minority agents that might have the ability or desire to post my own tours. If it’s not “illegal”(or against the license agreement) to use the software I purchased along with the viewer and post the tours on my server then it’s not any different than a fisbo selling his own home, if he tries to sell his neighbors home then that’s a different story altogether.

So again back to the original question of a way to post virtual tours on web site whether it’s visualtour.com, 360dof.com, billyjimbob.com or just plain video camera and windows media player. I’m looking for some input from anyone that has accomplished this. Thanks

Ann,
You need to chill. In my previous post I placed a link to a website that has software that does exactly what you asked.

The quote "If you are honest..." is from Mark Twain and is on my signature line. It was not directed at you but is on all of my posts.

Misunderstanding I am sure Jim.

Ann do you understand that is his signature?

This is your signature.

Jim participates in this forum daily helping thousands of people with good advice and ideas. If someone can help you get what you need he can.

Hi Ann,

I am brand new to this forum, but was intrigued by your question. I have answered this same question to thousands of realtors in the last 5 years. I haven't officially even introduced myself and background to the other members of this forum as yet. But I do have some input you may find valuable to your recent question regarding hosting your own tours.

First, you probably should ask yourself what is the reason I want to host the tour myself? Is it because you don't like the viewer that my tour company is providing, or is it because you don't like the fact that the consumer looking at your site is re-directed to a third party site.

To host the tours yourself, you will need to create a nice viewer to show the photo's in, you would then need to have a panoramic viewer software to run the images. Most consumer products are not a good quality for the imaging and let's face it tour companies have spent millions investing in getting this system right for realtors.

There are ways for you to link the tours to your site, but have it pop up in a window that makes it appear to the viewer that they never left your site at all. Also some tour providers can customize a Virtual tour viewer to have the same look and feel as your website, making it appear so seamless. Perhaps that is a solution for you.

One of the features with our services is an on-line statistics traffic report. Having the tour linked to our servers will help facilitate this report with real numbers and a pie chart of where your on-line visitors are coming from and how many showings. Imagine being in a multiple offer situation and using this as a leverage tool to gain a higher sale price. "We have had 5000 online showings on this property just this week, I think we will hold off till next week for a list price or higher offer". There is so much more to a virtual tour than just pictures. It is all about the investment vs. aquistion!

If you host your tour yourself, will you gain that type of exposure tool? Will it track the hits from realtor.com, yoursite, your company site, yahoo, obeo.com and any other site it may be linked to in one neat and tidy report?

I hope I was helpful, please feel free to contact me if you would like more information.

I use a Canon S1 IS digital camera and a wide angle lens to shoot my own virtual tours. With the software provided with the camera, I can create Apple Quicktime movies for the tours. Quicktime is a great platform because most people already have it on their PC.

The Canon S1 IS has a special panoramic mode for taking the pictures. Even without the pano head, you can still take great photos with a little practice.

I just bought Nikon 8800 and plan on using it with the Kaidan 360 VR lens. Lens is on backorder, so we'll see how it goes. The software works on a Mac, so that is pretty nice.

I tried using a tripod and stitching software. Man, that takes a much longer time and greater deal of effort. The Kaindan seemed like a good idea because it's just a one-shot solution.

Thait Kaidan looks like one great piece of hardware! Good luck!

Got my Kaidan a couple weeks ago. It was on backorder. The lens is very large, so I have to get an adapter ring, as expected. I'm going to test it today.

Hi room. I need your opinions on something. My company, CommercialNet, Inc., is seriously considering offering our Web-based DVT Production Suite under the "shareware" business model. This would DRAMATICALLY reduce the per annum cost of our product. As you know, companies such as VisualTour.com charge around $560 for one year of use per agent ($199.95 plus $25 per month). Virtual tour providers that offer photography services charge $60 to $90 PER TOUR. If we went with our proposed model, we would be able to offer a product that is more than twice as powerful as most "do-it-yourself" virtual tour products for only $55 per year (includes unlimited use, no recurring fees, hosting, documentation, free upgrades, more). The only thing we would not do is offer phone support. Instead, support be provided by thorough documentation.

I think a huge benefit of moving to a shareware business model is that it would give real estate professionals access to our product to create multimedia-rich tours when they need it most and still use "competitive" products for their daily tours.

So I guess the question is: Would you pay $55 for unlimited use of a virtual tour production suite for one year with NO STRINGS ATTACHED?

If you want to see our stuff, visit our Web site at http://www.commercialnet.biz. Click on the DEMO link to see some live tour demos.

Thanks for your help!

Sorry, I made a mistake in my previous post. VisualTour.com charges $29.95 per user per month (for a single-use license) - not $25

We suggest actually bypassing the virtual tour. We think it will become a thing of the past. The new format will be video tours. Perhaps you should put some of your efforts in to videos. With Windows XP and MovieMaker and a good mini dv camera, you can create great videos tours in minutes.


Just a suggestion...

Unless they find a way to compress video tours, it seems like it will be tougher for people with slower modems, correct? I forget the statistic, but a large percentage of Americans do not have cable modems or DSL. They already have a tough enough time with virtual tours.

Streaming video is still pretty slow and most people would not want to download the video.

Actually, it's funny that you should mention that. Our virtual tour technology was created to emululate motion video without the bandwidth requirements or production hassle. We wanted to give agents a way to create a "video-like" presentation using still images, so we incorporated features like per-frame voice narration capabilities, pan and zoom editing, etc. But for die-hard "slide-show" fanatics, our DVT Production Suite also allows you to create automated slided shows with 5 to 15 second transition rates. To try and complete the TV-like production process, we added a five-track background music selector to allow the consumer to semi-customize the tour experience.

And, of course, you can't forget the hearing impaired who can't take advantage of streaming audio, so we included a scrolling text marquee. It functions like captions but allows people to see "snippets" of info instead of begin bogged down reading full captions of the voice narration audio while the tour "video" is playing.

As far as true video versus the DVT Production Process, we experimented with Apple Quicktime video compression and achieved 67MB per video file at the high compression rate before seriously losing video quality. We then experimented with our current format using Macromedia FLASH and brought the total file size down to about 6MB! Of course, it's all streaming, but imagine the amount of overall bandwidth we've freed-up. This allows us to price our DVT Production Suite more reasonably than even guys like VisualTour.

Ann, it doesn't look like your question got a direct answer... so here's one.

"Can a tour somehow be posted on my site along with the tour viewer?"

No, at least I doubt it. BUT, you can find free or cheap software out there that WILL allow you to build your own virtual tours, then host them on your own server, usually served up on your website using Javascript, which is free too.

But no, I don't have any free or cheap software to refer you to. I did some research on this a year or two ago, and demo'd some pretty good free software and built a few virtual tours. But we have moved to using video, which is also free and people seem to like it better. You just use your digital camera, shoot some footage, connect it to your PC, edit the video, create a file and upload to your web space.

Everyone:

Check out the Website at http://www.reelestates.com. They use video to create virtual tours, and supposidly their videographers are "professionals". Notice, too, that their videography using a DV-cam is shaky and "quick". You almost need dramamine to watch their tours. ReelEstates.com also charges a hefty fee to produce your video tours for you as well. Why? Because video editing is time-consuming and would likely be perplexing for the novice. Granted, once you learn it, it's like riding a bicycle.

Now, how many real estate agents do you think know how to convert ANY audio/video format into streaming media, and how many others understand multimedia file compression and account bandwith allotment.

Let's not forget to remind Ann that even if she could figure out how to convert DV-cam video into streaming format (and I don't mean just downloading video from a camcorder to her PC), had a PC with a graphics and video processor capable of managing audio/video productions, knew how to purchase a co-located or managed streaming server account (using either Quicktime, RealServer, Window Media Server, or Flash Communication Server), could build real estate-centric media-player features and buttons using Flash, DHTML, Java, or another programming/assembly language, understood that if she exceeds her monthly bandwidth allotment that she could end up paying hundreds of dollars in overrage fees, understood how to FTP files between her PC and Web host, learned how to database video inventory using MySQL or another 'sequal' application (assuming her Web host had SQLServer), and could synchronized professional-sounding audio with her video clip, how in the world would she keep the DV-cam from shaking so badly that her prospects might get sick to their stomachs?

Oh, I know...a $1,200 glide-cam rig!

(I'm being facetious, but these are real considerations.)

The problem with agents creating their own tours is that they cannot compete with companies that have more technical and financial resources. But forget that point for now. Think about this instead...

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO USE A MOTION-PICTURE CAMERA TO FILM A STATIONARY OBJECT SUCH AS A HOUSE??? Kitchen counters don't move. Walls don't move. Toilets and showers don't move. Stoves don't move. Unless you just want to capture the swaying of tree branches (or the narrator), then using any video for real estate tours just doesn't make sense. It is a difficult and expensive proposition.

If you really want to create your own tours, use our DVT Production Suite. $75 for six months of unlimited tech support, product training, upgrades, resouces, tour hosting and more. All you need is your digital camera and a $6 microphone. Our production process allows you to emulate video production (which uses using pan and zoom effects and voice narration) but you can also create ol' fashioned slide shows.

Go to www.commercialnet.biz to see more.

Anyway, I didn't mean to turn this into a plug for my product, but before going to "do-it-youself" video, think it through.

And one last question. What is the likeliness that a home-made virtual tour is going to be MLS-compliant?

Great point about compression, Dee.

Try using Window Sound Recorder (the default recording application that comes with Windows) and record a 60-second audio clip. Look at the file size. It's HUGE! Now, imagine a 15-minute long audio/video tour. As mentioned earlier, we used Quicktime video a while back when considering video tours, and our files were over 60 megabytes for a five-minute audio/video tour - AFTER COMPRESSION! You can only compress so much before you severely degrade your audio and video quality.

Compress too much and you're high-end home will look like a tuna shack rental. Still, I have to believe that no matter what technology you use, if you are not a great sales person, you will lose the prospect anyway. You have to learn to qualify and close effectively. The virtual tour is a convenience and prospecting tool...nothing more. It shouldn't replace the sales person.

I tend to only use Virtual Tours without sound or other supplementary information at this stage. As Robert H points out, especially the sound would make the file size very big.

Mac users can do this for free and with ease in iPhoto. Just select the slides you want and it adds background music. You can export to a website or QT movie file.

There are still numerous issues the agent will not be able to overcome. For example, default QT media players are not compliant with most listing organizations. By the way, did I mention that the person who invented Quicktime VR for Apple is our lead technology advisor? (He was also the original piano player in Muddy Waters in the 60s and wrote several of songs for INXS that received international airplay in the 80s. His name is Ian Clyne. Just neat info. )

Of course, because even QT video is a hard-drive hog that eats up the a lot of server space, so we use Flash...but that's another technology issue in itself.

Well it seems to me that a very large portion on the customer base are still on 56k dial-up speeds, which means that virtual tours will still be better then a video tour. Until the industry standard becomes broadband, video will simply take too much time to load and the quality will suffer for those on slower speeds. The beauty of a virtual tour is the ability to preserve quality and not sacrifice as much bandwith. I can take a very large panoramic of the Front of a property have it be 72kb which works out to ~15 seconds of load time on the average dial-up. The best your going to be able to do for each video is a few megabytes, in quick-time format likely. Ask me again when you have a customer base that is willing to spend 10 minutes waiting for a video to play for EACH home they wanted to view. I personally don't think video is the most practical solution at this time, but sure having it in addition to a virtual tour would be a great idea to cater to those that can view them. Don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't axe vtours to move ahead to be the first to support video....

just my two cents

Hello,
there is another technology that uses a flash display tool ( most have flash in there browsers anyway ). You can make a small movie or several movies that have to be converted and upload.
A site under contruction ( not real estate ) will integrate this.
See: http://web116.abacushosting.com/plistings.php?prlid=268&listingid=40
in the right column.
No reason that it would not work for real estate as well

Helmut P. Fleischhauer
http://www.globalrealtyforsale.com

That's nice but how much traffic does your site get and how many potential viewers would you have there vs say for example, a virtual tour on www.Realtor.com???

I know for an additional $21.95 per tour you can enhance a listing on Realtor.com with a virtual tour that will also get it that little 'spinning house' icon that denotes a VT for that listing.

It also 'weights' the listing to appear first in a search if a consumer checks the "Display Listings with Virtual Tours First:". Countless surveys and studies show consumers (buyers) love lots and lots of pictures of listings so I believe it would be worth the 20 bucks or so to not only enhance your listing but also make it appear at the head of the line on a search.

You DO NOT have to have any other sort of presence on Realtor.com to use this feature.

Side-note to James: We just received our notice from Realtor.com this morning. We are now an official PicturePath provider. We can now post tours to Realtor.com (including AOL and about 30 other gateway providers they partner with).

Also, we're launching version 3.0 of our tours this week which includes a lot of new features and the ability to load panoramics. See the skin previews at http://www.commercialnet.biz/special/


NOW, ON TO OTHER THINGS - Like the virtual tour video debate!

I think we'll be adding a video uploader in the future for client who'd like to pay for the bandwidth, but here's what keep US away from it: At 20,000 "standard" tours streaming on average to 300 viewers each per month, our bandwidth consumption would exceed 98Mbps (Megabits Per Second) sustained bandwidth (from 6,000,000 total views).

For those who don't know how big that is, it's 256,312,524 Megabytes of data (or 31,288 Gigabytes). Video of any length is going to be 30MB to 60MB each! Our tours are 5.34MB each or smaller now, act like video, but use no video whatsoever. So imagine how many Web servers a virtual tour provider (like us) could crash by offering video.

Do the math:

A. 30MB video streaming divided by 1,024 (to get Gigabytes) = .029 GB
B. Average computer harddrive is 40GB
C. 20,000 videos online viewed by 300 people each = 6,000,000 views
D. Equal to 175781.25 GB of data streamed
E. That's enough data to fill up 4,395 40GB computer harddrives
F. The MONTHLY bandwidth and hosting bill comes out be about $80,000 ($960,000 per year) - not including support and equipiment purchases.

Now, 20,000 tours could come from 5,000 customers who each have only 4 tours online. Basically, you are looking at each client costing an ISP $16 per month in bandwidth and hosting charges ($80,000/5,000), or $192 per year per client. REMEMBER, THAT'S JUST WHAT THE TOUR PROVIDER PAYS SOMEONE ELSE TO USE THE CO-LOCATED HOSTING FACILITIES AND LEASE THE BANDWIDTH - NONE OF THE OTHER BILLS HAVE BEEN PAID, YET. The more views a tour has, the more you will see that $192 go up per client.

Keep in mind that some of the oldest and biggest players in the virtual tour business (such as VisualTours.com) have 45,000 customers. I'm only using 5,000 tour clients in my scenario, and I'm not even including the number of other clients who are using bandwidth to display "normal" tours. You can expect that they will outnumber video tour users by 30:1.

In other words, the cost of virtual tour providers hosting full-blown video that streams 24/7/365 is exhorbitant. Let's not forget to mention that in order to get a video stream of any quality, your tour is going to be displayed in a tiny window about 1/5th the size of current tours. If you try to increase the size of the video window to match the size of most virtual tour viewing windows today, you are either going to sacrafice quality (as the video will have to be compressed greatly), or you will have to ask consumers to wait a while for a high-quality video tour to buffer as it is streaming.


That's my two-cents and I'm sticking with it!

ANN MARIE--

Realtor.com receives:

7.29 million unique users per month who spent 264 million minutes of combined time on the site (about 30 mintues each consumer)

Source:
Liz Boyle, Director
Realtor.com/Homestore.com

Through Realtor.com/Homestore.com's PicturePath program, you can use any virtual tour provider as your vendor and your tours will still be seen on Realtor.com PLUS their 30 other gateway partner sites such as America Online, The Wall Street Journal, Juno/NetZero, etc.

...and...

You can still post links to virtual tours on your own Web site.

Point2Agents is also launching their version of "Realtor.com" at http://www.point2homes.com. It's a BETA site, but it is operational.

Hey, I spent about 3 solid days last week trying to figure out SOME WAY of providing video online instead of a virtual tour. Trust me, by the time you deal with all of the format issues (QuickTime vs. java vs. Flash, etc.) and compatibililty issues, then you have to deal with compressing the movie to a size that is downloadable without waiting until your next birthday.... the quality is just NOT GOOD. It's OK, but the photo size is sooooooooooooooo small, and the quality is "OK". OK is not good enough if you're trying to advertise a $800000 home, ya know? My goal was to try and find something that is better than the "Home Movies' that Coldwell Banker uses (personally I think they're awful - I would ask a REALTOR to remove that crap from my listing if they tried to use it. I think it hurts rather than helps).

So... after HOURS... I again am unsuccessful. (tried this two years ago as well- the only different is more people have broadband now, but the compatibility and quality issues still remain).

So, am going to bite the bullet and get a 360one from Kaidan and a Coolpix 8400. Although it's big bucks, I think the quality vs time involved is definitely worth it.

At nearly $800, that's huge investment. Instead, you could purchase a $50 photo stitching software package (and a little more for the 360-tripod) to use with your oridinary digital camera and drop them into our DVTPS (Digital Visual Tour Production Suite). The DVTPS gives you the ability to create/show three different tour styles (traditional slide-show, animated slide-show, and panoramic) and you can add 20-tracks of audio and create unlimited tours. You can also include sponsor ads (to earn a little extra money each month) and our expanded features tray is rather useful for homebuyers.

I'll GIVE you an account to our Version 3.0 to use for 30-days if you want to try it out. I'll also provide free training by phone to help you learn it more quickly. We are releasing DVTPS V.3.0 this coming week, so let me if you want to try it free for 30-days. I'll send you further instruction.

The lens and camera was only about $2000 total. I'm using it for another business venture, so it's what needed. I had some very expensive photostitching software, but like the single-photo lends better. It takes a lot less time creating the pictures since it's only one shot. No matter how good your stitching software is, you still have to take multiple pictures.

I can see where purchasing the Kaiden would be useful if you are going to use it in another business venture - even at $2,000. You gotta spend money to make money!

Eventually, we may add the engine to allow QuickTime video in our DVT Production Suite. I screwed up on the video size estimate earliear in this post, too. I said QT video was 30MB to 60MB each for a real estate virtual tour. That's uncompressed with full-length audio. I should have used compress figures without audio which is how most QT virtual tours are published. That would take it down to 7MB to 15MB. Higher compression would make the file size even smaller but at the cost of losing picture quality and presentation integrity.

Ahhh...another "problem" with online video.

I was just watching a RealPlayer real estate video (using a 3.2 Megabit broadband connection), and buffering was slower than the video play-back thereby causing the video to pause about every eight seconds until buffering could catch up.

This had nothing to do with my connection to the Internet. Instead, it had to do with the "load" on the broadcast server. Agents who think it's a good idea to host their own video using Windows, QuickTime or Real streaming video formats are going to be in for a shock in many cases. Here's why...

Most Web site hosting accounts used by agents (or anyone for that matter) are not DEDICATED hosting accounts. Instead, they are shared accounts wherein the agent's Web site is sitting on a server with perhaps 30 to 50 other companies. If Company-X is experiencing a lot of page-views, then the video stream will be slow because the shared Web server is using up "throughput" and bandwidth resources. Conversely, if you are receiving a lot of views for your video tours, you will slow down the server for the other 30 to 50 customers and your ISP will suggest that you purchase a dedicated hosting account. This means your videos will sit on their own servers and you don't share bandwidth, but this priveledge comes at a cost - $750 to $2,500 per month for starters for a decent-sized account (though many discount ISPs offer low-end dedicated hosting for less).

And don't bother setting up a server at home using your cable or DSL account. First of all, your contract with your broadband service provider likely doesn't allow you to use your home broadband connection for commercial purposes. And, you won't have the throughput to host video with a typical 300KB/s to 720KB/s upstream connection. You MIGHT be able to push three videos at one time (at 128KB/s) if you don't crash your server in the process.

I may be misunderstood some of the postings. But let me explain something here. Virtual tour doesn’t mean is a panoramic view either Horizontal, vertical or even circular. I noticed that some folks here are pointing to the panoramic tour but in the links they attached that’s not it, that’s what we call Fade in or out/dissolve in and out transitions. I have all the equipment and software that I use to create a short film or a doc. I use Adobe premiere Pro 1.0. as for the virtual tour I use Panoweaver 4.0. you can use a cheaper software such as panoweaver 3.0 or Tour weaver. If you are looking for only a fade in & out transition you can use a very cheap software called (I think) panorama Photo studio. Good luck.

Correction. sorry I was in a big hurry and made a lot of mistakes. here is what I meant to say:
" I may misunderstand some of the inputs. but let me explain something, the virtual tour doesn't mean fade in and out transition. a panoramic view can be either Horizontal, vertical or even circular. I noticed that some folks here are pointing to the panoramic tour but in the links they attached that’s not it, that’s what we call Fade in or out/dissolve in and out transitions. I have all the equipment and software that I use to create a short film or a doc. I use Adobe premiere Pro 1.0. as for the virtual tour I use Panoweaver 4.0. you can use a cheaper software such as panoweaver 3.0 or Tour weaver. If you are looking for only a fade in & out transition you can use a very cheap software called (I think) panorama Photo studio. Good luck.