Move.com Nationwide Assignment

mov_banner_05Offering exploration of gigapixel images online has proven very successful for enhancing web visitor “stickiness” and information delivery. In Spring of 2007, xRez Studio was contracted by online real estate resource Move.com to shoot over 270 gigapixel images, illustrating 170 neighborhoods from 34 major American cities for their website, Realtor.com. xRez Studio was challenged to complete the work in 4 months, so 2 shooting teams were sent across the country for 12 weeks, shipping nearly 5000 images (20 finished gigapixel images) weekly to the Los Angeles office for post-production. Studio infrastructure significantly expanded by tripling the existing quantity of photography and motion-control gear, adding cutting-edge 8-processor 8GB machines with 36TB of raid0 storage, and converting a 3d render farm to a “stitching” farm. The end result is an unprecedented catalog of 270 highly detailed images of the modern American city, viewable from Realtor.com, but also available from xRez for other purposes such as prints or visual effects backgrounds. An article describing the shooting challenges is viewable in Issue 29 of VRmag.