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I am not a big fan of the editing stage, mainly because I have to sit inside instead of going out to take more photos. I still have a similar sized tour of the Sacre Coeur to put together, but doubt I will have time to do now before next year. For this kind of project, you just turn into a robot. Once you have figured out the look you want, you use scripting for the HDR (I use photomatix for the HDR - you can get much better results actually if you use photoshop and know what you are doing, which with photoshop HDR I do not, but I think for this kind of project it is acceptable quality to use photomatix, even if it does soften the image a little), then it takes a bit of time to work on each panoramic photo, especially removing ghosts, but the HDR process also removes a lot of ghosts.
To create the panos, I use either Autopano Giga (I use this mostly for gigapixel images, not for 360s) or, my preferred option for 360s, mainly because I like that you can manually remove ghosts, is to use ptgui, which is a really good piece of software for 360s, though personally I find it not so good at gigapixel photos.
Once the first 360 photo has been created, with all the settings you want (min/max zoom, auto rotate etc) you just create the rest and use the same basic settings for each. The hard part starts as you need to create the actual tours. For this I use krpano. It mainly works in flash for the output, but it does have some html5 support, for 360s at least. To create the tours you need to edit/create xml configuration files. It is a right pain. With autopano giga there is a graphical tour interface, but I have not touched it for years, as I prefer doing this manually, it is more flexible, even if daunting at first having to use a command line application to build the tours.
Some of the simple configurations are things like ensuring you have the right view each time you click on the one of the 360 photos, using horizontal and vertical coordinates and to place the pulsating (or other type) hotspots at the right coordinates and ensure they point to the right panos when loaded etc. Some of the more difficult, which I am still working on for this tour, it is add a way to share a view, so that if someone clicks on the shared link, they do not just go to the right webpage, but the tour also selects the right scene and zooms into the exact same coordinates. I have it working like this for other tours, but for some reason I could not get it to work last night when finishing this off so I disabled it.
It took, I guess, around 4 hours for the photography, 24 – 48 hours spread over many nights and weekends for the editing, though I ran out of patience so I did not add a map (maybe I will at a later stage) and a video to the big screen you can see on the side of the shopping centre. If I find I have more spare time I will do it, as I think the map is very useful to have and the video looks great.....
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