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Affinity Photo/Panoramas

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Anyone have experience with making panoramas? Looking at Affinity Photo's app but not sure if it's the best for aerial panos. Looking at doing a full 360° pano from just above the horizon to looking all the way straight down to the ground. If anyone can give some advice I'd appreciate it.
 
Anyone have experience with making panoramas? Looking at Affinity Photo's app but not sure if it's the best for aerial panos. Looking at doing a full 360° pano from just above the horizon to looking all the way straight down to the ground. If anyone can give some advice I'd appreciate it.
Start with a shot straight down, then tilt up leaving about 25% overlap in your image, then snap again. Use a landmark for this that you can keep track of to represent dead center. Now you can start your rotation. Rotate the bird continuously in a 360 and snap photos again with a 25% overlap, you should have 8 or 9 total by the time you get all the way around. At this point you should have your bottom layer (straight down) and your 2nd layer (pointed down so you still can't see the horizon). Now going back to your landmark, tilt up so the horizon is near the top 1/3 of the frame, and repeat the same 360, again with about 25% overlap. Repeat again tilting the camera up further so the horizon is now at the bottom 1/3 of the frame. For good results I have found you need 4 layers total including the bottom layer which is just the one shot straight down.
It is easiest to stitch them in Lightroom, simply select all the images in the panorama, right click and merge to panorama. It should stitch them together pretty seamlessly. Then you get a result like this:

Fall sunrise in Edmonton.... - Alberta Drone Pilots | Facebook
 

droneseyeview

Manual pano shooting is error-prone and time-consuming. Most likely you won't have sufficient battery life to complete the job if you're shooting 3Gpx panorama like I do, with the Inspire2 Zenmuse X and 50mm DL lens. I use the Litchi App, which automates the shoot pattern, then stitch in PTGUI. Here's an example 3Gpx aerial Melbourne High School
 
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droneseyeview Affinity Photo doesn't give you the manual control. You throw your pano frames into Affinity and it stitches them. It seems more suited to flat panos with wide field of view, not a full 360x180° view. For that reason I recommend PTGUI Pro. PTGUI reads the Yaw, Pitch & Roll Metada which the drone embeds in each frames and uses that to position them before stitching

1665116345230.png

This is what the stitch from PTGUI Pro looks like https://www.hiddenmelbourne.com.au/camberwell-town-hall/
 

droneseyeview

Manual pano shooting is error-prone and time-consuming. Most likely you won't have sufficient battery life to complete the job if you're shooting 3Gpx panorama like I do, with the Inspire2 Zenmuse X and 50mm DL lens. I use the Litchi App, which automates the shoot pattern, then stitch in PTGUI. Here's an example 3Gpx aerial Melbourne High School
Thanks for the tip.
Do you use standard web hosting, or do you need to use hosting configured to handle the 360 pano? Thanks!
 
Thanks for the tip.
Do you use standard web hosting, or do you need to use hosting configured to handle the 360 pano? Thanks!
Good question! A lot of people just post their drone-stitched low resolution panoramas to social media like Facebook, but that's a real shame when you're using a professional drone like Inspire 3 which can capture a 3Gpx panorama. I use AmazonS3 for hosting and a Wordpress website for featuring the aerial tours. That means you can host the maximum resolution. I host 500,000px wide panoramas like that in full resolution, down to 648Mpx panos from a smaller drone. This website mentions several hosting options if you don't want to manage the hosting yourself: 5 Best Platforms to Upload Your 360 Photos | VeeR VR Blog They mention Facebook and I don't know if all those hosts are active.
 
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Good question! A lot of people just post their drone-stitched low resolution panoramas to social media like Facebook, but that's a real shame when you're using a professional drone like Inspire 3 which can capture a 3Gpx panorama. I use AmazonS3 for hosting and a Wordpress website for featuring the aerial tours. That means you can host the maximum resolution. I host 500,000px wide panoramas like that in full resolution, down to 648Mpx panos from a smaller drone. This website mentions several hosting options if you don't want to manage the hosting yourself: 5 Best Platforms to Upload Your 360 Photos | VeeR VR Blog They mention Facebook and I don't know if all those hosts are active.
Thanks for the tip. Yes, I find there is often gaps when viewing tutorials either how they capture, process, or where they host the final "product". It's nice to have forums to fill the gap!
 

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