Currently using a P4P for taking stills of natural landscapes. My customers are corporate art buyers who want larger & larger prints. P4P OK up to about a 36" print but not too admirable past that. SOOOO.... X5S or X7? Anyone taking stills with these cameras? The X7 looks really nice and I'm wondering if anyone is taking pan shots & stitching them together. This doesn't work with P4P.... the lens is too wide & distortion mucks up the result. Two rows of three shots from X7 with 35mm or 50mm in theory might work. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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Yep, stitching is the best solution to get really huge prints of high resolution. I'm surprised that you have problems stitching P4P images, I had very satisfying results with Autopano Giga 4.4 software. That said, X5 or X5S camera with 25mm lens will deliver probably the best this technology can offer these days. X7 may be just too expensive, overkill for stills. Inspire 2 under Litchi control does such panos splendidly with rotating gimbal. Here's one example made with P4P images: Virtual Tours Made Simple
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That example is incredible! Nice work! Was this done with I2 or P4P? Didn’t understand given the last line of your post.
That is an incredible example. I used to live up in that area.... made me miss it fierce. I didn't know about that software so I'll try it. I'm curious if you did two rows of pans or just one full rotational pan? I think you're right the X5S with the sharpest lens I can find, and in a longer focal length would give the best distortion free results.
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This one was made with Phantom 4 Pro+, but for really stunning hi-res spherical panos I'm using Inspire 2 with X5S and 25mm Olympus Zuiko lens. The resulting stitch is of 6GP size, containing roughly 60 of 4:3 frames shot in DNG and processed differently in 3 rows to compensate for exposure.
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I'm usually shooting spherical pano 360 x 110, starting first row at 20 deg above horizon. With 25mm lens that translates to approx. 60 images in 5 rows down to 2 nadirs. I'm ignoring zenith shots as irrelevant, unless sky features are capturing worthy. P4P will make only 38 images in spherical pano mode due to wider FOV. This approach render enough material to choose from when opting for partial panoramic image. I process DNG in 3 batches with different exposure adjustment for each batch, Autopano Giga usually does excellent job matching and stitching them. Final stitch in TIFF or any large file format I may finally colour grade in Photoshop. We're talking gigapixel sizes here ...
There's few little known tricks to make successful stitch and properly render hi-res panorama in Autopano Giga software, which is not cheap BTW. The computing stress is no small either when processing huge files. But any serious landscape photographer must consider such. Don't hesitate to ask questions ...
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Whoa. That's insane! As in cool insane! And a lot of work. So you feel you get better results with Autopano Giga vs PTGui? After reading your post I went out & shot a two row, 4 shots per row scene and stitched it together with PTGui. The drone was moving about a bit in a stiff breeze. The result was quite nice from a resolution standpoint, but the wind screwed up the alignment of a few lightpoles, signs, etc. I guess the wind has to be pretty low to pull this off. I'm excited though; looks like you've perfected a technique that works for the P4P. Distortion still a problem with the result I obtained (light poles & trees at whacky angles at edges of composited frame).
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Naturally stable hovering is absolute must to shot successfully stitching images. If that's not the case, no matter what you'll do in stitching soft, PTGui or Autopano, will result in a mess. For this reason only I've purchased Inspire 2 after elaborate field testing of hovering at dealer. First unboxed bird didn't pass, second did. Be aware of this issue since not every specimen behaves equally well in hover. My P4P+ is hovering rock steady, wind or not, although rendered panos aren't even close to what X5S can deliver in terms of resolution.
I'm not familiar with PTGui software, for no apparent reason. I've mastered Autopano Giga with relatively step learning curve, but I can deliver several meters wide print with 72 dpi resolution.
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Some samples of my panos, cropped from full spherical projections. Note size difference between P4P and X5S/25mm panos.
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Incredible. Thanks for all the help with this... The Edmonton shot is with the Zenmuse X5S with the 25mm. I'm amazed the buildings show no keystoneing, even on the edge. I guess that's because of the software. Is there any chance you could send me a DNG file of a X5S stitched pano shot you don't care about? I'd love to see how it looks after the enlargement protocol I use. The acutance of your jpg renditions is excellent, so I'd love to see the RAW's. I'm really tempted to purchase or demo this kit. One last question: The Olympus 45mm/25mm lenses don't need any adapter to put on the X5S? Was it difficult to get good balance?Some samples of my panos, cropped from full spherical projections. Note size difference between P4P and X5S/25mm panos.
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I'm not sure if Dropbox will accept this size file, will try tonight. Anyway, stitching software is delivering finished image in either JPEG, TIFF or PSD format, not DNG. It will accept DNG sequence for stitching, but this is not best strategy since you want to pre-process certain rows with different settings before and input TIFF's for stitching. JPG's you see were made after cropping huge PSD files of final stitches. TIFF file size limitation is requiring the use of Large File Format instead when rendering final stitch in Autopano Giga, which you can later post-process in Photoshop and convert to any printable format to your liking.
As for keystoneing or any other deformation ... Naturally stitching software does some magic stretching and aligning all supplied images seamlessly, but this is only believable illusion after all. However, Autopano is offering many different projection simulations, i.e. cylindrical or fish-eye. I'm not sure if spherical projection - as designed for interactive virtual tours - will be the best for your landscape photography.
As for lenses, only 45mm Oly need some balancing rings, but this lens is overkill IMHO. Full 360 spherical pano will require approx. 200 images to make, not enough hovering time for such. Splitting the mission into 2 flights rarely delivers reliably stitching sequence. It's doable, but to my knowledge only Autopilot app will allow to program precise shooting grid for 45mm partial pano.. My experiments with 45mm were promising indeed when extreme details are required. Meantime Litchi app finally allowed Inspire 2 to shoot panos with yawing gimbal, which is way more efficient than with yawing aircraft like in P4P or M200 drone case. This may make shooting 360 panos with 45mm possible during one flight (to be confirmed).
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OK.. this all makes sense. I think the jpeg gives me a pretty good idea. I should have thought about the DNG.. of course it would be a tiff or the like coming out of the pan software. Still trying to get my head around this. I'm attaching a typical pano I'd be shooting. I'm not doing huge 360's but it would be nice to capture the attached image with say 2 rows of 4 shots each. That's why I'm leaning towards the 45mm, but perhaps the 25 would be enough, AND give me better depth of field. Also, the 45mm may show vibrations more? Great to know Litchi is useable. That's about all I fly with, having the drone follow a predetermined flight plan (Waypoint Mode). With either the 25 or 45, I'm assuming you can tap to focus? or do you just use autofocus?
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Great pic, imagine this 5m wide on the wall and magnifying glass dangling beneath picture frame
! Anyway, no problem with 45mm, the vibration dampening system does amazing job and for stills doesn't really matter. However, I'm not sure if Litchi allows for shooting partial panos. Autopilot app for sure does, you can program anything precisely there, but it has some awkwardness in execution, if memory serves me well. As for focusing I usually just tap ...
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If I just may add my 2 cent worth. For these type of shots I find setting the focus in GO4 by tapping on the infinity mark in MF more reliable and more consistent than tap to focus on landscape subject in far distance. My findings are subject to properly executed lens calibration in GO4.Great pic, imagine this 5m wide on the wall and magnifying glass dangling beneath picture frame
Great picture Kevin !
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And - since you're here - what do you think about my idea of purchasing X5R? Is it worth extra 2K to replace my X5 or it's a dead cow already?
I only had very brief encounter with X5R but it was not all that pleasant one. I can only say that the strong magenta tint in video and stills was awful, the transfer of CINE DNG from SSD to comp took ages. I personally would not consider that as a viable option, especially if there are other perhaps "more current" cameras available out there, such as the aforementioned Blackmagic. I do not know all that much about video and video cameras to give any sound advice though.
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Yep, everybody is telling me this ... First generation of X5 class wasn't really a stunning success as compared to many other Micro 4/3 cameras on the market these days. Oh, well, thanks for input anyway.
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For solely stills I would say the value of the X5S at 20.8MP ($1,899 + $349) is better than the X7 at 24MP ($2,699 + $1,429). As already mentioned, the Olympus 25mm is a crisp lens. Have never tried the Autopano Giga 4.4 software...thanks for sharing that @Dobmatt ?
