Lastly, I would love to have a light and portable programmable pano head which is smaller than the Mecha, because sometimes the only view to the outside of a tower is through a small hole. But unfortunately, all the Ronin heads seem to be for mobile phones (rubbish for quality panos) or video cameras and are aimed at image stabilization and not rotation around a nodal point.
Inspire2-X7 panoramic technique success
- Thread starter sdunwell
- Start date
Just to clarify PTGui is a computer program for stitching the photos after they have been taken. You’d still use Litchi to program the gimbal movements of the Inspire.
So would:
1) Use Litchi as a control app for the drone to capture the pano shots. (You could do this manually but Litchi is the only real way to ensure full coverage in the fewest number of photos possible.)
2) Import photos in PTGui and have the program stitch the photos together to make a pano.
3) Import into PS/LR to edit.
When we were talking about a programmable gimbal we were talking about in terms of for a ground based camera.
As BarneyMeyer mentioned for truly pixel perfect panos the camera must tilt and pan on the lens’ nodal point which for wide angle lenses tends to be the front element. The Inspire gimbal rotates around the balance point of the camera not the nodal point of the lens. This causes error into pano right off the bat but since objects are really far from the camera when flying a drone it will have minimal effect. However, bring it down to the ground and now this will be an issue.
Agree completely! I use exactly the same workflow. Honestly, I don't know of a better workflow and I have tried many.
As Brett8883 said, Why is PTGUI the best for drone aerial panoramas?
The drone camera embeds metadata into each DNG image frame: date/time, GPS position, Yaw, Pitch, Roll of the camera.
In the early days of drones only Autopano Giga (now defunct) was able to read this data but PTGUI quickly came up to speed.
When you drag your drone image frames (preferably processed DNG>Jpeg or Tiff) the program reads this data and automatically places the image frames in that pattern. There will be slight misalignments (because the drone moves) and when you tell PTGUI to "stitch" the panorama it looks only for points of correspondence in the overlapping regions between frames. Some areas (sky, clouds, water) may not have definable structure to align to, but you can manually drag these frames into place and also rotate them. This can also be done precisely by editing the YPR parameters of a frame, by editing in PTGUI.
I always need that automatic placement as well as manual editing. Lightroom and other photo editors do not offer these features.
The drone camera embeds metadata into each DNG image frame: date/time, GPS position, Yaw, Pitch, Roll of the camera.
In the early days of drones only Autopano Giga (now defunct) was able to read this data but PTGUI quickly came up to speed.
When you drag your drone image frames (preferably processed DNG>Jpeg or Tiff) the program reads this data and automatically places the image frames in that pattern. There will be slight misalignments (because the drone moves) and when you tell PTGUI to "stitch" the panorama it looks only for points of correspondence in the overlapping regions between frames. Some areas (sky, clouds, water) may not have definable structure to align to, but you can manually drag these frames into place and also rotate them. This can also be done precisely by editing the YPR parameters of a frame, by editing in PTGUI.
I always need that automatic placement as well as manual editing. Lightroom and other photo editors do not offer these features.
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