Hi, I’m considering taking a gigapan of a large gym sporting event like volleyball or basketball. How do I set up the gigapan so that the players aren’t cut off, or in multiple locations?

Hi,

The Gigapan does not have any special mode for not cutting people apart. You will have the best luck by having significant overlap between images (40-50%) so you can go back in to the image post stitch and clean up the broken body parts with a good likelyhood of having a complete torso in one of the images. I like to use Ptgui stitcher for this as it has an excellent mode of exporting projected images as layers in place, so that you can easily go and piece the bodies back together in photoshop by painting visibility of the layers. It’s actually pretty fun to do. Ptgui has a tutorial on their website explaining how to do this.

I like to capture a scene with the Gigapan robot and then switch to a free motion gimble head from the exact same vantage spot and shoot the ‘action’ by hand, then stitch this action into the scene in the appropriate place, such as my X-games images http://www.3d-360.com/gigapan/?id=77777 and http://www.3d-360.com/gigapan/?id=15884

Also, limiting the number of shots by either having a lower gigapixel size or using a higher megapixel camera (ie 36 mp Nikon D800) helps reduce cut up bodies.

Good luck!