Hey guys
New member here with a couple of questions.
I’ve been shooting Panoramas manually for some time now and have been thinking about getting into an automated system 2 concerns/questions

1: how does the sky get stitched?
I’ve had some problems with this in my panoramas when there’s not enough control points.

2: I’ve heard of some people’s shoots taking hours, sometime 8-12 hours for a single image. How does the change in sun direction/quality/strength not affect the final image and the final stitch?

thanks so much for your help
Alex

To address your questions:

1) The GigaPan Stitch software doesn’t need control points to deal with the sky – this is one of the advantages of shooting with a GigaPan in a regular grid. There are other situations it doesn’t handle quite as well as other stitching programs, but for the most part they can be cleaned up in Photoshop (or similar) without too much pain when they occur.

2) The Epic100 shoots about 17 frames/minute at its default setting, which means I can shoot a 1000 input image GigaPan in about an hour. Unless you’re shooting at sunrise/sunset or in changing weather or you’re trying for a ginormous shot, the time to capture is not usually a big issue. I’m pretty sure all of the GigaPan units allow you to adjust the time between images in the setup stage, so if conditions require it you can adjust accordingly. Stitching will take a similar amount of time to shooting, depending on the specs of your computer. Often, depending on connection speed, I find that uploading is actually the rate limiting step.

Hope that helps.