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Topic: Web Site and Forum / Old forum posts ported to this forum?

Find out what to look for when you are shopping for a hard drive

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Old forum posts ported to this forum?

What to Look for in a Hard Drive That You Are Purchasing?
When you are going to buy laptop hard drive, it is extremely important to look for one that is going to be fast and large enough to accommodate all of your files and data needs. It

Yeah, it’s just what I need, I’m about to have a new one

I always use Dell Hard Disk Drives, what about you, guys?

Gateway!!!lol

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Find out what to look for when you are shopping for a hard drive

What to Look for in a Hard Drive That You Are Purchasing?
When you are going to buy laptop hard drive, it is extremely important to look for one that is going to be fast and large enough to accommodate all of your files and data needs. It

Yeah, it’s just what I need, I’m about to have a new one

I always use Dell Hard Disk Drives, what about you, guys?

Gateway!!!lol

Topic: General Gigapanning / Shoot the crowd at a festival

Hi,

I’m thinking of doing a gigapixels panorama at a festival next week.
What settings would you recommend considering that I’ll be able to be on stage.
I’m thinking of using my 70-200 at 200mm (but I think that 200mm will be too much for the crowd near the stage)
Below is a link to last year’s festival so that you can have an idea of what it’s like
http://www.festivalmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2…

Thanks
Steve

Topic: Upload / GigaPan upload from Linux

An uploader program for linux is mandatory for my workflow. Do you have an idea when it will be available ?
Thanks

Topic: General Gigapanning / Discoloration and uneven levels

Hi Taylor,

Let me echo what Jason said about the fact that these look pretty good – really nothing to be down about.

In looking at your stitch notes, I see that most of your horizontal overlaps are in the 10-20% range. I’d bet you could reduce the vignetting significantly by getting this up to 20-30% in the future, which is what I generally aim for. It’ll take more input images to cover the same area, but you won’t regret it later. Especially on these big GigaPans, it’s better to spend a little extra time in the field capturing them.

On the one with clouds, you can certainly attempt to clean something like that up in Photoshop, but if you pay attention like a hawk while you’re capturing it out in the field, you could also pause while your subject is in clouds and restart when it’s clear again. Alternately, just take note of the row and column ranges where clouds affect the original shoot and use the “last panorama” option to go back and reshoot those once the original grid is done. Either way, it can be pretty frustrating to shoot on those partly cloudy days, but with a good measure of patience it’s possible to capture an image that looks as good as one shot on a “severe clear” day.

Best of luck. Keep the great images coming!

Topic: General Gigapanning / Discoloration and uneven levels

Ok gotcha, I will give it a try again then.

Yeah I used the vignette correction. That’s what made me think maybe I didn’t have the gigapan device setup with enough overlap between pictures such that the stitching program could really do its job well.

Topic: Digital Cameras on Gigapan / Canon N3 Cable with Epic100

Is the Canon N3 cable compatible with the Epic 100? Will the Epic 100 trigger focus as well as shutter?

Topic: Embedding / Images Now Accessible on Mobile Devices

I’m THRILLED that embedded images will now be viewable on mobile devices!

Kudos Gigapan team!

Now I’m off to redo my website. . .

Topic: General Gigapanning / Gigapan wish list

Yesterday I received an emailed questionnaire from Gigapan, apparently doing market research about customer satisfaction. Without exception I gave Gigapan a big tick, as I am a true fan of gigapan. But… all things can be improved. Their last question asked for suggestions. I will post my suggestions here for discussion as I am sure they can be added to and/or improved upon also:

“Looking forward to seeing new models come out, hope they have these features on every model:

1. tethering facility for all Epic models – some smaller cameras support tethering – and cameras and laptops keep getting smaller yet more powerful, and advanced features should not be limited to the Pro model; size and weight become a factor when hiking to a mountaintop lookout.

2. Time lapse option for all models. Extra features mean extra buyers, and some great HD time-lapse has been shot with point and shoot cameras.

3. Less lash in the plastic gears – maybe go to metal or harder plastic? This is a major problem with heavy lenses and windy conditions, no matter how sturdy your tripod is, there is wobble. Even the Pro model is susceptible: http://gigapan.com/forums/1/topics/412

4. A power inlet for external battery. A standard voltage of 12, 6 or 4v would be handy, compatible with a car lighter outlet or you could hook up an external battery pack of four D cells.

5. Smaller increments in horizontal moves – so you could make panning time-lapses. About 1000 shots over a 360 revolution would be ideal.

6. Implement the promised royalty-sharing deal for Gigapan prints, as detailed in paragraph 4 of this Gigapan press release: http://www.gigapan.com/cms/pdf/printingpressrel…

7. Website integration with Google Earth could be greatly improved, similar to the way Kilgore.org’s gigapan tools already are: http://www.kilgore.org.uk/cgi-bin/surfing/surfe…
Maybe also a google map showing where each member’s gigapans were taken could be added to the members’ profile pages.

8. A dashboard or analytics page – something like YouTube has – would encourage people to add more gigapans that other people like. I posted one gigapan that notched up 2000 views in a matter of weeks, yet I have no idea why, because I can’t see who linked to it. The strange thing is, nobody left any comments, so I assume they were outsiders, not registered members of the gigapan site.

9. Better level system. The green bubble is good, but something better – maybe an electronic or automatic level – would put an end to all those tilted panoramas."

One other suggestion which just occurred to me is, with modern camera sensors continually increasing in size (the new Nikon D800 has more than 36 megapixels!) the day is approaching when you will be able to take a 0.05 gigapixel image with a single shot. So I myself would have no qualms if Gigapan.org doubled the minimum upload size limit to 0.1 gigapixels (of course only after giving members ample notice, and leaving all already-uploaded panoramas online as historical archives).

Any other suggestions?

Topic: General Gigapanning / Discoloration and uneven levels

Oh, I would not think that the slower drive would necessarily cause the error, but would lead you your pulling all your hair out waiting for the program to do things (load, apply effects, save). But perhaps it could cause the error, its a lot to ask of a mechanical device really when you think about it…

Also, I realize that stitch (non-efx) has vignette correction now, did you use it? (I do not believe the efx version of vignette correction is any different)

Topic: General Gigapanning / Discoloration and uneven levels

Okay that’s probably my problem then – I don’t have access to a SSD drive and I’m not very familiar with raid arrays. I guess this is something I’ll have to look into. I will see if I can reproduce the error sometime soon and get back to you to confirm it’s an issue with my drive not being fast enough.

Topic: General Gigapanning / Discoloration and uneven levels

Sounds like you have a far better computer system than I do, I have successively worked with 18 Gigapixel image in Photoshop with a quad core and 4 gigs of ram, it was painful, but no errors. Would need to know what type of error it was to help. You would definitely want to be using a SSD drive or raid array for access speed.

Topic: General Gigapanning / Discoloration and uneven levels

Thanks Jason! Shooting twice is a great idea if I’m ever in a bind and have to shoot on a partly cloudy day like in the first one.

I will definitely look into Stitch efx if you think the vignetting correction is even moderately better than in Stitch.

I’ve had a lot of trouble working with both raws and tiffs of these gigapans in photoshop. Any suggestions concerning settings or preferences? I can’t remember the exact error I was having, but it basically just gives me an error message and quits. I could replicate the message if you thought you might be able to provide a solution. I’m working on a Dell Precision T7600 at my school (32 gb of memory, 8 core processor) so I don’t think it’s an issue on the hardware side, but maybe that’s not true when you’re dealing with images this large . . ? I played around with the disk cache and some other settings but without success.

Thanks again for your help!

Topic: General Gigapanning / Discoloration and uneven levels

Honestly Taylor, they look pretty good to me. You have taken some nice, large 3+ Gigapixel panoramas on a day with scattered clouds. The clouds have cast shadows on your subjects.

The stitch efx version has some excellent vignette correction tools that I would believe help all the images as they are showing vignetting on each input image.

If you have the patience of working with a 3 gigapixel image in Photoshop, there is much you could do with burn and dodge tools.

To avoid this in the future you could try shooting it twice and substitute any regions that get shadowed, once again, that is a lot of work.

Of course, large Gigapans dont have to be perfect, they are not really ‘photographs’…

Thats my take on it,

Nice images!

Topic: General Gigapanning / Discoloration and uneven levels

I’m wondering if someone could take a quick look at my gigapans and suggest how to even out the color and levels. They get better as you go down, and I imagine the fixes may vary between them.

(1) http://gigapan.com/gigapans/110535

(2) http://gigapan.com/gigapans/110523

(3) http://gigapan.com/gigapans/110568

(4) http://gigapan.com/gigapans/110574

Did I go wrong somewhere when I stitched, or when I took the gigapan? If it is because of the latter, can this be fixed with Stitch, Stitch FX, Photoshop, or another program?

Any help is much appreciated!

Topic: Upload / Explore Score

Hi Martin,

‘Explore Score’ is a metric developed up by the Gigapan site programmers to represent how much interaction the Gigapan Community has had with a posted Gigapan. The score represents ‘interestingness’ or ‘engagement’ and is used to rank the display order ‘most popular’.

I do not know the exact formula for computing it, but it includes the age of a Gigapan, the number of comments, the number of snapshots, the number of comments on snapshots, and possibly the size of the Gigapan. Initially it is easy to get a high explore score with a few users posting comments or snapshotting an image, but it is hard to maintain a high score as users need to continue to do these things or the score will degrade.

I do not believe it is included, and if not, it would be nice if the metric included the percent of an images tiles actually explored over time. I suppose this metric would be very computationally expensive. I can see where including image tile downloads into the metric could lead to some real expensive ‘gaming’ of the system.

The Gigapannographer currently known as Kilgore661 has consistently had the most success achieving multiple Gigapans with high explore scores with his beautiful and surreal images. I, however, am very consistent with creating very low scoring beauties like this http://gigapan.com/gigapans/36632 , so please do not feel bad if yours is not high, most are stuck at ‘1’. The largest cityscape Gigapans rightly have maintained the highest explore score as they have the most number of different things to explore in their large images. I personally have explored this Gigapan far more than all others combined http://gigapan.com/gigapans/66626 (every time I look at it I still find something interesting and new about this beautiful masterpiece by Alfred Zhao. Regardless of what those London folk over at 360cities say, this is still the largest single image natural world panorama)

The Explore score formula has definitely improved over the years, kudos to the development team for keeping up on this!

Topic: Upload / Explore Score

Could someone tell me what is the Explore Score ?
Regards,
Martin

Topic: General Gigapanning / Gigapan Epic Pro - in moderate winds

I built an automatic pano head based on the use of the tribrach from a laser level.

This could rock slightly because of play in the central shaft.

Cured this by putting a PTFE disc between the upper & lower sections of the unit – don’t know if that is possible with the Gigapan heads.

Topic: General Gigapanning / Exposure AND Focus Bracketing ....

Art for your camera there is software that will control exposure bracketing, altho it would be a nightmare to use with a Gigapan. You would have to use Helicon Focus available at www.heliconsoft.com/heliconfocus.html
Installed on a labtop helicon focus would do the exposure bracketing, but you would manually have to move the gigapan from each part of the pano to the next and shoot the exposure bracket from that position once you have all those shots done. Then use the helicon software to stack each positions shots together then use the stich software to create the pano.
I have done it, but it takes a while to do where its worth it or not is really up to you. This is the only way I know to do this atm but some clever software would allow this to be automated but alas im not a programmer….
hope this helps

Dave

Topic: General Gigapanning / Gigapan Epic Pro - in moderate winds

Most pano heads are rather sensitive when it comes to wind and I have the same experience with the EPIC Pro. Trying to get short exposure times (1/500 or faster) helps a bit but doesn’t solve the problem completely.
Mounting directly on the tripod as the GP technician suggested doesn’t change anything, the movement happens in the EPIC Pro itself. Using different tripods (carbon, alu, wood) also doesn’t make a difference. It’s down to the construction of the EPIC Pro, at least that’s my experience.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / URL for directly linking to a snapshot

I haven’t seen an easy way to get the link to a particular snapshot in a gigapan so thought it might be of use to folks to write it down here. Please chime in if you know an easier way to do this.

The URL for a link to a snapshot is formed like this:
http://gigapan.com/gigapans/YourGigapanNumber/s…

For example:
http://gigapan.com/gigapans/128385/snapshots/32…

To find the snapshot number, under a snapshot in your gigapan, click on the little speech icon as if you were going to comment on the snapshot. Then either mouse of the “open snapshot in new window” url and note down the snapshot number and copy this into your URL. Or, click on the link to open the snapshot, then right-click on the snapshot name in the new window and copy that URL, it will be the direct link to your snapshot.

Topic: General Gigapanning / Shoot in Portrait mode

Also, .65 is correct

Topic: General Gigapanning / Shoot in Portrait mode

Thanks!

Topic: General Gigapanning / Shoot in Portrait mode

I use a D800e as well.

You can change the aspect ratio in the settings under expert options. I believe (working from memory here) that the one you need is 0.65:1 or thereabouts.

You won’t be able to use the Stitch software though. Unlike Autopano Giga or others, it only understands landscape images.