Forum

Topic: Gigapan Mechanism / Battery recommendation EPIC/EPIC 100

I use a brand called Vapex that I bought on eBay – and I get good mileage from them, half a day’s shooting or more. Use reputable battery brands and a quality smart charger and you should have no problems. Its easy enough to hook up an external battery to the Epic 100 if you want more power:
http://madaru.net/gigapan.html

Topic: Web Site and Forum / What happened to all the google earth data

Still investigating.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / What happened to all the google earth data

Tim, we are looking for your geolocation data. I will post an update today.

Topic: General Gigapanning / Image Management

My gigapan workflow on a PC:

Transfer photos from SD card to hard drive using Adobe Lightroom. In this process: 1) files are renamed to something meaningful, 2) files for each gigapan are saved to a separate folder, and 3) metadata is added to the Lightroom database (this includes all the EXIF data in each image file plus any keywords and IPTC fields I added during the import).

In Lightroom, the metadata for each photo (which now resides in the Lightroom database but is not all present in the image files) is saved to each image file. Because I always shoot camera RAW (NEF), this step produces an XMP sidecar file for each photo.

If I have GPS coordinates for each photo, I use RoboGeo to write the data to each image file. It is added to the sidecar files. Lightroom is then instructed to update its database with the new GPS data in the image files (sidecars).

If individual photos or groups of photos require brightness, contrast, or color adjustments, these are made in Lightroom. I rarely stitch a gigapan without first making these adjustments to compensate for light variations during shooting, dull color produced by old lenses, and vignetting. Lightroom allows any group of photos to be selected and adjusted in any way (e.g., white balance, saturation, vignette correction, cropping). Shooting in RAW allows great latitude when making adjustments (e.g., about 1.5 stops of exposure) without greatly sacrificing image quality. Lightroom does not change the image files at this stage; it only displays the corrected image and saves the instructions in the database.

Using Lightroom, full resolution jpegs (100% quality) of the photos are exported to a separate folder. The jpegs reflect any image adjustments made in Lightroom.

Gigapan stitch is used to stitch a gigapan from the jpegs.

There are a couple of wrinkles specific to my process. With my Nikon D40, I often use old lenses with no electronic connection to the camera, so the EXIF data saved by the camera are incomplete. Gigapan Stitch gets confused by this and the Stitch notes of a finished panorama often lack even the data that were present in the EXIF headers. Also, if the jpegs produced by the above process have GPS coordinates, they crash Stitch. Fortunately, Lightroom has an option to “Minimize embedded metadata” when exporting the jpegs, and these jpegs do not crash Stitch. Gigapan Stitch does not use location data to georeference the stitched panorama, so removing the GPS data at this stage has little consequence (the GPS data still exist in the Lightroom database and in the XMP files).

Topic: General Gigapanning / Image Management

I check out the Batch Enhancer. Thanks.

Topic: General Gigapanning / Image Management

I use iPhoto Batch Enhancer to apply the same adjustments to hundreds of pan photos. http://www.feroxsoft.com/ibe/index.php.en
Free trial available there. I used it to do my 1176 image Goosenecks pan: http://gigapan.org/gigapans/49832

I manage all my pan photos in iPhoto as albums and just drag and drop an album’s content into Stitcher after editing. I also do complex repairs in PS through iPhoto and combine that with iPhoto adjustments. The darkness tool is quite useful to help with dynamic range.

No need to make extra copies or export to folders. Originals are preserved as the scripts just open the normal edit tool. You can always revert to original if you don’t like the end result after the stitch.

Aperture doesn’t do batch on adjustments, only metadata changes. You must manually paste adjustments on selected photos. Not convenient on a thousand photos. I did not find a similar batch scripting plug-in for it.

Dave

Topic: General Gigapanning / Image Management

Lightroom will do batch corrections pretty quickly. Good for exposure adjustments. Not sure if Aperture does that.

Topic: General Gigapanning / Image Management

Wonder what people are doing for image management for their GigaPans?

Is it worth using LightRoom or Aperture for storing everything or some other program?

As I’m just starting out, its been a folder/sub-folder setup for each pano I’ve shot. That won’t last much longer.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / What happened to all the google earth data

Any idea when the google earth issue will be fixed? I have more than 200 gigapans and about 1/3 of them were georeferenced. I’m not going to be able to manually fix all them. Particularly since the google earth placement tool doesn’t work right anymore either. I use gigapans for my research and work and it is very important that we be able to share a gigapan in google earth with our clients and collaborators.
Right now all of my previous gigapans are no longer georeferenced and I can’t place new gigapans in GE because the placement tool doesn’t show the gigapan so there is no way to accurately place it. This seriously reduces the usefulness of gigapans for us.

Topic: General Gigapanning / Tripod Poll

I have been quite happy with my Acratech Ultimate Ballhead. It supports the Epic Pro with a D200 just fine. Easy to level the Epic Pro. Also a nice general purpose head.

Topic: General Gigapanning / Tripod Poll

I’ve got a Manfrotto I’m pretty happy with. I need to gat a better head for it though. The current one won’t support the Epic Pro particularly well. Anyone have any suggestions on a good head. Usually shooting with a 70-200 2.8 on a D300.

Topic: Digital Cameras on Gigapan / Shutter release cable

I’m actually now on my 3rd cable for Olympus because I broke 2 of them: the cables supplied by Gigapan are simply too short! I’ve acquired extension USB cables to avoid breakage…

I tried the regular E30 USB cables but the pins are connected differently. :-(

Topic: General Gigapanning / Image size when shooting

To make the most of the zoomability, which is GigaPan’s killer feature, you generally want to shoot as large an image as you can shoot sharply. I have always shot maximum resolution JPG files for my GigaPans.

Topic: Stitch / Rows flipped

Figured it out. One extra image. Silly me.

Topic: Stitch / Rows flipped

Attempting first pano.

Shot a small one to test – 15 cols x 6 rows

When I brought the image into Stitcher, the bottom 3 rows were on top and the top 3 on the bottom.

Is this expected? Did I screw something up?

Topic: General Gigapanning / Image size when shooting

Going to try shooting my first pano this weekend. I’ve got a feeling I know the answer to this but thought I’d ask anyway…

When shooting a pano – what are the recommendations for image resolution and format? Noticed that the Stitcher app doesn’t support Camera RAW files, so JPEG or TIFF at the max resolution of the camera?

Topic: Gigapan Mechanism / Meaning of Epic 100 blinking battery icon

William, our apologies for missing your post earlier. I want to add that the battery brand John O mentions is the same brand we recommend for the Epic and Epic 100 models. They do seem to perform quite well in most environments.

Topic: Macro Gigapanning / Small Steps???

Epic Pro: 0.04 degrees/step for tilt and 0.12 degrees/step for pan
Epic 100: 0.12 degrees/step for tilt and 0.36 degrees/step for pan
Epic: 0.36 degrees/step for tilt and 0.36 degrees/step for pan

Topic: Low-light Gigapanning / Motion Blur

David,
Kevin was referring to the Epic model, not the Epic Pro. There is no button pusher function on the Pro, it triggers the camera electronically via trigger cable.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Website Fixes

The release of the newest batch of fixes has been postponed for the week of Jan 11th.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Gigapan viewer and 90 degress gigapans

Thanks to Alex Smith http://gigapan.com/profiles/biodiversity22
I found (copied Alex’s links) a way to show my Gigapans as spherical panoramas, see e.g. http://bit.ly/wIkFkY or http://bit.ly/yfmNxI

It would be real helpful if the Gigapan webside could be extended with a link like this assuming the Google earth parameters are provided with the panorama

Topic: Upload / Upload aborted: Creating panorama failed

Thanks.

For other users who come here: You can find the uploader logfile under ../Documents/My Gigapans under your winwos 7/vista account.

Topic: Upload / File Corrupt or Timing Out

Eliza,

I see you posted a while ago – has this been resolved?

Topic: Upload / Logging in for upload fails

Phillip,

Can you please contact Tech Support at http://www.gigapan.com/cms/support/contact-support ? We’ve got some trouble-shooting questions to ask you. Thank you.

Topic: Upload / Upload aborted: Creating panorama failed

Hello YC Ong, we replied to your technical support case on 4 Jan.

Sven, I’ve started a case in regards to your issue and we’re emailing you with some trouble-shooting questions.