Forum

Topic: General Gigapanning / Tripod Poll

I used to use a cheap $90 tripod. I have since purchased a Velbon Rexi http://www.velbon.co.uk/products/photo/ultra_RE…. I dont use a head other than the gigapan

Topic: General Gigapanning / I am having a hard time with my Epic Pro

James, I would imagine that there would be some distortion at the edges of the photo due to the focal lenght, i think this is causing you problem. If you could post a picture taken with this lens somewhere it would help

Topic: Cold-weather Gigapanning / Does it work in cold weather?

i have been using gigapan epic pro head here in Alberta, shot many times at -35C (-31F) it just plan works, it keeps going & going,make sure, you have it fully charged, keep battery warm before you head out. If your going to do extended cold weather shooting, get extra battery. Also turn off LCD display
I do have the head mounted on a very large video tripod, I also use 3 10 lbs. sand bags to to keep unit solid.
Also plant tripod in snow bank usually 3 feet deep, the shot must be rock solid all the time.

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

Sorry one has to set the “Share this Gigapan with others using Google Earth” flag. Otherwise the view in Google Earth button is not shown even for my own panoramas

Topic: General Gigapanning / I am having a hard time with my Epic Pro

Please help. I have a Gigapan Epic Pro. I am using a Canon 5D Mark ll with a 14mm. prime lens. I set up the Nodal point and centered the camera in the unit. Initially because of the huge field of view of the ultra wide angle lens I was shooting at 76.4mm FOV range, but none of the photos would stitch correctly. I tried multiple different overlap options, but nothing helped. I then tried to minimize the FOV and set it at a shallow 20.1mm FOV. Nothing seems to work. When I stitch the photos in the Gigapan software they look awful. The photos end up being all over the place with either too much insane overlap or non at all. What am I doing wrong? I’ve used the Epic Pro for a year now, and never had any problems, but now with this new lens I can’t get anything to work for me. Does anyone have any thoughts? Thanks.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / What's a pro membership?

Pro Membership is the next level of membership that will be available along with the new features in 2012. Much of the programming is already done, which is why you are seeing that bug. I’ll see if I can duplicate this behavior and make a record of it for fixing.

Totally agree about the forum search. We have a list of forum features we’d like to see available to gigapaners, and it will be just a matter of working them in into the development schedule.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / What's a pro membership?

In the process of making a test image public to get the plus features working for my account, I got an error message that says I need a pro account to turn off snapshots by visitors. It would seem simple enough to disable that checkbox option and label it as a “pro” feature so that the user doesn’t need an error message to learn about a feature.

I tried searching the web and this site and can’t find information about a pro membership.

By the way, Search for the site needs a Forum option for the drop down. A site search for “pro membership” just delivers some Gigapan images.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Can't access profile and other observations

Thanks, Angelko. At least I know what we need to do to keep links private.

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

Wow. I figured this was a simple question that would get a quick answer.

Thump, thump, thump…is this thing on?

Topic: General Gigapanning / Tripod Poll

Tim;
I have a 190XB manfrotto tripod that I’m quite happy with. It has a 486RC2 ball head which I find really convenient for levelling but it’s kind of like balancing on the end of a stick – looks wonky but seems to work. With my pro I have had vibration issues in high wind environments such as in the mountains but I suspect that would be the case with most anything. I suggest take your unit to a reputable camera store and try it on several in the store – they’d probably love to see it!

Topic: Embedding / Limit to number of embeds?

Yeah- Thank you!

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

Checking into this. There should be a link for Google Earth KML file like on this gigapan: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/30136

Topic: Macro Gigapanning / Small Steps???

So how small a step can Gigapan take? With Macro, of course, really small steps are super important.

Also, since Gigapan is designed for large photos primarily, are there problems caused (primarily by focus) by Gigapan taking photos in an arc rather than all in the same horizontal / vertical plane?

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Monitoring Threads

Monitoring is not performing as intended. We will remove the checkbox for the time being. Sorry 661, and everyone else who was relying on the “Monitoring topic” functionality.

Topic: Gigapan Mechanism / Bluetooth or Wi-Fi?

Probably your best bet would be to use an eye-fi card (http://www.eye.fi/) or to get one of those expensive wireless transfer setups for your camera. Eye-fi now has a free smartphone app so you can stream images from your camera straight to your phone (or over 4g on your phone, straight home to your computer or server), but judging from the numerous complaints on their forums I wouldn’t count on it actually working.

Topic: General Gigapanning / estimate number of photo

If you calculate this stuff a lot it helps to make an excel spreadsheet to calculate number of images for a given zoom and field of view, etc.

This is a helpful calculator for figuring out the FOV degrees covered by a DSLR with a particular lens on it.
http://www.howardedin.com/articles/fov.html

Topic: General Gigapanning / Tripod Poll

After years of using a crappy lightweight tripod I finally bought one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/Slik-400DX-Tripod-Quick-R… I’ve been very happy with it. quite sturdy, not too heavy or expensive. Seems to work fine even with my Epic Pro.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Web site speed

Jason, you should be noticing some speed improvements already. Much of it was due to post launch pains. We did acquire a new performance reporting tool, and development time is being allocated to optimize several areas of the website performance.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Monitoring Threads

661 I’ll follow up on this. It should work as you expect it to.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Website Fixes

Although I haven’t posted a list, numerous hotfixes have been applied. A new list of fixes will be available soon.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / 'Edit' post and 'Reply to Topic' button blues

Totally agree too! I’ll see if we can get a fix for this sent in for testing this week.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Google Earth Layer

Props to 661 for setting up the surfing page, even though it’s been a while since the page was up. It’s the first time I’ve seen it.

As for GS layer for GE, I don’t have the details on when and how, but I know that it won’t be long before it’s available again.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / 'Galleries' in 'Groups' do not allow adding Gigapans

Thanks for that clarification post jason. The Galeries will be getting some love I can tell you that! :)

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Can't access profile and other observations

Regarding private gigapans, yes, they are private in the scope of public searches on this website. Since they don’t appear in public searches, they also aren’t available to search engine bots that are looking through gigapan.com or gigapan.org. However, as Jason pointed it out, once a private gigapan’s URL is posted on another website, search engines may find it there.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Can't access profile and other observations

William, the Plus membership requires at least one public gigapan. So, in order to upgrade your membership from Free to Plus, your uploaded gigapan has to be Public. Other then that, your member profile page should show ‘plus’ as your membership subscription level. Please let me know if your are still experiencing this issue.