Forum

Topic: Digital Cameras on Gigapan / iPhone 4S with Epic?

The iPhone 4S the iPad 3 (now known as the iPad) and presumably newer models from here on in support focus and white balance locking.

The iPad is of course way too large for your Epic holders. The iPhone 4S will mechanically fit.

It would be an act of kindness to me and a possibly huge increase in your market share if you were able to show that the iPhone 4S worked with any of your present models, or an iPhone specific model.

In spite of some grumbling by camera purists, iPhoneography has attracted quite a following among professional photographers.

I would really appreciate the explosion in GigaPan images that having an iPhone model of an Epic would create.

Any chance of you trying this out?

If you lack the time and interest to make such a test would you consider shipping me some model of Epic you think might work and let me do the testing for you?

Topic: General Gigapanning / Banding on images

Stephen: With the ~30% horizontal overlap you’ve got I’m very surprised you’re still seeing this much vignetting, especially using the vignette correction setting in Stitch Efx. I wonder how much vignetting your original input images had? Was it noticable?

There may still be a way to fix this for your original set of images – Paul Heckbert should really have a look at these. I’m no expert in dealing with this problem, but I’d echo what David Pivin suggested – it’s probably worth doing the experiment he suggests shooting at clear blue sky. If I were in your shoes, I’d probably try to increase the overlap to 40-50%. If that still doesn’t solve it you’ve got some other problem I haven’t seen before, perhaps relating to this specific lens/zoom combination.

Good Luck!

Topic: General Gigapanning / Banding on images

I think I’m having the same problem. here’s my gigapans that I have used with the Gigapan Stitch 2.0.

http://gigapan.org/gigapans/​100901
and
http://gigapan.org/gigapans/​100781

I just can’t get those lines to go away.

Topic: General Gigapanning / App no longer working

Introducing iPan beta http://www.3d-360.com/iPan

A free Gigapan viewer for the Apple ios devices including the Ipad, Iphone, Ipod. It is a touch responsive viewer that runs on the devices Safari web browser and can be installed as a ‘Home Screen’ app so it functions just like a real ‘app’.

This web-app generously uses the Gigapan API and tile servers. It will be available unless availability is requested to cease.

This is not meant as a replacement to the Gigapan.org website, but rather as a new means to bring Gigapans to new devices that are ideal for viewing panoramas, but do not support Adobe Flash. It is not near as complete as the Gigapan website as it does not allow for taking snapshots or commenting.

It runs entirely in JavaScript and PHP. There is a known bug in the ios Safari web browser that causes a memory leak after a certain large threshold of images has been loaded, the browser will shut down.

The underlying code includes the Seadragon tile viewer from Microsoft, for which I have adapted for a Touch environment.

As there is no other way currently to view Gigapans on ios devices, I hereby share this:

http://www.3d-360.com/iPan

When loaded in your Safari on your ios device, make it a ‘Home Screen’ app by clicking the ‘Right Arrow in Box’ icon next to the title bar and select ‘Add to Home Screen’

This web-app has been tested on an Ipod Touch 4th Gen and an Ipad HD (third Gen iPad- glorious display!)

PS, I have never used the Ipad Gigapan app that used to be in the app store as I never had access to an Ipad, so I do not know how it compares, but this web-app works on Iphones too.

Please provide feedback at http://3dpan.blogspot.com/ and enjoy!

Jason Buchheim (odyssey)

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Replacing a Gigapan

Gregory – if you want to avoid this problem in the future you should consider creating a GigaPan Gallery and sharing the URL for that gallery. It’s no trouble at all to add and remove GigaPans from galleries.

Thus, if you need to edit a GigaPan at a later date you could just upload the edited version, add it to your gallery, and remove the obsolete one from the gallery. The same gallery URL in your press release now points to the correct and updated set of GigaPans.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Competitions

Jason – I found them. Our entries ended up in a Gallery by the GigaPan Curator: Multiplicity http://www.gigapan.org/galleries/7068/gigapans

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Replacing a Gigapan

You don’t. Prepare to reissue that press release.

Topic: Upload / Gigapan Upload Crashes on OS X Lion

I am unable to open or use gigapan uploader 2.0.0440 on Lion. It crashes on startup.

Topic: General Gigapanning / EPIC Newbie Questions

John,

Your first gigapans look ok, but you should be shooting with fixed aperture and exposure. This is a problem with your DMC-ZS3. It only offers a set of automatic modes. It does have a panorama assist mode that locks the settings to whatever your first photo was. It might prove challenging to take a pano with this limitation. I would try taking a wide-angle exposure of the most important part of the scene with the first exposure, then zoom in and begin the pan.

Answers to each of your questions:

1) Most situations you should zoom all the way in to capture the most detail. However, if you are doing a full 360 degree pano with a lot of vertical coverage, then you could run into limits of battery or storage in a single run. Changing them out during a run can be a problem. Your particular setup determines the practical limit. I try to keep my 360s under 2000 photos shot with a 300mm lens on an 18Mpx camera.

2) The scalloped edges are always present, it is just that some stitchers allow them to be cropped within the program, rather than after they have been exported to TIFF or JPEG and cropped in Photoshop or whatever. As you zoom in, you will find that the scalloping is reduced. Zoom to the maximum optical limit (12x) of your Panasonic. You will get good results. GigaPan Stitch does not crop.

3) There are a variety of stitchers used. The GigaPan.org site does not discriminate and the uploader is only concerned with the file type, not the source. Your choice is limited only by your wallet.

Good luck,

Dave

Topic: General Gigapanning / EPIC Newbie Questions

Ok with 3 gigpans under my belt I have a few newbie questions:

1) The English language is not very precise—am I supposed to have the zoom set to the widest possible view or the optically zoomed in all the way?

2) All my gigpans have scalloped edges whereas most of the the pano programs I’ve used in the past automatically crop the edges. I notice in the gallery that folks have nice square edges. Is it my camera position that is an issue or are people trimming these outside of the stitcher?

3) Do people ever create these things with another stitcher? The software isn’t ummm exactly sophisticated (and I bought the high priced version).

Might I humbly suggest a beginner faq? There is a pro section and a faq that only has general questions. Not much on getting to know the system other that the one hour video.

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Replacing a Gigapan

I just sent out a press release with links to some of my Gigapans. I now need to edit the gigapans and maintain the same links. How do I do this??

Topic: Stitch / Unable to save projected images

A small glitch occurs when saving projected images using above workaround. When I save a specific image to a specific subdirectory that I’ve navigated to, the save proceeds OK. When I choose another image to save, the program does not remember where I just saved to and I have to locate and navigate down to the same subdirectory again. When the subdirectory is really buried this is a bit of a pain to have to do each time.

Topic: Digital Cameras on Gigapan / DMC-ZS3

Before buying and EPIC I talked my daughter into giving me her old Canon. Now that I have the unit it looked like my regular Panasonic DMC-ZS3 would fit just fine so I tried it and it appears to be working. Any reason why I can’t use it?

Topic: General Gigapanning / Enter FOV directly?

Is there a way to enter the FOV in the setup without having to move the camera? When using a wide angle, when you already know the FOV of your lens, why do you have to waste more than 30s to move the camera around instead of entering the number directly in the epic pro? Also, sometimes, I can’t raise the camera high enough to reach the maximum FOV for this menu due to the position of the camera (long arm and arca swiss bracket then touch the bottom of the epic pro).

Or another way, would be to be able to save multiple basic settings (one for each lens/camera combo) that we can recall from the menu by their name.

Topic: Stitch / Stitch 2,0 crashes

I tried again with the GPS data stripped from the images – NO crash. Gigapan stiched fine (apart from a weird stiching error but that’s nothing to do with this)

Topic: General Gigapanning / App no longer working

App is working for me, hope it is back on app store soon.

Topic: Stitch / Unable to save projected images

Workaround worked for me…thanks. Greg

Topic: Stitch / Stitch 2,0 crashes

I remember that the problems started when the Stitch.efx end the trial.
¿Is it possible to download the previous version?

Topic: Stitch / Stitch 2,0 crashes

I have the same problem too, the program sais “Can’t find 42 of the 42 input images:
/Users/bla bla bla”
I dont know, i reinstall once. twice and nothing happens.
This problem dont have with the older version.

Topic: Stitch / Saving Stitch notes

I just checked and you are correct, we have a small bug there, on Windows. (No bug on cut & paste of stitch notes, on Mac).

I’ve put this on my UI bugs list

thanks
-Paul
GigaPan Stitch Developer

Topic: Stitch / Vignette removal in Stitch 2.0

Yes, the software first does alignment to determine how the images overlap, then it uses the corresponding pixels in the overlap regions between horizontally- and vertically-adjacent images to infer a vignette attentuation function.

This way of doing things is nice for several reasons:
(1) It works when the input images don’t have EXIF for the lens (you’d want to know lens model, focal length, and aperture, at minimum),
(2) It does not require a large library of vignette attenuation data indexed by lens model, focal length, and aperture, which would be incomplete every time a new lens comes on the market,
(3) It does not require special rules when a tele-extender or filter causes a change in the vignetting,
(4) It’s automatic and transparent to the user!

This analysis only adds a few seconds of time to the entire stitching process.

If you look in the Stitching Notes, you’ll see two coefficients listed that are part of the attenuation function that is inferred. It is circularly symmetric and it’s a quartic polynomial.

-Paul
GigaPan Stitch Developer

Topic: Web Site and Forum / How do work my equirectangular gigapano like a espherical proyection in the gigapan.org

The Gigatag viewer works the same way as a Gigapan viewer on gigapan.com website. Here is an example of what a stadium Gigatag looks like:

http://oregonianextra.com/gigapan/2011_civil_wa…

Topic: Web Site and Forum / Competitions

Ron, ALL your feedback is appreciated. And, I will let you know when the post edits are functioning properly. :)

Topic: Third-Party Stitchers / 3rd party software with your device or uploader?

No one mentioned PTGui or Panorama Factory, both are good

Topic: Stitch / Stitch 2,0 crashes

We’d like to figure out what’s causing that, and fix it (assuming it’s a bug, as it sounds like).

Does it crash if you start Stitch 2.0 and then add a single image? If so, could you email one of your input images to customerservice AT gigapansystems.com, please?

Do your input images contain GPS coordinates in the EXIF header? (We’ve seen a couple of users encounter trouble in that situation).

thanks

-Paul
GigaPan Stitch Developer