-- UPDATE 4 --
Moved my Pano links (and added a couple of new ones):
University of Delaware Football Stadium - new
William Cooke Elementary School - new
The Italian Palace 500 ft up
The Italian Palace 1,600 ft up
Wilmington Riverfront
Piedmont Baseball Field
-- UPDATE 3 --
Pano of Wilmington Delaware Riverfront
Wilmington Delaware Riverfront
Videos I also took here flying over the city:
-- UPDATE 2 --
I did a third in this "series" now using only about 160 regular 4,000 x 3,000 photos. I agree that the photos look better and its much easier than doing video and then extracting the frames.
The Italian Palace
-- UPDATE --
Had a break in the weather here so based on suggestions from this thread I went up again and did a "redo" using only stills snapped with the camera instead of taking video and extracting the frames. I went a little crazy taking a couple hundred photos but was easy.
New version using 4,000 x 3,000 pixel camera shots
http://theitalianpalace.com/tipv2/tip360v2.htm
I am not going to give my opinion on which one I think looks better - want to see what everyone thinks. I am convinced however we need an "app for that" via the API to do this automatically.
Original version using 3840 x 2160 extracted movie frames
http://theitalianpalace.com/tip360.htm
Interesting observation - the final jpg for the new version is roughly the same size as the original despite the fact that the camera only pics are higher resolution each.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Its like Google earth - you can move & zoom with the mouse. Full screen (upper right control) is awesome. I used PTGui to create the pano itself.
The web server is running from my basement and I only have a limited upstream pipe. There is about 20MB of data to transfer so please be gentle
. From my LAN its perfectly fluid & even looks great on my phone. If this thread generates interest and someone wants to re-host this for me somewhere it would be appreciated and I can get you the files.
How I did it:
1 - Flew up to 500ft
2 - Turned the camera all the way up.
3 - Started the video and SLOWLY turned the bird clockwise 360 degrees with ONLY the left stick being careful NOT to change vertical position. About 60 seconds to pan stopping where I started. Then stopped the video.
4 - Turned the camera down a bit and redid step 3. Again careful not to change or move the P3 itself up or down, idea is to only rotate clockwise in place.
5 - Moved the camera down again and again repeating above until the last rotation was with the camera pointed all the way down.
6 - I then had ten 4K videos. Landed the bird and went inside for the fun part.
7 - Next I had to extract one frame a second from each of the ten videos. I renamed the videos sequentially to 1.mov, etc. I then used ffmpeg with this command line: ffmpeg -i e:\in\1.mov -vf fps=1 e:\out\1out%d.png repeating ten times changing the input and output file names.
8 - I ended up with 509 5-8mb files totaling 7.57gb.
9 - I settled on trying PTGui after doing some generic Google searches on Panoramics and watching a couple of youtube videos.
10 - I basically used the defaults in the software. I first exported it as a 20mb JPG and also as a MOV that quicktime could view. I then realized that PTGui had an export to HTML option.
11 - TIP - PTGui won't be able to get the metadata from the exported png frames so when you first load the files it will want some info. When asked I told it my focal length was 3.61 with a multiplier of 5.54. After you load the images hit the advanced button and select Optimizer and hit the Optimizer button at the bottom. It will further correct these settings. Then just hit the create panorama button.
The program ran for about 45 minutes and chewed up 16gb of RAM. I never even though it was going to finish without blowing up. Much to my surprise it turned out way better than I had even imagined. Amazing that this small camera 500ft up in the air pointed in all directions creates as much detail as it does even with zooming. I can't wait to do something like this much closer to the ground & around something more interesting
DOM
P.S.
Was just thinking - isn't there an obvious SDK opportunity here? Does anyone know if with the new SDK a "script" could be written to move the P3 to a particular spot & altitude, position the gimbal, take a series or burst of pictures while rotating, move the gimbal, down, repeat, etc. That would be exactly what I did but would use the higher res stills and be precisely controlled for an exact overlap of pics. Also would be incredibly efficient in terms of time and number of shots. Heck I could see with such automation the shots necessary to do what I did but better be performed in less than a minute.
Heck, people would PAY for an app that did this....
Moved my Pano links (and added a couple of new ones):
University of Delaware Football Stadium - new
William Cooke Elementary School - new
The Italian Palace 500 ft up
The Italian Palace 1,600 ft up
Wilmington Riverfront
Piedmont Baseball Field
-- UPDATE 3 --
Pano of Wilmington Delaware Riverfront
Wilmington Delaware Riverfront
Videos I also took here flying over the city:
-- UPDATE 2 --
I did a third in this "series" now using only about 160 regular 4,000 x 3,000 photos. I agree that the photos look better and its much easier than doing video and then extracting the frames.
The Italian Palace
-- UPDATE --
Had a break in the weather here so based on suggestions from this thread I went up again and did a "redo" using only stills snapped with the camera instead of taking video and extracting the frames. I went a little crazy taking a couple hundred photos but was easy.
New version using 4,000 x 3,000 pixel camera shots
http://theitalianpalace.com/tipv2/tip360v2.htm
I am not going to give my opinion on which one I think looks better - want to see what everyone thinks. I am convinced however we need an "app for that" via the API to do this automatically.
Original version using 3840 x 2160 extracted movie frames
http://theitalianpalace.com/tip360.htm
Interesting observation - the final jpg for the new version is roughly the same size as the original despite the fact that the camera only pics are higher resolution each.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Its like Google earth - you can move & zoom with the mouse. Full screen (upper right control) is awesome. I used PTGui to create the pano itself.
The web server is running from my basement and I only have a limited upstream pipe. There is about 20MB of data to transfer so please be gentle
. From my LAN its perfectly fluid & even looks great on my phone. If this thread generates interest and someone wants to re-host this for me somewhere it would be appreciated and I can get you the files.How I did it:
1 - Flew up to 500ft
2 - Turned the camera all the way up.
3 - Started the video and SLOWLY turned the bird clockwise 360 degrees with ONLY the left stick being careful NOT to change vertical position. About 60 seconds to pan stopping where I started. Then stopped the video.
4 - Turned the camera down a bit and redid step 3. Again careful not to change or move the P3 itself up or down, idea is to only rotate clockwise in place.
5 - Moved the camera down again and again repeating above until the last rotation was with the camera pointed all the way down.
6 - I then had ten 4K videos. Landed the bird and went inside for the fun part.
7 - Next I had to extract one frame a second from each of the ten videos. I renamed the videos sequentially to 1.mov, etc. I then used ffmpeg with this command line: ffmpeg -i e:\in\1.mov -vf fps=1 e:\out\1out%d.png repeating ten times changing the input and output file names.
8 - I ended up with 509 5-8mb files totaling 7.57gb.
9 - I settled on trying PTGui after doing some generic Google searches on Panoramics and watching a couple of youtube videos.
10 - I basically used the defaults in the software. I first exported it as a 20mb JPG and also as a MOV that quicktime could view. I then realized that PTGui had an export to HTML option.
11 - TIP - PTGui won't be able to get the metadata from the exported png frames so when you first load the files it will want some info. When asked I told it my focal length was 3.61 with a multiplier of 5.54. After you load the images hit the advanced button and select Optimizer and hit the Optimizer button at the bottom. It will further correct these settings. Then just hit the create panorama button.
The program ran for about 45 minutes and chewed up 16gb of RAM. I never even though it was going to finish without blowing up. Much to my surprise it turned out way better than I had even imagined. Amazing that this small camera 500ft up in the air pointed in all directions creates as much detail as it does even with zooming. I can't wait to do something like this much closer to the ground & around something more interesting
DOM
P.S.
Was just thinking - isn't there an obvious SDK opportunity here? Does anyone know if with the new SDK a "script" could be written to move the P3 to a particular spot & altitude, position the gimbal, take a series or burst of pictures while rotating, move the gimbal, down, repeat, etc. That would be exactly what I did but would use the higher res stills and be precisely controlled for an exact overlap of pics. Also would be incredibly efficient in terms of time and number of shots. Heck I could see with such automation the shots necessary to do what I did but better be performed in less than a minute.
Heck, people would PAY for an app that did this....
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