Which picture ratio?

[Meta4]

This is completely false. I can shoot VR panos with perfect success using everything from a crappy Mavic camera to my cell phone. The P4P specifically causes issues because of the crop and rescale process distorting the photo.

Can you show examples of the problems?
I shoot a lot of regular panoramas with no problem. The P4 pro is a great panorama machine.
I've only made one 360 with the P4 pro and it seemed to stitch as well as regular panoramas.
SkyPixel - Connecting Creativity
I can't see why 360 stitching should be any trickier than regular panoramas.

 

[AyeYo]

Can you show examples of the problems?
I shoot a lot of regular panoramas with no problem. The P4 pro is a great panorama machine.
I've only made one 360 with the P4 pro and it seemed to stitch as well as regular panoramas.
SkyPixel - Connecting Creativity
I can't see why 360 stitching should be any trickier than regular panoramas.

In a regular panorama you're doing straight line, flat stitching. So typically you're matching one photo to another photo both taken in the same plane. With a VR pano you're matching points for possibly 4-6 photos that overlap the same area, they're taken on different planes, and they're being stitched into a sphere - so accurate perspective and minimal distortion is key or you get a situation in which those photos will only agree/match in one area at a time while being off in many other areas. That can give you duplicate objects, missing objects, offset straight lines, etc. This is far more prevalent when shooting buildings because of the many vertical/horizontal lines that need to line up perfectly. If you're shooting 360 landscapes, you likely won't notice stitching errors in a forest or grass.

 

[Meta4]

In a regular panorama you're doing straight line, flat stitching. So typically you're matching one photo to another photo both taken in the same plane. With a VR pano you're matching points for possibly 4-6 photos that overlap the same area, they're taken on different planes, and they're being stitched into a sphere - so accurate perspective and minimal distortion is key or you get a situation in which those photos will only agree/match in one area at a time while being off in many other areas.

When I shoot panoramas they are usually 2 or 3 rows so I'm not just "matching one photo to another photo both taken in the same plane".
There's no real difference between making a 3 row panorama and a 360 panorama, the stitching is the same.
When you do a lot of panoramas, you can always get the odd one that just doesn't work.
I haven't found the P4 pro to have a higher failure rate than any other camera on the ground or in the air for panoramas.
Here's an example of a 3 row pano that the P4 pro is excellent for.

 

[AyeYo]

When I shoot panoramas they are usually 2 or 3 rows so I'm not just "matching one photo to another photo both taken in the same plane".
There's no real difference between making a 3 row panorama and a 360 panorama, the stitching is the same.

There absolutely is. To clarify some terms here... I'm talking about spherical panoramas, 360x180 degrees, not 360 cylinders (which indeed are just a really long standard panoramas).

 

[Meta4]

There absolutely is. To clarify some terms here... I'm talking about spherical panoramas, 360x180 degrees, not 360 cylinders (which indeed are just a really long standard panoramas).

Yes ... and I attached an example in post #101 above

 

[AyeYo]

Yes ... and I attached an example in post #101 above

And your point is... what... exactly? Plenty of us have made them work with the P4P. The point is, it's a pain in the *** when it doesn't need to be.

 

[Meta4]

And your point is... what... exactly? Plenty of us have made them work with the P4P. The point is, it's a pain in the *** when it doesn't need to be.

I shoot panoramas all the time, on the ground with a Nikon D800 and with every Phantom I've had and I can't see that the P4 pro is any more difficult to use for panoramas.
I understand stitching for 2D and 3D panoramas.
I made a tutorial for 360 spherical panoramas here last year.
It might be a pain for you but I haven't had any problem. That's my point.
I don't understand what your problem is and wonder if it might be unrelated to the camera.

 

[AyeYo]

I shoot panoramas all the time, on the ground with a Nikon D800 and with every Phantom I've had and I can't see that the P4 pro is any more difficult to use for panoramas.
I understand stitching for 2D and 3D panoramas.
I made a tutorial for 360 spherical panoramas here last year.
It might be a pain for you but I haven't had any problem. That's my point.
I don't understand what your problem is and wonder if it might be unrelated to the camera.

Because there's no chance that having photos cropped and then distorted to be rescaled back to size by 20%+ could be causing any stitching issues with highly sensitive 3D pano stitching. That's just totally unpossible. Must be user error. /typical DJI response to hardware issues

 

[Shammyh]

Guys... You're both talking past each other.

Clearly, there is some pretty serious lens distortion at the low level, and clearly DJI has worked pretty hard to ensure the automatic corrections produce generally excellent shots.

The question is, now that we know this, how do we best optimize what we can get out of the camera? Especially for scenarios where I'd rather take a smaller crop of a photo, rather then include all the degree of warping the stock correction applies.

No one disagrees that the stock DNG - > Lightroom workflow doesn't produce excellent photos. The question is purely for those of us who need highly accurate sensor readings.

 

[AyeYo]

No one disagrees that the stock DNG - > Lightroom workflow doesn't produce excellent photos. The question is purely for those of us who need highly accurate sensor readings.

This.

But in typical DJI fashion, instead of attempting to come to a solution, we have a DJI surrogate trying to blame users and do the typical "mine is issue free, don't know what you're talking about, you're obviously the problem".

 

[Shammyh]

This.

But in typical DJI fashion, instead of attempting to come to a solution, we have a DJI surrogate trying to blame users and do the typical "mine is issue free, don't know what you're talking about".

Meta is not a DJI surrogate, I think he's just trying to understand the practical implications of the problem, since in his work flows, he hasn't noticed an issue.

Theres no room for emotion in this. Neither the sensor, the lens, nor the photons colliding in the CMOS, give an eff about people arguing in a forum.

Lets keep it technical? Cool?

 

[smiller]

No one disagrees that the stock DNG - > Lightroom workflow doesn't produce excellent photos. The question is purely for those of us who need highly accurate sensor readings.

Could one not use the Raw Therapee application (discussed earlier in the thread) to import a truly raw (ignoring embedded profile) DNG and go from there? (Assuming Photoshop or Lightroom don't have a similar capability, and I would think that they do.)

 

[Shammyh]

Could one not use the Raw Therapee application (discussed earlier in the thread) to import a truly raw (ignoring embedded profile) DNG and go from there? (Assuming Photoshop or Lightroom don't have a similar capability, and I would think that they do.)

That's kinda what I'm thinking.

If someone builds a nice standard correction profile too, assume it can be shared here and would add some flexibility to those needing this particular workflow.

 

[AyeYo]

Could one not use the Raw Therapee application (discussed earlier in the thread) to import a truly raw (ignoring embedded profile) DNG and go from there? (Assuming Photoshop or Lightroom don't have a similar capability, and I would think that they do.)

That was the direction I planned on going. Since Raw Therapee is free, it doesn't add any expense. It definitely adds a lot of work though. My thoughts are...

- Shoot massive overlap, at least 70% vertical and horizontal.

- Use Raw Therapee (which I still need to download and get familiar with) to view actual RAW files, crop files as necessary to manually remove heavy vignetting and barrel distortion on the edges. Huge overlap should still be at least 40-50% overlap in both directions after cropping.

- Import cropped files to Lightroom for basic color corrections

- Stitch edited files


Pros:
- PTgui can handle the remaining barrel distortion just fine. In fact, it could probably handle all the original lense distortion just fine. What it can't handle is the distortion of the inconsistent resizing, which this workflow will eliminate.
- Should get good quality, accurate stitches

Cons:
- More total pictures per pano + tedious manual cropping = massive workflow time increase

 

[AyeYo]

That's kinda what I'm thinking.

If someone builds a nice standard correction profile too, assume it can be shared here and would add some flexibility to those needing this particular workflow.

Someone did build a P4P profile for Lightroom at one point, but I was never able to find the thread again. If we could simply get a good vignette removal and chromatic aberrations fixed, I think any stitch software can handle the distortion correction itself, especially with the lense data picked up from the exif.

 

[smiller]

Cons:
- More total pictures per pano + tedious manual cropping = massive workflow time increase

More pictures per pano yes, but I'm not sure why the cropping would be tedious... just import, crop to a pre-defined size, and export in the format of choice. Shouldn't take very long, maybe even could be automated if the program allows macros or scripting.

 

[AyeYo]

More pictures per pano yes, but I'm not sure why the cropping would be tedious... just import, crop to a pre-defined size, and export in the format of choice. Shouldn't take very long, maybe even could be automated if the program allows macros or scripting.

Yea that's true, I guess the vignetting should be more or less the same on every photo. I haven't tried Raw Therapee yet. Can you batch crop or sync settings?

 

[smiller]

I haven't tried Raw Therapee yet. Can you batch crop or sync settings?

I don't know but I hope so

 

[Meta4]

But in typical DJI fashion, instead of attempting to come to a solution, we have a DJI surrogate trying to blame users and do the typical "mine is issue free, don't know what you're talking about, you're obviously the problem".

What you actually have is one user asking: why, if this is such a huge problem aren't I seeing it when I shoot panoramas?

Must be user error. /typical DJI response to hardware issues

I haven't suggested user error. There are lots of other possibilities.
What's different?
The way you shoot ... amount of overlap etc?
The stitching software used?

 

[Eddyfisher]

What you actually have is one user asking:

I have seen the same issues in my P4P (and not in the P3P) shooting 360 x 180 panos and increasing the overlap alone has not helped. I thought that the problem was due to the shifting nodal point of the lens (which would have also appeared in P3P panos but didn't seem to) and I started a thread that didn't go far. I may have to try shooting DNG and doing the Raw Therapee solution. @AyeYo when are you coming up to the mountains?