articles/Panoramas/panoramasmadeeasy-page4

GigPan Epic Pro - Panoramas made easy! - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

by Mike McNamee Published 01/08/2013

he shooting was done hand-held as there was no room on the top floor of the 13-story scaffolding to use a tripod. A focal length of 24mm was employed with a downward shooting angle which has resulted in a rather ragged collection along with a wide distortion arc. Despite this GigaPan Stitch made a good effort of assembling the pan including straightening the horizon.

Panoramas take around about 10 minutes for a 120-image pan although the actual timing depends greatly upon the computing power brought to bear and the number of images. The 320 gigapixel image - taken by expert photography firm 360Cities during the Olympics - comprised 48,640 individual frames which were collated into a single panorama by a supercomputer and required three months of work to finalise. It was, at the time, the world record stitch. It was not shot with a GigaPan system (but it could have been!).

One thing to be alert to is the fact that a stitched export does not have a profile but seems aimed at sRGB so you will need to do an 'assign and convert' to keep you colour accurate if you use a larger colour space as your Photoshop default. A peripheral snag that we came across was when building our Portfolio database. We set Portfolio to collect only TIFF and JPEG assets but noticed far more than we expected. Looking at the GigaPan Stitch folder revealed that our 368 Raw files had expanded to 14,544 files (during the pan build), the majority of which were JPEGS 256x256 pixels (less than 10 Kbytes). This is not a problem until you try and catalogue them in a database, it added almost a day to the process.

The trick is to exclude the offending 'data' folder from the cataloguing process.

• GigPan Epic Pro - Panoramas made easy! page 1
  
• GigPan Epic Pro - Panoramas made easy! page 2
  
• GigPan Epic Pro - Panoramas made easy! page 3
  
• GigPan Epic Pro - Panoramas made easy! page 4
  
• GigPan Epic Pro - Panoramas made easy! page 5
  
• GigPan Epic Pro - Panoramas made easy! page 6
  
• GigPan Epic Pro - Panoramas made easy! page 7
  

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