First Look: Air 3 70mm-lens spherical panoramas

Thmoore · Dec 21, 2023

I'm absolutely delighted by the new Air 3 update. I'd really been hoping the Vision Assist would come down to the Air line. It's quite cool.

I'm also intrigued by the 70mm-lens spherical panoramas. I've been shooting a few of them, and here's a first-look report, which I'll update:

• The spherical panorama with the 70mm lens is 137 (!) photos
• It takes about 4 minutes 40 seconds to take all those shots.
• The aircraft takes the pictures, and is done with them. It does not stitch them together, as it does with the 24mm lens spherical panorama. 137 photos transfer to your phone or computer.

I'm trying to figure out how to get them stitched together. When I do, I'll have some comparisons between it and the 24mm panorama. Any ideas?

wco81 · Dec 21, 2023

I mean will Lightroom be able to merge them all or will you have to get specialized pano stitching software?

And after you get it stitched, can the free hosting sites handle such big panos?

Thmoore · Dec 21, 2023

Photoshop botched it pretty good. I bought the "Panorama Stircher" on the Mac App Store, and it seems to have done a very nice job.

The final JPG is 567 megabytes and 50434 × 25217. And too big to attach here! I'll figure something out.

wco81 · Dec 21, 2023

I guess the trick is to shoot both 24 and 70 mm spherical panos in the same place -- maybe higher altitude when doing the 70mm one .

Then stitch and compare.

Dusty DJI · Dec 21, 2023

Thmoore said:
I'm absolutely delighted by the new Air 3 update. I'd really been hoping the Vision Assist would come down to the Air line. It's quite cool.

I'm also intrigued by the 70mm-lens spherical panoramas. I've been shooting a few of them, and here's a first-look report, which I'll update:

• The spherical panorama with the 70mm lens is 137 (!) photos
• It takes about 4 minutes 40 seconds to take all those shots.
• The aircraft takes the pictures, and is done with them. It does not stitch them together, as it does with the 24mm lens spherical panorama. 137 photos transfer to your phone or computer.

I'm trying to figure out how to get them stitched together. When I do, I'll have some comparisons between it and the 24mm panorama. Any ideas?

How does the smaller panoramas do, like 180?

GadgetGuy · Dec 21, 2023

Thmoore said:
I'm also intrigued by the 70mm-lens spherical panoramas. I've been shooting a few of them, and here's a first-look report, which I'll update:

• The spherical panorama with the 70mm lens is 137 (!) photos
• It takes about 4 minutes 40 seconds to take all those shots.
• The aircraft takes the pictures, and is done with them. It does not stitch them together, as it does with the 24mm lens spherical panorama. 137 photos transfer to your phone or computer.

I'm trying to figure out how to get them stitched together. When I do, I'll have some comparisons between it and the 24mm panorama. Any ideas?

Completely eliminate the top row of images.
In the sky, there is no detail that any program can use for accurate stitching. Then use either PTGui or PanoramaStudio 3 Pro for the 360° pano stitching on the remaining images.

PanoramaStudio 4 Pro | PanoramaStudio Panorama Software

www.tshsoft.com

VenomXts · Dec 21, 2023

man, i cant get anything to stich those 137 images together... Adobe Lightroom Classic, Hugin or another app i have used in the past...

Will have to try one more run at it...

If anyone else has any luck let me know lol. I just want to see one thats combined!!!!

wco81 · Dec 22, 2023

It may be that 70mm panos are best for distant terrain, so maybe more 180 panos or some smaller set like 5 columns by 2 or 3 rows. Or even wider like 7 or 8 columns.

rickmurray1989 · Dec 22, 2023

FYI... the update needs to be applied for every battery that you use in your aircraft, at least for the Air 3.

GadgetGuy · Dec 22, 2023

VenomXts said:
man, i cant get anything to stich those 137 images together... Adobe Lightroom Classic, Hugin or another app i have used in the past...

Will have to try one more run at it...

If anyone else has any luck let me know lol. I just want to see one thats combined!!!!

See Post #6 above.

rddl · Dec 23, 2023

I agree, it is difficult to stitch those pictures.

I get quite good results adding pictures like this using Hugin :

1 center pictures and auto align
2 above center pictures and auto align
3 under center pictures and auto align
4 bottom remaining pictures and auto align
5 upper remaining pictures and auto align

Then, create pano !

This is much longer than trying to auto-align all of them at once, but at least, it works well except for skies without clouds : I manually correct the sky.

I will give a try to panorama studio as mentioned by GadgetGuy !

zhillz · Dec 23, 2023

Thmoore said:
The final JPG is 567 megabytes and 50434 × 25217. And too big to attach here! I'll figure something out.

Can you share a link from an external hosting site such as Imgur or Flickr?

RoryG · Dec 23, 2023

These are all taken with the 70mm camera on the Mavic 3 Pro, stitched in PTGui. The panos are all 1.37 Gigapixels.

https://www.360shetland.co.uk/lerwick-gigapixel/

mobilehomer · Dec 23, 2023

RoryG said:
These are all taken with the 70mm camera on the Mavic 3 Pro, stitched in PTGui. The panos are all 1.37 Gigapixels.

https://www.360shetland.co.uk/lerwick-gigapixel/

Those are SPECTACULAR!!!

BobaFut · Dec 23, 2023

Thmoore said:
I'm absolutely delighted by the new Air 3 update. I'd really been hoping the Vision Assist would come down to the Air line. It's quite cool.

I'm also intrigued by the 70mm-lens spherical panoramas. I've been shooting a few of them, and here's a first-look report, which I'll update:

• The spherical panorama with the 70mm lens is 137 (!) photos
• It takes about 4 minutes 40 seconds to take all those shots.
• The aircraft takes the pictures, and is done with them. It does not stitch them together, as it does with the 24mm lens spherical panorama. 137 photos transfer to your phone or computer.

I'm trying to figure out how to get them stitched together. When I do, I'll have some comparisons between it and the 24mm panorama. Any ideas?

Maybe this has already been discussed, but the Mavic 3 Pro spheres are 106 photos. Cameras are the effectively identical. I wonder why there’s a difference.

wco81 · Dec 23, 2023

RoryG said:
These are all taken with the 70mm camera on the Mavic 3 Pro, stitched in PTGui. The panos are all 1.37 Gigapixels.

https://www.360shetland.co.uk/lerwick-gigapixel/

Those are terrific.

Is that a hosting site for large panos?

Or is the host name referring to where they were taken?

Wreckhunter · Dec 23, 2023

BobaFut said:
Maybe this has already been discussed, but the Mavic 3 Pro spheres are 106 photos. Cameras are the effectively identical. I wonder why there’s a difference.

Not exactly sure the cameras are the same,They may have tweaked the sensor in the Air 3 some,as in more
updated technology.

BobaFut · Dec 23, 2023

Wreckhunter said:
Not exactly sure the cameras are the same,They may have tweaked the sensor in the Air 3 some,as in more
updated technology.

That’s why I said “effectively,” because despite having some different tech, they are the same focal length, same FOV, same aperture, same sensor size, and same megapixels. So why would one need 106 images and the other 137 for a 360 photo?

The only thing I can think of is the Air3 is using a different stitching algorithm with more overlap between images.

MS Coast · Dec 23, 2023

RoryG said:
These are all taken with the 70mm camera on the Mavic 3 Pro, stitched in PTGui. The panos are all 1.37 Gigapixels.

https://www.360shetland.co.uk/lerwick-gigapixel/

Those panoramas definitely deserved the WOW! for the day. The level of detail is stunning.

How long does it typically take PTGui to stitch one? Did you do any post processing (on the constituent images or the stitched) or are those jpgs straight from the Mavic 3 Pro?

GadgetGuy · Dec 24, 2023

BobaFut said:
That’s why I said “effectively,” because despite having some different tech, they are the same focal length, same FOV, same aperture, same sensor size, and same megapixels. So why would one need 106 images and the other 137 for a 360 photo?

The only thing I can think of is the Air3 is using a different stitching algorithm with more overlap between images.

The Air 3 can elevate the gimbal higher than the Mavic 3 Pro so DJI foolishly decided to add a useless additional top row of unnecessary images, which do nothing other than ruin the stitching, if they are included, as there is no detail in the sky from which to align the top row images.