HOW TO: Use Panorama flight modes with Air 3S

msinger · Tuesday at 8:03 AM

In this video, DJI demonstrates how to use the Panorama flight modes on the Air 3S, including Free, Sphere, 180°，Vertical, and Wide Angle.

Felix le Chat · Tuesday at 8:36 AM

Short, but quite interesting. 'free mode' looks like some DJI boffin decided to resurrect the 'super resolution' type pano from the Mavic 2 zoom, which even now spits out a really impressive still.

wco81 · Tuesday at 12:43 PM

Has anyone here actually used the Free Panorama?

shawn67 · Tuesday at 4:38 PM

I tried it quickly last night. Shot a 28 image panorama and it did blend it in drone. It also saved the individual shots which I merged in Lightroom. The blend in drone was about 54 megapixels (shooting with the 70mm in 12mp mode), the lightroom blend was about 180 megapixels. Difference was partially due to the drone blend applying a crop based on the area I had set, the LR blend was everything from the full images with an auto crop.

IDrone was set to shoot dng+jpeg but it only saved jpegs during the free panorama shooting. Was easy to use but would have liked to have the dngs as the jpegs are oversharpened. Will try with it in dng only mode and see if that changes anything.

EDIT: Tried again and the panoramic mode has its own set of settings for the saved file type. I changed that the raw and got the DNGs.

wco81 · Tuesday at 6:59 PM

28 image and it wasn’t even a 360 pano?

How many shots does it take if you do a 360 or 180 pano?

shawn67 · Tuesday at 7:17 PM

wco81 said:
28 image and it wasn’t even a 360 pano?

How many shots does it take if you do a 360 or 180 pano?

28 images with the 70mm lens. I think it was 4 rows of 7 columns of shots. If I had used the wide angle it would have only needed a few shots. Was seeing how it handled a high resolution file like an old gigapan panorama.

wco81 · Tuesday at 8:14 PM

Ah that makes sense.

Can the 70mm save in DNG?

Also, you can select the area you want covered by the Free Panorama fairly easily?

shawn67 · Tuesday at 8:23 PM

The 70mm definitly shoots in DNG in regular picture mode. I *think* it will in free pano too now that I found the additional settings for panoramics. I will test that tomorrow to confirm.

It is pretty straight forward in selecting the area as you basically just hit the top left corner and then the bottom right corner and it puts an overlay on what the pano will contain. Basically the same process of a gigapan if you happened to have used one. If you have a lot of gimbal tilt, looking at the bottom on screen it curves and the actual pano will be rectangular so the projection is a little different to visualize. But really it works well and is dramatically easier than taking the shots by hand. The in drone pano merge is pretty quick too, you have to let that complete before you can change camera settings or take another shot. I think you can also disable the merge so it will just take the shots for you to merge elsewhere.

wco81 · Tuesday at 9:02 PM

Thanks for those details.

It did save the individual images in their own folder, so that you don't have to figure out which ones in the series?

Especially since the number of shots will be variable depending on the borders you selected.

shawn67 · Tuesday at 9:11 PM

wco81 said:
Thanks for those details.

It did save the individual images in their own folder, so that you don't have to figure out which ones in the series?

Especially since the number of shots will be variable depending on the borders you selected.

Yes, different folders and the files were also named sequentially in the series PANO_001, PANO_002...etc.

I'll have to take a couple panos and see how LR handles the similiar file names (in different folders) if I import the main Panoramic folder plus all the subfoders (each panoramic) at the same time. I think it will append an additional number to the rear of the duplicate names but that might get confusing if you have different numbers of shots in each. Can probably use the LR Auto Stack by capture time function to get the needed files together as long as you wait a few minutes between panoramics.

wco81 · Tuesday at 9:16 PM

Lightroom doesn't handle it well at all.

Maybe best to rename the folder or the resulting Pano.dng to something more descriptive than PANO_001-Pano.dmg, which is what LR would do if you merged the files as they were named by the drone on the memory card and you copied them over.

shawn67 · Thursday at 6:14 PM

wco81 said:
Lightroom doesn't handle it well at all.

Maybe best to rename the folder or the resulting Pano.dng to something more descriptive than PANO_001-Pano.dmg, which is what LR would do if you merged the files as they were named by the drone on the memory card and you copied them over.

The basically duplicated file names actually wasn't much of a problem on import. Just bring them all in. In Library thumbnail view search on text "PANO". Then just select everything, Photo->Stacking->Auto Stack by Capture time and set the capture time to around 6 seconds and it will figure out the proper photos that go with each panoramic and make a stack for each pano group of photos.

The select your first stack. Photo->Photo Merge-> Panorama and set your settings however you want and let it create the panoramic and click add it to the Stack. Once you do that you can then select all the rest of your stacks and Photo->Photo Merge-> Panorama and LR will use the same settings you did for your first merge on all the rest of your stacks automatically. It makes it pretty easy to deal with.

The main place file naming could run into problems is on export so either rename them or make unique name on export.