p.1 #1 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
I'm usually lurking on the Canon forum but since this has interested me for almost a year I thought someone else may benefit from finding out about this new motorized panoramic head. I first noted it on the Kolor (Autopano Pro) forums. Here's the link:
p.1 #5 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
the claim to support 8kg is the key here - want to see a 600mm f4 with TC doing a 10 gigapixel shot - that is where the market is. For wide angle low def stuff, you don't need this thing.
p.1 #6 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
I'd do it if I could afford such a lens! A friend of mine has a Canon 600mm f/4 and a 5D Mark III, maybe we can get together and shoot something this summer. Not sure if he has a 2x teleconverter though. I shoot with a 70-200mm f/2.8 and a 2x telephoto just fine with my D700 and vertical grip. That's a bit of weight. The torque is electronically adjustable from 1Nm to 4Nm.
As far as wide angle lower definition panoramas not needing a motorized head, I disagree! But it really depends how much you are shooting and your desired turnaround time. I shot a lot of them manually with my Really Right Stuff rig, but my workflow has dramatically improved with a robotic head and the time to take the spheres and edit them has been cut to a quarter of the effort before. More importantly, if you want to do timelapses you need to land on the exact same degree repeatably, which cannot be done without a robotic head. The Panoneed also has a speed mode with single exposures where it doesn't stop between shots. That really takes a sphere incredibly fast, but it is of no real use to me since most of my work is all HDR with multiple exposures anyway.
p.1 #8 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
I don't have a need for more than 1 or 2 gigapixel images up here where I live. There are no major cities or anything with a view that far. It's all hills and woods. :-P
I've rented from borrowlenses.com a few times, but only for paying projects. I haven't had a project that needed more than 400mm yet. Maybe someday! I tend to shoot with my 14-24mm more than any other lens. I love that lens!
My friend with the 600mm f/4 also has a Kessler CineDrive 5-axis kit that we haven't had time to even open the packages of yet. That will probably get more attention than the Panoneed when we next get together, haha!!!
p.1 #10 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
I didn't even bother shooting the lower hemisphere after taking a full sphere and deciding it was too dark to even bother. It was all black anyway at 15 second exposures. I go much further to ISO 3200 and 30-40 second exposures if I want to shoot the Milky Way and that will also expose the ground, but too many stars makes for very bad star trail images and since that was my goal I limited it to ISO 1600 and 15 seconds.
I usually take a couple nadir shots from different directions after moving the tripod a bit to stitch in later and also remove any shadows from the sun. The nadir hole to patch is incredibly small with the Panoneed robotic head because the horizontal motor is actually off-axis and near the edge of the bar instead of in the middle, so it shoots down over itself. This is what the nadir looks like on my RRS TV-34L tripod:
p.1 #12 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
I have a very large tripod (75mm video bowl) with no center column. If you raised it higher on a tripod with a smaller diameter and a center column, you could almost hide the tripod under that octagon shape. Of course, it wouldn't be as stable in wind and such outdoors then.
p.1 #13 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
You're right that the slightly reduced nadir size isn't worth the stability risk of a center column. Saw that you're shooting with the 14mm end of a 14-24mm. Are you shooting 2 rows of 7 photos around?
p.1 #14 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
I like to shoot at 24mm for more resolution, which is about 27 photos depending on overlap. When I need speed or shooting interiors which don't require as high a resolution I shoot at 14mm, which is usually 13 photos @ 20-30% overlap. I manually shoot extra nadirs after moving the tripod when necessary. When I shoot just the sky and no ground like this example I shoot 6 photos.
When I used my RRS manual head I would shoot 2 rows of 6 photos at 14mm every 60° horizontally, and 40° up and 40° down vertically, and 3 rows 12 photos at 24mm every 30° horizontally, and 55° up, level, and 55° down. These always gave me very good stitches in PTGui and was easy to shoot in the field. The Panoneed robotic head will automatically determine the least amount of photos to cover a sphere on the fly, depending on the chosen focal length and overlap. I often leave it at 20% as that is enough with the .xml positioning file for a very good stitch. It shoots a straight up zenith, varying numbers of photos per row, and skips the nadir area of itself which would just be wasted space. It's not stuck with a grid pattern like the Gigapan Epic Pro unless you choose grid mode for regular panoramas, so it takes less photos to cover a sphere in spherical mode. Sometimes I increase the overlap to 40% when I'm shooting interiors with a lot of close light sources because the 14-24mm tends to flare with such a bulbous front lens element, and 40% overlap gives me plenty of places to clone out flares from multiple overhead lights. Outdoors, 20% is perfectly fine and takes less photos.
p.1 #15 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
aaronpriest wrote:
I have a very large tripod (75mm video bowl) with no center column. If you raised it higher on a tripod with a smaller diameter and a center column, you could almost hide the tripod under that octagon shape. Of course, it wouldn't be as stable in wind and such outdoors then.
nothing like content aware fill in Photoshop to get rid of holes
I don't shoot those things, though - we're on opposite ends of the panorama stitching world. My little pano bot only has 30 degrees tilt range, although with the 14mm I could possibly get close to a hemisphere. Never tried, as I am more into the resolution thing than the coverage part.
p.1 #16 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
Yes, content aware fill rocks!!!
I've shot a lot of ~300-500 megapixel rectilinear panoramas, especially with a Gigapan Epic Pro before I sold it. My house is lined with 1'x3' panoramas, haha! I've only shot a few panos at more than a gigapixel though. There aren't a lot of scenes around here worth capturing at that high a resolution. There are along the Maine coast of course, but I'm quite far north of there. For whatever reason spherical panoramas have more or less become my interest and specialty the past couple of years. Once I tire of them it will be something else... hehe
I've discovered that high resolution panoramas have just as many challenges as spherical panoramas, just different challenges. Light changes more dramatically and clouds move a lot further when waiting 45 minutes for a gigapixel image to shoot. On the other hand, finding a scene that is interesting from every direction for a spherical panorama and choosing a focus and exposure that covers shooting into the sun and into the shade, as well as a location to reduce shadows and reflections that reveal the camera in the sphere, are also challenging. All of them are fun and rewarding!
p.1 #17 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
@aaronpriest - Interesting. Thanks for the info. I usually shoot with a 15mm fisheye - 6 around, 1 up, and 1-2 down. I suppose the resulting 15,000x7,500 file seems small to you.
p.1 #18 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
Mr Joe wrote:
I usually shoot with a 15mm fisheye - 6 around, 1 up, and 1-2 down.
Yes, I've been thinking about renting a 16mm fisheye to see what I think compared to my 14mm rectilinear lens. I might be able to shoot my spheres faster with less star movement and smoother star trails in my timelapse project. Resolution would not be a big deal on this project because the video resolution is going to have to be very small anyway. Most people do not have computers and internet speeds capable of handling 4K video in real time, and these spheres are more like 10K. I'm going to have to really reduce them down to 720p video or so, which is a very low resolution for a spherical panorama! A fisheye would still be many times the resolution required.
Those are great! Your exposure is right on, you'd swear it was shot in the day if it wasn't for the stars in the sky! Do you recall offhand what your white balance was? I assume you must be using bulb mode to go past 30 seconds, what remote are you using? I've done this with a Promote Control and it works great, but I can't go more than 40 seconds at 14mm without getting some pretty obvious star movement in the edges of the frame, especially the further away I get from the north or south poles.
p.1 #20 · Panoneed Motorized Panoramic Head - German Engineering
I typically start at 3850K for full moon conditions away from city lights. I am using a TC80-N3 timer remote with Bulb mode on the camera. Yeah -- balancing exposure to make sure the stars stitch together OK, but you still get nice cloud streaking is tough sometimes! I've been using Enfuse in PTGui to blend clouds and it works pretty well.
I'd be happy to answer any questions about it!
A friend of mine has a Canon 600mm f/4 and a 5D Mark III, maybe we can get together and shoot something this summer. Not sure if he has a 2x teleconverter though. I shoot with a 70-200mm f/2.8 and a 2x telephoto just fine with my D700 and vertical grip. That's a bit of weight. The torque is electronically adjustable from 1Nm to 4Nm.