DJI Mini 4 Pro

[Mike Cowlishaw]

Decided that I needed a sub-250g drone to use for specific panoramas and chose the DJI Mini 4 Pro.  I am really impressed by it.   It seems to have everything my Mavic Pro 2 has at less than a third of the weight -- and the reduced resolution (12Mp instead of 20Mp) doesn't affect the image quality as much as I feared.

So .. I tried a spherical panorama today.   The in-drone stitch was fine, but the PTGui Align was not good (see attachment).  I tried with and without 'Position images automatically using metadata ...'.

Any suggestions?

Mike

[Erik Krause]

Am 18.10.23 um 16:53 schrieb Mike Cowlishaw:

> So .. I tried a spherical panorama today. The in-drone stitch was fine,
> but the PTGui Align was not good (see attachment). I tried with and
> without 'Position images automatically using metadata ...'. Any suggestions?

Image 35 is positioned wrong. Did you check the Control Point Assistant
whether it has control points (doesn't seem so). It looks like a
sky-only image.

--
Erik Krause

[PTGui Support]

Hi Mike,

If you just load the images (with 'Position images automatically using
metadata' enabled), and don't do Align Images, do the images appear at
the right position?

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

[Mike Cowlishaw]

Erik: yes #35 is bad, but also lots of the sky images are vague.

Joost: Just tried "Load the images (with 'Position images automatically using metadata' enabled), and don't do Align Images" ... and indeed the images appear at the right position :-).

And Create Panorama then gives result as expected  -- attached -- with the weird black rectangle at Zenith which is "expected" for DJI Mini 3 and 4, I think, and easily filled in by PanGazer, etc.  

So .. I have a good panorama, but am slightly concerned that if 'Align Images' isn't needed, then why is it there?  Also the "Position images automatically using metadata" doesn't seem to be remembered.

As must be evident, I take two kinds of panoramas: drone and and land-based: the settings in PTGui for each seem to need to be hand-tuned for each.  John and/or Erik mentioned Templates .. perhaps that is where I should be going.  But perhaps the standard Assistant could figure this out :-).

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[John Houghton]

On Wednesday, October 18, 2023 at 7:49:22 PM UTC+1 Mike Cowlishaw wrote:

So .. I have a good panorama, but am slightly concerned that if 'Align Images' isn't needed, then why is it there?  Also the "Position images automatically using metadata" doesn't seem to be remembered.

" 

 Mike,  Check the settings in the "Align Images behaviour" section of the Project Settings tab.  You should uncheck the "Roughly arrange images first" option since that would destroy the automatic positioning.  The option "Images are already roughly positioned" should be checked.

John

[Mike Cowlishaw]

OK, thanks.  Will try that (in a couple of days .. am away).

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[Sam Ablott]

I have the Mini 3 Pro, but the issues are the same.

When I load the image set into PTGui they get placed according to the meta data which is a nice start, as they are roughly in the right place.

My next step it to select from the Control Points menu, "Generate Control Points for all overlapping images". That way it only looks for points where points will be, so less chance of false positives from on overlapped images.

Now you can hit "Align Images". In most cases that will give you good alignment.

Here's a tip for the zenith gap. For reasons known only to DJI the Sphere function shoots the whole sequence in landscape mode, when in fact the camera is capable of capturing the zenith, completing the sphere when in portrait mode.

So what I do is take two photos manually before or after the sequence with the camera in portrait and the gimbal tilted fully up to 60 degrees. The two pictures are 90 degrees yaw apart. Add those and your zenith is covered.

For the very best results, shoot the whole sequence manually, this lets you use AEB or 28MP resolution (not both) and fully manual settings. It just takes a while to do.

The biggest issue I have is that PTGui can't handle the vignette you get from the DNG files. The vignette curve works to an extent to reduce it, but doesn't remove it by any stretch.

I end up having to convert to Tiff pre-stitch which is a bind.

[Erik Krause]

Am 27.10.2023 um 22:02 schrieb Sam Ablott:
> The biggest issue I have is that PTGui can't handle the vignette you get
> from the DNG files. The vignette curve works to an extent to reduce it, but
> doesn't remove it by any stretch.

Some DJI drones seem to produce not only vignetting but also a color
gradient from the center to the edges. PTgui can only handle the
brightness vignetting, not the color gradient.

--
Erik Krause
http://www.erik-krause.de

[Mike Cowlishaw]

Sam, thanks -- and apologies for the delay in replying: I have been travelling.

In those travels I took a number of spherical panoramas, and following Erik and John's suggestion, all were perfectly stitched by PTGui.   The black rectangle at the zenith is always sky for my outdoor shots so auto-fill using PanGazer is more than adequate to cover that.  I use time in the air to capture spheres from which I later compose and save 'flat' images (which never include the zenith) .. so adding extra manual shots is not a 'win' for me, and for adding to Google Maps again I suspect very few people view the zenith.

Anyway, thanks again for the suggestions!

Mike