does anyone know how many images are taken in a full panorama and how large the zenith hole is compared to mini 2 or does it take all around?

I think one of the reviews said the vertical camera for 360 panos was coming later.   

I think the lens tilts to 60 degrees which suggests no hole as my mini does 19 degrees and leaves about a quarter of the top pano to fill so 60 degrees should more than cover it.... awesome!  I'm really keen to see sample stills from this drone.  It so feels like many of the design changes in the Mini 3 should have been in the Mavic 3 it is just way better presented and thought out but time will tell :-)
  

Hello there Kent360. Good day and thank you for reaching out. For additional reference the DJI Mini 3 Pro ( https://www.dji.com/mini-3-pro?site=brandsite&from=nav ) has a Pano Shooting Mode, you can choose from Sphere 180 degrees, Wide Angle and Vertical. Thank you.

DJI Stephen Posted at 5-10 20:56
Hello there Kent360. Good day and thank you for reaching out. For additional reference the DJI Mini 3 Pro ( https://www.dji.com/mini-3-pro?site=brandsite&from=nav ) has a Pano Shooting Mode, you can choose from Sphere 180 degrees, Wide Angle and Vertical. Thank you.

hi dji stephen
the specific question is whether thanks to the +60 angle on the gimbal is this used in the auto spherical panorama setting to take additional images in the zenith (top) and therefore reduce the size of the visual hole (filled in with colour in your auto system) at the top of any 360/180 equirectangualr image? is the hole at least smaller than say on a mini2?

At the moment, DJI Fly does not shoot Sphere 60° up. So 360 is not 360, up is filled with blurred pixels.
Shooting all manually, or shooting automatic Sphere and then manually 8 extra 60° up pictures, gets close to 360, but there's a tiny hole up (nadir). Small enough to be filled with Photoshop, but could be a problem in some situations.
I hope DJI Fly will eventually add 60° up pictures. That would be a shame not to use that feature for 360's...
See here for 2 examples of Sphere shot by Mini 3 Pro, automated by DJI Fly and manually shot, filled, and stitched with PTGui: https://mega.nz/folder/zhA3xA4A# ... 3yQ/folder/Hxx01BZS

fredbotton75 Posted at 5-11 07:12
At the moment, DJI Fly does not shoot Sphere 60° up. So 360 is not 360, up is filled with blurred pixels.
Shooting all manually, or shooting automatic Sphere and then manually 8 extra 60° up pictures, gets close to 360, but there's a tiny hole up (nadir). Small enough to be filled with Photoshop, but could be a problem in some situations.
I hope DJI Fly will eventually add 60° up pictures. That would be a shame not to use that feature for 360's...

Yes thanks for that and I guessed the workaround (with 6 manual up shots taken at same time) would work, ive trialled doing shots after landing but only works for plain sky. At the moment just using content aware in affinity to fill the zenith after ptg  so if they automated it would just make it quicker. thanks again

fredbotton75 Posted at 5-11 07:12
At the moment, DJI Fly does not shoot Sphere 60° up. So 360 is not 360, up is filled with blurred pixels.
Shooting all manually, or shooting automatic Sphere and then manually 8 extra 60° up pictures, gets close to 360, but there's a tiny hole up (nadir). Small enough to be filled with Photoshop, but could be a problem in some situations.
I hope DJI Fly will eventually add 60° up pictures. That would be a shame not to use that feature for 360's...

I agree totally here and am really surprised for the Mini 3 this isn't a standard function on release in the Fly app, this drone was built for 360 panos with no manual intervention... fingers crossed!

Hi, may I know how many photos are included in a 180 degree panorama taken by DJI Mini 3?

In Mini 2, the 180 degree panorama contains a row of 7 images only, which is no good. Air 2 is much more poweful to provide 3 rows of 7 images, totally 21.

fredbotton75 Posted at 5-11 07:12
At the moment, DJI Fly does not shoot Sphere 60° up. So 360 is not 360, up is filled with blurred pixels.
Shooting all manually, or shooting automatic Sphere and then manually 8 extra 60° up pictures, gets close to 360, but there's a tiny hole up (nadir). Small enough to be filled with Photoshop, but could be a problem in some situations.
I hope DJI Fly will eventually add 60° up pictures. That would be a shame not to use that feature for 360's...

Hi,could you share a 180-degree panorama taken with Mini 3 for my reference please?

Kent360 Posted at 5-10 22:21
hi dji stephen
the specific question is whether thanks to the +60 angle on the gimbal is this used in the auto spherical panorama setting to take additional images in the zenith (top) and therefore reduce the size of the visual hole (filled in with colour in your auto system) at the top of any 360/180 equirectangualr image? is the hole at least smaller than say on a mini2?

don't bother. those moderators here are the worst useless bots i have seen anywhere...i doubt they will share any useful info. better wait for test from somebody that owns the drone. But won't be surprised if it is not implemented and we have to wait about an year to get it done....

I'm also looking for better specs regarding the panorama modes and single shots taken to stitch them together.

I am extremely disappointed! I've been using my Mavic Air for years nearly exclusively for spherical panoramas and had hopes of finally being able to stitch a full 360° x 180° panorama. Ever since I saw the new design of the Mini 3 Pro, I've been trying to find out if this is possible with the new camera and the vertical panning of the gimbal. But of the YouTube testers, no one has ever talked about these specs. For this reason I have ordered the new Mini 3 Pro on suspicion, but now I'm thinking about canceling the order because with a max 20° angle, it's of no use to me at all.

If DJI is smart, they will change the specs asap. Maybe I'll buy it then after a firmware update.

Please DJI, fix this. PLEASE!

It’s very disappointing to see the drone makes no use of it’s gimbal's tilt ability in pano mode.

Unfortunately, that means for me there’s absolutely no point in buying this drone whatsoever.

Come on DJI, this is universally stupid.

fredbotton75 Posted at 5-11 07:12
At the moment, DJI Fly does not shoot Sphere 60° up. So 360 is not 360, up is filled with blurred pixels.
Shooting all manually, or shooting automatic Sphere and then manually 8 extra 60° up pictures, gets close to 360, but there's a tiny hole up (nadir). Small enough to be filled with Photoshop, but could be a problem in some situations.
I hope DJI Fly will eventually add 60° up pictures. That would be a shame not to use that feature for 360's...

Hi Fred

Thanks so much for posting that 360 pano. I use the Mini 1 heavily for that purpose but the quality you are achieving from the Mini 3 looks just awesome. Using the manual 60 degrees upward shots has also enabled you to take an image where there is still detail and information in that upper third of the frame, something with the Mini 1 that would have been impossible (unless your drone was low and you could manually hold the drone and take upward images).

It's also really pleasing to see that the lens on the Mini 3 is stitching well in PTGUI  (What I use too)

It's a very encouraging image. Was PTGUI happy including the manual shots in the set? I can't imagine the drone moving too much so shoudn't be a problem. The latest enhancements to PTGUI really make this type of shot a lot easier to stitch well. Well done!

Cheers

Bussty

I have also downloaded the pano from Fred. Very impressive! Is it really the case that with a gimbal position of 60° the whole zenith is completely covered? Then manual shooting would be at least an alternative.

But looking closely (I calculated the pano in Pano2VR to the sphere) you can see some stitching errors with the branches near the zenith. Have you ever tried to do the stitching rather with PanoramaStudio Pro 3 than with PTGui? Because this program is able to read the EXIF data of the single shots and thus align the images in the exact position. This is also especially helpful with very uniform textures (such as sea surface).

Still, I hope DJI is reading along here and realizes how great the need is for an update to the Sphere feature!

SPLflyer Posted at 5-15 23:56
I have also downloaded the pano from Fred. Very impressive! Is it really the case that with a gimbal position of 60° the whole zenith is completely covered? Then manual shooting would be at least an alternative.

But looking closely (I calculated the pano in Pano2VR to the sphere) you can see some stitching errors with the branches near the zenith. Have you ever tried to do the stitching rather with PanoramaStudio Pro 3 than with PTGui? Because this program is able to read the EXIF data of the single shots and thus align the images in the exact position. This is also especially helpful with very uniform textures (such as sea surface).

I had another look and you are right about those stitching errors I wonder how Fred captured the zenith shots as they are actually pretty uncharacteristic stitching errors for PTGUI but potentially cleaned up with masking and seam placement adjustment or just manual control points.

I also wonder what the delay was between the Pano by the drone and the manual zenith shots? Still  very ambitious pano with a drone given the detail being all around the drone.

Your post perked my ears up about the Panorama Studio Pro 3 and it's ability to map the Pano from EXIF data, is it somehow capturing Pitch and Yaw data from the drone written to the RAW data? I never even realized those were recorded in the EXIF data.

Something I maybe need to bring up with the author of PTGUI!   

Bussty Posted at 5-16 03:12
I had another look and you are right about those stitching errors I wonder how Fred captured the zenith shots as they are actually pretty uncharacteristic stitching errors for PTGUI but potentially cleaned up with masking and seam placement adjustment or just manual control points.

I also wonder what the delay was between the Pano by the drone and the manual zenith shots? Still  very ambitious pano with a drone given the detail being all around the drone.

Unfortunately, I don't know exactly what PanoramaStudio Pro 3 reads from the EXIF data. I often had the problem in the past that single images of water surfaces were not mapped correctly because of the similarity of the textures. Since I can check "Place unmapped images based on metadata" in the program, all images are immediately arranged correctly. I don't know if pitch and yaw data is read out, but the general quality of the stitching, which was already good before, has become better once again with this feature. PanoramaStudio Pro 3.6 is a commercial program (not too expensive!), but it's the one I've used to get the best results so far - without complicated post-processing and control point shifts. Trial versions are available at https://www.tshsoft.de/en/download_en
I'm not involved with the author and the program!

Does any one know if the full res jpeg is available after taking the auto sphere pano, because with my mini 2 the only available full res photos were dng?

SPLflyer Posted at 5-16 03:53
Unfortunately, I don't know exactly what PanoramaStudio Pro 3 reads from the EXIF data. I often had the problem in the past that single images of water surfaces were not mapped correctly because of the similarity of the textures. Since I can check "Place unmapped images based on metadata" in the program, all images are immediately arranged correctly. I don't know if pitch and yaw data is read out, but the general quality of the stitching, which was already good before, has become better once again with this feature. PanoramaStudio Pro 3.6 is a commercial program (not too expensive!), but it's the one I've used to get the best results so far - without complicated post-processing and control point shifts. Trial versions are available at https://www.tshsoft.de/en/download_en
I'm not involved with the author and the program!

Thanks I might have to download and try :-)

SPLflyer Posted at 5-16 03:53
Unfortunately, I don't know exactly what PanoramaStudio Pro 3 reads from the EXIF data. I often had the problem in the past that single images of water surfaces were not mapped correctly because of the similarity of the textures. Since I can check "Place unmapped images based on metadata" in the program, all images are immediately arranged correctly. I don't know if pitch and yaw data is read out, but the general quality of the stitching, which was already good before, has become better once again with this feature. PanoramaStudio Pro 3.6 is a commercial program (not too expensive!), but it's the one I've used to get the best results so far - without complicated post-processing and control point shifts. Trial versions are available at https://www.tshsoft.de/en/download_en
I'm not involved with the author and the program!

Hi there

I contacted Joost from PTGUI and he said it's correct, DJI records pitch and yaw info in the EXIF and PTGUI uses it too to position images. Wow that's pretty cool.

I think what would be great is if Fred (Hi Fred!) would be willing to post the original jpegs and we use your software Panorama Studio Pro 3 to see if we can generate a better result out of the tin...

What do you reckon Fred? Also can you let us know how you shot the Zenith images?

Many thanks


Andrew

fredbotton75 Posted at 5-11 07:12
At the moment, DJI Fly does not shoot Sphere 60° up. So 360 is not 360, up is filled with blurred pixels.
Shooting all manually, or shooting automatic Sphere and then manually 8 extra 60° up pictures, gets close to 360, but there's a tiny hole up (nadir). Small enough to be filled with Photoshop, but could be a problem in some situations.
I hope DJI Fly will eventually add 60° up pictures. That would be a shame not to use that feature for 360's...

Thanks for sharing.  Since the gimbal does allow for 60° upward then all they have to do is rotate the gimbal into portrait and then the zenith would be covered?!?  Can you test to see if in portrait mode then directly up would be captured.

Contacted the DJI-Support and they told, that for all panorama shots the Mini 3 Pro would take as many single images as the DJI Mavic Air 2 or DJI Air 2S:

RESOLUTION & IMAGES TAKEN:

Sphäre: 8192x4096 (25 Bilder)
180°: 8192x3302 (21 Bilder
Weitwinkel: 7200x5376 (9 Bilder)
Vertikal: 3328x7936 (3 Bilder)

Deebee5 Posted at 5-20 01:24
Contacted the DJI-Support and they told, that for all panorama shots the Mini 3 Pro would take as many single images as the DJI Mavic Air 2 or DJI Air 2S:

RESOLUTION & IMAGES TAKEN:

And they probably see no reason to improve anything in the interest of the customer. Why should they? The main thing is to be able to take pictures of skyscrapers from below or film silly vertical Instagram or TikTok videos.

The only solution seems to be to wait for the SDK release in a year, buy the Mini 3 with the RC-N1 and install Litchi. Maybe by then the signal quality will have improved enough to fly the drone safely.

There you go pick the Bones out of that and obsess all you like about tiny little aspects on the fringes that no same person should worry about

https://www.skypixel.com/photo360s/first-360-pano-from-my-mini-3

Bigplumbs Posted at 5-20 03:56
There you go pick the Bones out of that and obsess all you like about tiny little aspects on the fringes that no same person should worry about

https://www.skypixel.com/photo360s/first-360-pano-from-my-mini-3

I think you need to apply the same logic here as audiophiles, they can listen to sound out of a $2000 sound system and go "Rubbish" when I think it's fine. With 360 panos, I guess while I'm not an audiophile, I do apply the same critical view as they do when it comes to "experiencing" the 360 view the drone was seeing at the time. Put that on a big monitor and start looking around and you will soon have the "illusion" of being "there" flawed if the stitching is not perfect. But that's just me I like to get totally immersed in that technology and I totally understand others don't and that is fine, horses for courses  as I go and play my favourite track on my UE Boom to the dismay of many an audiophile :-)

But also the Mini 3 has just been released and there will be issues early on and we are all probably extra vigilant to find things that DJI need to fix and for a "pro" drone they definitely need to fix their stitching.

Your scenes are amazing by the way, so lush!

Cheers

Bussty

I think there are some panoramic photographers who would only buy the Mini 3 when there was automatic zenith shooting. I am one of them.

Qbishon Posted at 5-22 11:45
I think there are some panoramic photographers who would only buy the Mini 3 when there was automatic zenith shooting. I am one of them.

And the disappointed panorama photographers who are unwilling to buy for the time being can be found not only here, but also elsewhere on the web. Here, for example: https://360rumors.com/dji-mini-3-unique/

Read also the comments at the bottom of this page!

It takes 26 pictures for the sphere. And the zenith is still not captured, although this drone could, having a camera now which can tilt up to 60° - and including the angle of the lense this drone could have been the game changer for sphere panoramas. Sadly DJI blew it. So disappointing. Would have been the reason for so many i know to buy it.

SPLflyer Posted at 5-22 12:59
And the disappointed panorama photographers who are unwilling to buy for the time being can be found not only here, but also elsewhere on the web. Here, for example: https://360rumors.com/dji-mini-3-unique/

Read also the comments at the bottom of this page!

It's strange why DJI can not program additional photos upwards with the vertical position of the gimbal in one sequence. It would actually be a killer feature.

I am not a big fan of 360 panos But am amazed by DJI approach to them - they Just forbid them with M3's wide lens???  and now here where they have perfect opportunity hardware whyse to do it right they omit this in software

There are indeed some stitching errors on zenith in the assembled 360's using PTGui. 60° is not close enough to 90°, so there is some bit of material missing.

Correction is usually ok with PTgui (Pro version have an "automatic fill" option looking good, but I have the regular version), or using Photoshop. Works fine with skies, even cloudy ones.

It gets tricky with complex stuff above, such as trees branches or ceiling. I have not been able to perfectly correct that yet, even by moving M3P away from 360 shooting place to reveal more of the environment.

I have tried with ICE from MS. It works with shooting manually all pictures (around 34), but it does not while shooting automatically then adding 8 extra 60° manually.
I'm afraid all other trial versions of stitching software have expired on my Mac, so if some of you have software available, please try stitching complicated 360's, that would be nice to the community ;)

You can download here 4 examples of Mini 3 Pro 360° panoramas done automatically (34 pictures) using DJI Fly + 8 60° pictures shot manually. One of them is Raw if your software handles that.
download link

fredbotton75 Posted at 5-22 23:15
There are indeed some stitching errors on zenith in the assembled 360's using PTGui. 60° is not close enough to 90°, so there is some bit of material missing.

Correction is usually ok with PTgui (Pro version have an "automatic fill" option looking good, but I have the regular version), or using Photoshop. Works fine with skies, even cloudy ones.

I just tried to stitch that first one came up with a massive load of no control points available. Never had that before but then again I never really have had a full seamless 360 pano before, have always had to fill in a hole. Have you tried this software PanoramaStudio Pro 3  SPFlyer recommended it but haven't gotten around to it yet. Might try now...

fredbotton75 Posted at 5-22 23:15
There are indeed some stitching errors on zenith in the assembled 360's using PTGui. 60° is not close enough to 90°, so there is some bit of material missing.

Correction is usually ok with PTgui (Pro version have an "automatic fill" option looking good, but I have the regular version), or using Photoshop. Works fine with skies, even cloudy ones.

Hi Fred

I tried that software PanoramaStudio Pro 3 and it stitched that No.1 Pano first time which PTGUI couldn't handle. Worth having  a look. I'm guessing the reason DJI hasn't incorporated a full 360 x 180 pano stitcher is that it's actually quite hard and to do it properly you need good software. I thought PTGUI was the best but may be mistaken...

I might try one of the harder ones now...

SPLflyer Posted at 5-16 03:53
Unfortunately, I don't know exactly what PanoramaStudio Pro 3 reads from the EXIF data. I often had the problem in the past that single images of water surfaces were not mapped correctly because of the similarity of the textures. Since I can check "Place unmapped images based on metadata" in the program, all images are immediately arranged correctly. I don't know if pitch and yaw data is read out, but the general quality of the stitching, which was already good before, has become better once again with this feature. PanoramaStudio Pro 3.6 is a commercial program (not too expensive!), but it's the one I've used to get the best results so far - without complicated post-processing and control point shifts. Trial versions are available at https://www.tshsoft.de/en/download_en
I'm not involved with the author and the program!

Hi there SPLflyer

Thanks for that software recommendation. If you refer up this thread you'll see it stitched a Pano PTGUI couldn't even manage so quite impressed!

Thanks again

Bussty

fredbotton75 Posted at 5-22 23:15
There are indeed some stitching errors on zenith in the assembled 360's using PTGui. 60° is not close enough to 90°, so there is some bit of material missing.

Correction is usually ok with PTgui (Pro version have an "automatic fill" option looking good, but I have the regular version), or using Photoshop. Works fine with skies, even cloudy ones.

Hello again Fred

Tried to stitch that tree shot had not bad results in PTGUI but worse in Panorama Studio Pro.

When the Mini 3 does a Pano can you set it at a fixed white balance and exposure for the whole process? I always do that but looking at the below there are two wildly different exposures and white balances that any stitching program will struggle with.



The stitch area of these two images is really obvious as the stitching program tries to merge them (plus trees this close are super hard anyway!)

This actually poses a really big question. Is the only mode in the drone for 360 Panos Auto or can you lock those things down?  Currently I just use Litchi on my Mini 1 and it leaves exposure at what I have set it when doing Panos.

So if DJI isn't doing Manual Exposure / White Balance on it's Pano's then will it in future? If we don't know or it's unlikely you can always fall back on one day Litchi will be made available for the Mini 3 Pro BUT Litchi needs to be loaded and right now the DJI RC doesn't allow third party apps so you would have to buy the standard controller?? What a conundrum!  Would just be best if DJI didn't touch the exposure settings when taking Panos.

If anybody has any information around this would be great as 360 Panos is one of my key uses of the drone and if it's limited like this will need a rethink about purchase...

Bussty Posted at 5-23 01:37
Hi there SPLflyer

Thanks for that software recommendation. If you refer up this thread you'll see it stitched a Pano PTGUI couldn't even manage so quite impressed!

Sorry, I had to delete this reply. Somehow I do not manage to insert pictures here.

SPLflyer Posted at 5-23 03:01
Sorry, I had to delete this reply. Somehow I do not manage to insert pictures here.

Do you know if the Mini 3 Pro locks exposure and white balance when it takes a 360 pano?  

Bussty Posted at 5-23 01:37
Hi there SPLflyer

Thanks for that software recommendation. If you refer up this thread you'll see it stitched a Pano PTGUI couldn't even manage so quite impressed!

There is something coming from me too ;-)

I just experimented with the Pano 1 in PanoramaStudio 3 Pro. Without any preliminary work I imported the JPGs. PSP 3 does the white balance and exposure adjustments automatically. The following picture shows the program after importing the images. It is important to select the checked boxes under "Presets".



After the completely automatic processing, PSP 3 exports this image:



If I calculate this in Pano2VR, I get this result: https://bernis-bilderwelt.de/panotest/output_1/index.html

I then loaded the equirectangular panorama from image 2 with the narrow border into the spherical panorama feature of Photoshop CC2018 and filled the missing circle "content-based". The finished panorama then looks like this: https://bernis-bilderwelt.de/panotest/output_2/index.html

I think it already looks very good. It would be easier, of course, if the Mini 3 would provide the information automatically.