I’ve been testing the Litchi Beta with my Mini 2 and tried shooting some 360 panoramas yesterday. The Auto function didn’t seem to work when I tried it a few days back (think it’s a problem with the DJI SDK rather than Litchi) so I setup a manual one to try and replicate what Fly does on Auto. Settings were: Width = 360, Columns = 8, Height = 110, Rows = 3, Nadirs = 2, Grid = Linear and Capture = Row by Row. Think I should have set delay before each photo to 0.5 seconds as the drone seems to jerk around a bit and the gimble probably needs to settle, I’ll try that this morning. I accidentally left the photo settings on AEB, but that worked well as there was a low winter sun and it helped balance things out. So instead of shooting 26 pictures as intended I shot 78 per panorama. The only snag was that Litchi stores them in the same DCIM folder as all the other photos, so it took a while separating them out an transferring then to a separate folder before stitching with PtGui 12 Pro. It would be nice if Litchi could store each set in a discrete folder the same as Fly does. Here is the end product though:
Unfortunately I was unable to re-create this on yesterday’s test flights. I left the panorama settings exactly the same but PtGui was unable to stitch any of the three panoramas I shot. It might possibly need the gimble to be at the optimum angle before starting to shoot the pictures. I was doing a comparison, so after shooting the pictures with Litchi, I landed and changed over to Fly and re-ran the flight. Using the Fly Auto 360 panorama produced three perfect panoramas in PtGui and also uploaded to Kuula with no further modifications required. I had a response from Litchi about putting panorama shots into a separate folder but the answer was that DJI didn’t permit them to create separate folders, so looks like the only hope is that DJI release their panorama default settings in a future version of the SDK.
When I used Litchi for pano, I’d take a single pic before/after seriously underexposed (using manual settings) to easily identify the pano set.
I can’t see why they wouldn’t stich. From the 83° FOV of the lens, you have plenty of overlap with 8x3 + nadir … and the previous one stitched so well.
AEB shouldn’t make any difference to that.
When you stitched the previous one, did you use all AEB exposures? … or just select the same mid-exposure?
I think that they were both shot with auto exposure on AEB. The tink that I noticed with the second days tests that didn’t stitch properly was that there was an excessive amount of sky in the upper row with only a tine amount of ground visible, but I was wondering if the drone starts with the gimble angle that is selected previously and maybe I had it slightly above 0 degrees, will have to check that. With the ‘Fly’ aout pano it doesn’t matter what angle the gimble is at before you start. Good idea about taking a single easily identifyable shot befor ethe panorama set, I did something similar on the last test and it made it mucg easier to count out the 78 shot AEB set following.
I did more testing yesterday and think I’ve nailed it, the problem was that I needed to reduce the ‘Height’ parameter to stop shooting too much sky. I also tested to see if the starting angle of the gimble had any effect and the answer is no, it makes no difference. Is I’ve mentioned in another post, the settings I ended up with are:
Width=360
Columns=8
Height=95
Rows=3 (also tried 5 but there was no particular advantage seen, just took longer to shoot!)
Nadirs=2
Grid Pattern=Linear
Capture Settings=Column by Column
Delay before each photo=0.05s (important if shooting with auto exposure as it allows the shutter speed to re-set)
Delay after each photo= 0.00s
I ended up shooting 9 test panoramas and all of them stitched in PtGui with no problem. I had to reduce the final stitching settings from the 100% of optimum size that I’d use on picture sets from ‘Fly’ as that produced a panorama that exceeded Kuula’s maximum image size. I used 75% for convenience but it could go a bit higher.
I shot both on auto and manual exposure settings, in truth the auto ones actually worked better! Also with single shots and AEB, the AEB ones really enhanced the sky although it was a bit tricky to find a balance between sky and land when processing in PtGui.
So I’m really happy with the results, think that now I seem to have hacked the panoramas I’ll be using Litchi as the defualt app for my photography. I don’t have any need for the tracking parts of the app, but I do take on board the warning over using them with a drone that has no collision avoidance systems!
Beginners Litchi question. Installed the Android app, getting familiar with it before I use it with the Mini 2. Hasn’t asked me to login so I’m wondering how it would sync with my web login for missions.
I tried Litchi Beta tonight for a 360, first time I’ve used it for a 360 and haven’t (knowingly) changed any settings in the Android app. It said it was going to take 22 photos, counted up to 22 as it took them and there’s 22 photos on the SD card. I thought it would take 26 but went ahead and put them through ICE only to get this scene. Any help appreciated!
P.S. I used the top globe icon. It also appeared to throw a wobbler on 2 of the 22 i.e. the gimbal was moving up & down before settling down & taking a photo. Not had any problems with the Mini 2 before today. There were a few high wind notifications but they were there when it wasn’t throwing a wobbler as well.
No option to change the settings other than start pano. I realise now I used the auto-pano option but still can’t get the 360 into a format that works with panoee.
No, they weren’t with the globe auto-pano option, straight to start pano. I know for next time but assumed it would take photos that ICE would work with.
According to Litchi release notes, “AutoPano now shoots 360x110 spherical panoramas compared to 360x90 before” but that was back in 2020
I did some trials in shooting 360 panos with a Mini 2 and Litchi a while ago and posted my suggested setting for using in manual here. This should be the link and the settings work with bot the Mini 2 and Air 2S: https://greyarro.ws/t/testing-litchi-beta-with-mini-2-take-2/41515
