You are a wealth of knowledge - thank you so much! I shot them using the Mavic's auto-pano deal, so it does all the shooting, adjusting, etc. But I end up with raw files (which I love). So I think I won't even bother with the auto-stitching you mentioned above, because the control freak in me can process all the raw files for optimal exposure and color, and then use PanoramaStudio to stitch it!
Photoshop STINKS at the 360º stitching. I use Photoshop to work on my Insta images (to remove the tiny bit of tripod at the bottom) so I am relatively comfy working in the 3D space, but I have not ever been able to get it to give me an acceptable 360º stitch, from my Mavic's shooting. But then again, maybe that is user error. Ha. I have very firmly established, I'm not the techno-wizard in our house.
Let me just tell you how exciting it is to walk into a customer's business and hand them a pair of goggles (we have the Oculus Go) and watch their reaction as they go through a virtual tour of another business. The idea of being able to bring that into a realtor's office, to show them what the future of virtual tours could bring (I fully expect the VR goggle technology to explode in the next 10 years, so that they are in more and more households) - I get SO excited about this stuff! And then to add 360º drone? So people could "float" above a property and look all around? Crazy! I love it. Thanks so much for chatting with me about this - it's so fun to find others who have that passion.
My pleasure. Happy to share.
If the auto 360 pano function on the Mavic works as on the Mavic 2, there should also be an already stitched 360 pano jpeg on the microSD card in the same directory as the video files, while the originals get saved in a separate directory called PANORAMA. The only downside to the DNG's is that PanoramaStudio 3 Pro can't read the DNG metadata to automatically pull out the GPS location data, so you will have to enter it manually, which is a pain, when doing lots of panos and using the mapping function. On the M2, I can pull it from the stitched jpeg that the M2 creates, but copying latitude and longitude and height is still cumbersome. PanoramaStudio Pro 3 also does a very good job of correcting the exposure throughout the image, so I use the 25 original 20MB jpegs, and call it good enough! I also shoot all panos in flat, overcast lighting, so no sun hotspots to deal with, and have a giant soft box from the sky. Midday or early afternoon works well, too, to keep the sun from ruining one side, but the lighting is often harsh. Stay away from water only on one side for 360 panos. Hard to stitch well, and nothing to see on the backside.
I am eager to add terrestrial 360° panoramas, including interiors, to my aerial 360° panos on Google Maps. Virtual tours are where it is at! Essentially, they are self directed tours, rather than limited to the field of view chosen by the drone pilot in a video, where the viewer's interests may be different than what the drone pilot chose to look at, and the linear timeline of a video is very constraining, leading to abandonment! The multitude of options in an interactive map of 360 panos lets the viewer control where they look, for how ever long they choose, and zoom in and out and around in every direction, for detail that interests them.
You'll also have to play around with the elevation at which you choose to shoot the aerial panos, which will vary, depending on how the higher elevation reveals more of the sights in the distance, but less detail on the ground when zooming in. I'm still experimenting, often shooting the same pano at 25', 50', 75', 100', 150', 200', 250', 300', 350', and 400', especially over my own house, to get a feel for what works best, and in different lighting conditions and at different times of day, and even at night.
It's really fun!
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