360 Panoramas

Been researching motorised timelapse heads for the iphone and I have to say that there doesn't seem to be one that stands out. Your Motrr Galileo robotic head, Brian, got terrible reviews on Amazon but I wonder how much that was due to lack of knowledge. One of the main criticisms seems to be finding one with a smooth rotation over a long period. Any thoughts?

I think you will find most were made for panoramic work rather than time lapse. Some can be programmed to make 3 or 4 rows of images top to bottom by some number of images wide, all in register.
The Motrr Head wasn’t really made for time lapse. The motor speed is too fast for what I would call time lapse, that is, over a period of hours, not minutes. The slowest motor speed is only suitable for a 15 or so minute time-lapse. In its normal operation it fairly quickly moves the camera from frame to frame position and then pauses while the next shot is made, and so on.
A big problem with mechanisms is getting them to run smoothly enough. The mechanism needs to be free of slack which would make it wobbly but making it tight is just as bad. Friction is an issue for smoothness. Very fine tolerances are needed to run smooth but not have slack. It needs to be well sealed against dirt which can make even the smoothest mechanism run roughly. It would need stepper motors and very fine gearing.
There are a couple of fancy expensive ones made for DSLRs which are excellent. They include a programmable pause time, after motoring to the new position, for vibrations to die down before making the exposure. The ones that look best to me were actually made for smaller mirrorless and compact cameras, but they lack the connection to the iPhone apps that made the Motrr work so well.

The DJI Osmo Mobile powered gimbal has a programmable time-lapse function which I haven’t explored as yet. You set the start and end points and the duration and press go. Sounds simple enough. I wonder about the battery life though. 5 hours battery life is less than the 6.25 hours for the tide.

I made a couple of my own things using stepper motors. One is a glide rail that runs about 5 3/4 hours to cover 1 metre. It can run straight or rotate the camera L or R while it slides. It’s quite a pain to carry and set up. Should really have 2 tripods although one big one will work.

If you get through all that then you find there are variations in the light that cause hiccups in the brightness smoothness of your time lapse and then you need some time-lapse software, such as LRTimelapse. It works in conjunction with Lightroom on your computer to adjust your DNG files for smooth transitions.

It never ends!
 
What drone have you got, Brian? Thinking I need one of these too for the trip.

I have an Autel X-Star Premium. It is quite comparable with the Phantom 3 - 4. Not quite as many features as the 4 but more than the 3. About 25 minute flight time.
Drone flying takes more time and experience to do well. There are lots of things that can go wrong with drone flying, even with the safeguards. On top of that is the regulations are becoming increasingly restrictive because some a** h*les fly near airports or do other irresponsible things like flying near people or over private property, which causes problems for everyone else. You had best check the regulations first before you travel. About the only place really safe to fly is the wilderness, or at least way out in the country. Yay! That’s where I live. That’s not to say that your drone won’t decide to fly off into the sunset on its own, never to be seen again. It hasn’t happened to me but it does happen occasionally.
One of the rules is that you must maintain visual contact with your drone at all times while flying which goes against the FPV goggles idea where you can fly right out of sight and explore. Just remember that if anything comes between your drone and your controller, such as a building or a hill, you lose control of the drone. Fail safe routines should send it “home” without your control but make sure there is nothing in between your drone and “home”.
If I was buying right now I’d be looking at one of the fold-up DJI ones, not the tiny ones. The full-sized drones use a full size backpack to transport. The fold up one fit in a small shoulder bag about the size of a fat hardcover novel. Just remember, smaller drone, smaller camera. Unfortunately, DJI has an abysmal customer service record. Autel Robotics is much better in that respect.

As much as a higher vantage point is interesting, everything is far away. I especially like flying low, 2 or 3 metres above the ground, or water. That way you get a nice foreground and good sense of motion in your video. For some reason I especially like flying over the waves at low tide parallel to the shore and following the shoreline.
 
Last edited:
I have an Autel X-Star Premium. It is quite comparable with the Phantom 3 - 4. Not quite as many features as the 4 but more than the 3. About 25 minute flight time.
Drone flying takes more time and experience to do well. There are lots of things that can go wrong with drone flying, even with the safeguards. On top of that is the regulations are becoming increasingly restrictive because some a** h*les fly near airports or do other irresponsible things like flying near people or over private property, which causes problems for everyone else. You had best check the regulations first before you travel. About the only place really safe to fly is the wilderness, or at least way out in the country. Yay! That’s where I live. That’s not to say that your drone won’t decide to fly off into the sunset on its own, never to be seen again. It hasn’t happened to me but it does happen occasionally.
One of the rules is that you must maintain visual contact with your drone at all times while flying which goes against the FPV goggles idea where you can fly right out of sight and explore. Just remember that if anything comes between your drone and your controller, such as a building or a hill, you lose control of the drone. Fail safe routines should send it “home” without your control but make sure there is nothing in between your drone and “home”.
If I was buying right now I’d be looking at one of the fold-up DJI ones, not the tiny ones. The full-sized drones use a full size backpack to transport. The fold up one fit in a small shoulder bag about the size of a fat hardcover novel. Just remember, smaller drone, smaller camera. Unfortunately, DJI has an abysmal customer service record. Autel Robotics is much better in that respect.

As much as a higher vantage point is interesting, everything is far away. I especially like flying low, 2 or 3 metres above the ground, or water. That way you get a nice foreground and good sense of motion in your video. For some reason I especially like flying over the waves at low tide parallel to the shore and following the shoreline.
Yikes, just looked at the cost of a fold-up DJI. Hmm, maybe I’ll give the drone a miss. I can see myself using it a lot in Namibia because of the wilderness but not here in the UK. I love your idea of flying it low especially over water.

Thanks for all the info. Most interesting.
 
5 minutes practice should do. Really. It’s very easy. Do you have the DMD Panorama app? It’s the best pano app I have found for 360s.
You “can” make 360 Panoramas without a tripod but it is much easier with a tripod (if you discount the nuisance of getting it level). Next to a tripod a monopod is your 2nd best option. I have made several hand held 360s and the worst problem will be a crooked horizon. Just try again if the first one is crooked. On even ground it is easier to stay level. Stepping around on rocky uneven ground is a recipe for crooked panos.
When you start the DMD app it instructs you to hold your phone vertically. It means true vertical, both directions. This puts your virtual horizon in the middle of the screen. You “can” angle the camera a few degrees up or down and still have it stitch ok but as you play back the pano the horizon will either bulge up or down rather than running true all around.
The camera should be the centre of the rotation, not your feet. This is why a tripod or monopod is better. I can never step around the camera very well in a circle in a hand held pano but it doesn’t seem to matter. This would become more of an issue if you have scene features that come very close to the camera as well as distant features. If the camera is rotating around your feet, rather than the lens axis, it may not be possible to correctly stitch near & far objects at the same time.
Using a tripod: #1 your tripod needs a level to get the tripod set up in a speedy matter. If the tripod isn’t level, even if the camera is straight to start with it will be crooked as it goes around and your horizon will vary up and down. You could do it by trial and error (mostly error) but no, you should have a bubble level on your tripod. Adjust the leg lengths a bit until the level is centred. Get the tripod level first, then level the camera.
Tripod head: A video head is ideal since it will only have one axis to adjust and the panning handle is handy to rotate with. I usually use my ball head but this requires more adjustment to get it level. If using any head besides a video pan head it will need the additional free rotation feature. Not all heads have this.
Mounting the camera on the head: You need a camera tripod mount that puts your phone in vertical orientation on top of the tripod head, not down at one side. If you want to be absolutely correct the lens should be at the centre of vertical rotation. As far as I know no tripod mount currently made does this. On a DSLR set-up they go to great pains to ensure the lens is centred. As far as I can tell, on the iPhone 2or3 cm off-centre doesn’t seem to matter.
Levelling the camera: Right beside the DMD Panorama app in my camera folder I have another very useful app - a spherical level. This is the only level I have found that shows side-to-side & front-to-back level at the same time. It’s perfect!
Rotating Sphere Clinometer by Nils Calander
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/rotating-sphere-clinometer/id1190844563?mt=8
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/rotating-sphere-clinometer/id1190844563?mt=8
(I’m not sure why the last part is duplicated but that’s how it came out so maybe I shouldn’t mess with it)
Once your tripod is level then you should level the camera in both directions so it stays vertical throughout 360°.

Making the 360 Pano is easy as pie once all the levelling is done. Start up the DMD app, make sure to select HD for the highest resolution, tap on the screen to start, and rotate the camera either direction while watching the yin and yang symbols at the top of the screen. One will move to merge with the other. When they touch the next exposure is made, repeat. A total of 19 shots will be made. As fast as you can read the last sentence the stitching is done and your pano is displayed on screen. Check it for problems. Crooked horizon is the main one when hand holding. Also watch out for moving objects, such as people walking by, that only half appear because they were near the edge of one frame and moved before they could be recorded by the next frame.
In the DMD app you need to set up an account so you have your own place to upload and show your panos on their website. You can copy a link to post in other messages, such as here. Now you can post 360 pics directly into FB and it will display properly. Otherwise, use the link to post, just as you would a video on YouTube.

Yes, you can make panos less than 360 but if you do you will later wish you had made a 360 when you see how lame it looks next to your 360s.

You have the option to export a copy of your pano to the camera roll for your own back up (or for editing, for instance if you want to remove any lens flare spots, or unwanted trash). You can reimport the edited pano back into DMD to upload to their site.

The DMD app uses the internal gyro sensors to know where the camera is pointed to automatically position each photo in the set. It is possible to pause briefly if you want to wait for someone to walk past before making your next frame but there is some risk of gyro drift. If you wait too long between shots the overlap might not be correct. On an older iPhone I had the gyro seemed to always drift in one direction so rotating to the right didn’t work well but rotating left was always ok.

There is a motorized pano head made for the iPhone, now discontinued unfortunately. I have one and it still works perfectly. It is faster and easier than turning manually but there is no difference in pano quality. It is called the Motrr Robotic Head and it is capable of more complicated things than just panos. It can also make spherical 360s with a special app Sphere but the app developer dropped out, sad story etc. Also, automatic camera tracking of moving objects in videos, & face finding. Quite amazing really. The only downside is that there is no off switch(!) so the battery gradually goes dead on its own and you have to keep checking it is charged up before you use it. Rather a pain. Also, since it was discontinued around the time of the iPhone 6, that is the last iPhone mount size available. They never made a mount for the 6 Plus. You have to invent your own. When using the Motrr with DMD Panorama there is actually a special app made to link them together. You give the Motrr a twist to initiate Bluetooth and once you tap the screen to make the first shot the Motrr takes over, quickly motoring to the next position and stopping while the shot is made and then stepping on to the next position. Works very well.
Thank you so much for all that good knowledge. I often use DMD for panos but not 360. I also didn’t realise you had to have the horizon in the middle which I now realise accounts for so many of my panos not being hugely successful, displaying the bulge you mentioned. Quite logical now that I think about it. I might try and practise a little with my monopod.
 
Red Head Cliffs 360, Waterside, New Brunswick, Canada
Here is a flat preview of the panorama.
Enlight19.jpg

To see the interactive 360 panorama in-the-round use this link below.
http://pnr.ma/eHqfpD
This area of red Triassic sandstone cliffs is called Red Head, about 5 km from my home. The actual part called Red Head is to the right where you see the big hole through the finger of cliff extending toward the Bay. There used to be a large block of sandstone rising on top of this finger almost to the height of the cliff and the distinctive profile was visible quite far up and down the coast. A few years ago the large block collapsed and the distinctive profile was lost. Of that huge block of rock that fell not a trace remains. The pieces were all eroded away by the tide faster than I thought possible.
About 3 km from home I get to Dennis Beach and it continues to these cliffs and after that you get to Waterside Beach. Altogether, Dennis Beach, Red Head, and Waterside Beach comprise a length of coastline of about 7 km. The red cliffs area is perhaps 1/2 km long at most and all the rest is a long stretch of beach, some parts rocky, other areas beautifully sandy. The lowest tide area is a continuous strip of beautiful sand. Waterside Beach is the only part visible from the road.
I’m facing the cliff and to my right in the far distance you can see another headland which is Cape Enrage. To my far left is Matthews Head in Fundy National Park. A bit closer is Owl’s Head in Alma.

Sometimes when the sun is within the picture area I get a small green spot of lens flare below the sun at the bottom of the picture. Recently I decided to try editing the pano to retouch the green spot. I soon discovered that the only photo editor with a healing brush or cloning function that can give a full size output from the pano file is Enlight. NOT Snapseed, NOT Photoshop Fix, NOT iColorama, NOT Leonardo. EVERY other editor I tried reduced the size of the pano, sometimes by a lot. The full size resolution of these panoramas is 14560 X 2500 px. Enlight reduces the size down to 2498. The best of any I tried. It is possible to import an edited pano into DMD to upload to their site the same as the unedited ones. That is what I have done here.
For Ann’s interest, I had to tip my iPhone 7 Plus up about 2° to include the top of the cliff. In the first 0° version the cliff was touching the top of the frame. The 2° tilt doesn’t appear to have caused any noticeable problems with the horizon.
PS. I just got an app called HDR Panorama which I haven’t had time to test as yet. That might satisfy one of the major problems with 360 panos - the dramatic difference in lighting in different parts of the image.
 
Last edited:
When making Panoramas it is important to rotate the camera around the lens, not the camera around your feet. On the iPhone there seems to be a lot of latitude for poor camera positioning. A panorama with only distant objects is easy to align, even with poor camera positioning. If your panorama has elements that come close to the camera then correct positioning becomes more important. Problems show up as straight lines that don’t meet correctly.
With that in mind I have further refined my panorama head. I made a small bracket to offset the iPhone mount do that the lens axis aligns with the tripod head rotation centre.

IMG_3116.JPG

You can see the aluminum bracket between the tripod head and iPhone mount. It shifts the mount sideways 27.5mm. Depending on your iPhone mount you may also need forward or backward adjustment to get things centred.

IMG_3111.jpg

Now as I rotate the tripod head the lens stays right on the axis of rotation.
 
Been looking at automatic rotating heads and found lots of hacks on YouTube showing how to transform a £6 Ikea egg timer into a timelapse head. Looks as if it often works better than the cheap £20 options you get on Amazon. Pity Ikea is so far away...
 
Been looking at automatic rotating heads and found lots of hacks on YouTube showing how to transform a £6 Ikea egg timer into a timelapse head. Looks as if it often works better than the cheap £20 options you get on Amazon. Pity Ikea is so far away...

You might be happy with a cheap solution for a couple of experiments but soon you would find it too limited. Don’t forget it turns too fast for a long time lapse. Also, ideally you want the head to stop turning during the exposure. A slider or glide rail is more useful for time lapse than simple rotation. Sliders are often capable of both motions at once.

A motorized head needs to interact with the panorama app so it stops for each photo. There are panorama heads with settings to lock at each photo position but they are expensive.
With DMD Panorama that would be 19 shots. In low light the exposures are definitely long enough to blur if the motor head doesn’t stop for each exposure.
Although the Motrr Head works very well it is a nuisance to carry. You would need to put the motor head on a tripod on a tripod so the tripod anyhow so since you already have the tripod it works perfectly well to just turn it around manually. The handle of a pan head is handy for this but I usually just use my ball head. It takes more adjusting when levelling than the pan head, though.
 
Last edited:
I just made a test of the Motion Time-Lapse option on the DJI Osmo Mobile! It works beautifully. You can program more than one position for it to move to, including up/down/left/right. I don’t know what the limit is on how many positions you can set. I used 3 for my test. Once you have picked your positions to start and move through and end at then you set the interval time and the total length of your time lapse and it shows how long your video will be. Then you press start and off it goes, dimming the screen after a while to save power. As soon as it finishes recording it generates the video. Very nicely done.
I’m amazed I never got around to using it for a time lapse since that was one of the deciding features when I bought it. Too bad it’s so cold out now, besides being night, going to -8°C tonight. Not ideal for batteries in a time lapse.
 
I just made a test of the Motion Time-Lapse option on the DJI Osmo Mobile! It works beautifully. You can program more than one position for it to move to, including up/down/left/right. I don’t know what the limit is on how many positions you can set. I used 3 for my test. Once you have picked your positions to start and move through and end at then you set the interval time and the total length of your time lapse and it shows how long your video will be. Then you press start and off it goes, dimming the screen after a while to save power. As soon as it finishes recording it generates the video. Very nicely done.
I’m amazed I never got around to using it for a time lapse since that was one of the deciding features when I bought it. Too bad it’s so cold out now, besides being night, going to -8°C tonight. Not ideal for batteries in a time lapse.
Wow, that’s neat. How do you stand it though?
 
You might be happy with a cheap solution for a couple of experiments but soon you would find it too limited. Don’t forget it turns too fast for a long time lapse. Also, ideally you want the head to stop turning during the exposure. A slider or glide rail is more useful for time lapse than simple rotation. Sliders are often capable of both motions at once.

A motorized head needs to interact with the panorama app so it stops for each photo. There are panorama heads with settings to lock at each photo position but they are expensive.
With DMD Panorama that would be 19 shots. In low light the exposures are definitely long enough to blur if the motor head doesn’t stop for each exposure.
Although the Motrr Head works very well it is a nuisance to carry. You would need to put the motor head on a tripod on a tripod so the tripod anyhow so since you already have the tripod it works perfectly well to just turn it around manually. The handle of a pan head is handy for this but I usually just use my call head. It takes more adjusting when levelling than the pan head, though.
Yes, all valid points. The best equipment is so darn expensive though.
 
Brian, I might have found the solution to the microphone issue with a gimbal but can’t find the telescopic arm on it’s own. You being a bit of a diy merchant might be able to come up with your own solution.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zhiyun-Smo...HUAWEI+Sansung+Extendable+Axis+Telescopic+Arm

Brackets I can make. The main problem is plugging a cable into the Lightning connector. That end of the phone is flush against the motor. If I could find a really tight right angle plug on a Lightning to Lightning extension cord I could make it work.
 
Some time ago when I was filling up an order to get up to the “free shipping” amount, I bought a counterweight for the DJI Osmo for use with a Moondog anamorphic lens. I figured it would probably work for the Moment WA lens as well. The Osmo doesn’t normally need a counterweight as it has an adjustable length arm on the right side.
Yesterday I removed one of the rubber strips from the mounting jaws of the Osmo and found that my iPhone with Moment case would fit OK. I tried adding the counterweight and Moment lens and it needs more counterweight. The Moment WA must be heavier than the anamorphic. I added some coins to balance but found the balance is not just end-to-end but also front-to-back and this direction is harder to counterbalance. The overall extra weight might exceed the design load of the gimbal.
When I ordered the DJI Osmo Mobile I was also looking at the next size up in gimbals. Not DSLR size, but small camera size, like compacts and mirrorless. It might have been better to go that route for maximum compatibility with add-ons. However, those bigger gimbals don’t have the iPhone integration that makes the Osmo work so well with the iPhone.
 
I tried the HDR Panorama app today at the brewery. The interface looks a lot like the Apple camera with the horizontal bar with the arrow progressing across the screen. Except it seems to run slower and it makes more photos to combine. Plus it takes longer to process. It doesn’t make 360s.
IMG_9438.JPG

It does do one thing DMD Panorama doesn’t do. It stitches photos made with my Moment WA lens! That has been my one disappointment with the DMD app.
 
Brackets I can make. The main problem is plugging a cable into the Lightning connector. That end of the phone is flush against the motor. If I could find a really tight right angle plug on a Lightning to Lightning extension cord I could make it work.
I found this which would work if you used the Apple lightning to headphone jack converter as well. Whether the sound would be okay is a question but from the reviews it looks promising.
 
I found this which would work if you used the Apple lightning to headphone jack converter as well. Whether the sound would be okay is a question but from the reviews it looks promising.

On the gimbal I’m pretty sure it will have to have a tight right angle Lightning plug, no matter what you plug in. The Apple Lightning to headphone jack adapter will only allow a mono mic to be plugged in.
A straight plug pushes the iPhone too far away from the motor end which also throws off the balance. I have found a couple of 90° Lightning plug cables online but not Lightning-to-Lightning. Only Lightning-to-USB. Eventually I will find one. Without Lightning-to-Lightning I can’t plug in my Shure MV-88 stereo mic.
 
On the gimbal I’m pretty sure it will have to have a tight right angle Lightning plug, no matter what you plug in. The Apple Lightning to headphone jack adapter will only allow a mono mic to be plugged in.
A straight plug pushes the iPhone too far away from the motor end which also throws off the balance. I have found a couple of 90° Lightning plug cables online but not Lightning-to-Lightning. Only Lightning-to-USB. Eventually I will find one. Without Lightning-to-Lightning I can’t plug in my Shure MV-88 stereo mic.
Oh sorry, Brian, forgot the stupid link which was what ‘found one’ meant.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01MD23A84/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=I17SK4NCAN5N6B&colid=R9P2DRWN1P27
 
Another feature I had not tried yet on the DJI Osmo Mobile with my iPhone 7 Plus and using the companion DJI Go app: in the panorama menu - 3 rows of 3 pictures combined into one photo. Once selected, you aim the camera at the middle of the scene and tap. Quick as you like the iPhone swivels to the bottom left corner, shoots and moves to the next frame, right, and another in far right. Then zips back to the far left to scan the middle row and finally the top row. In no time the completed pano appears and perfectly stitched. The picture was well exposed across all the different brightness areas. And a vastly wider view than would be possible in one shot, even with my Moment WA lens. The vertical lines were correct even though I had made no effort to make that happen and had not even thought about it at this point in the testing. The only downside, if it could be considered as such, is the final image resolution was only 4255 x 1871 px. I had somehow expected it to be bigger considering it was made from 9 photos although it is roughly equivalent to a typical image file size. I must investigate the resolution settings.
When I started the test I remember thinking this looks like a solution to the missing AutoStitch. I’ll do an outdoors photo to post later.
Edit: looking back on previous still photos made with the DJI Osmo Mobile and DJI Go app with my iPhone 7 Plus: they were made while recording video so it isn’t surprising they are 16:9 aspect ratio and 4096 x 2304 px. Of course photos made with other apps on the Osmo still produce the same resolution as before. This is just the internal still photo capture of the DJI Go Camera app.
The 3 rows of 3 pano would be made of 9 - 16:9 stills.
 
Last edited:
ImageArt -Ann. I just ordered the DMD 180° lens and the new Rotator. I found out that the Rotator is compatible with the DMD Panorama app.
The VR kit app has 2 settings for choice of lens, 160, & 180, representing the two lenses they have calibrated their system to work with. This relates to the stitching of the different images making up the panorama. Only the 180° lens is suitable for the 7 Plus, 8 Plus & X. And I suspect for the 7 & 8 as well. This is because of the image stabilization moving the lens elements around and requiring a larger diameter lens element to avoid cutting the corners.
 
Last edited:
Sorry to fill your Alerts with so many likes Brian. Your panoramas, and other iMages, are beautiful. I have also been following your experiences with different equipment and apps. In fact you’re my go-to guy for iPhonography wisdom. Thank you for taking the time to test and share. It is well appreciated :thumbs:
 
Sorry to fill your Alerts with so many likes Brian. Your panoramas, and other iMages, are beautiful. I have also been following your experiences with different equipment and apps. In fact you’re my go-to guy for iPhonography wisdom. Thank you for taking the time to test and share. It is well appreciated :thumbs:

Well, thank you. Likes are good [emoji3]. I often think the accounts of equipment and tests must get tiresome so I’m glad to know someone reads them.
 
Back
Top Bottom