[Frank Neuperger]

Austin,

Yes, for max zoomability in the in the pano, I generally go to the max optical on the camera. There are caveats however. For still subjects, zoom to max, but for crowds that are moving like this one, if you zoom too tight, you can end up with a ton of rework if you want to minimize motion artifacts of missing legs heads etc. The frequency of occurrence of these artifacts goes up as you zoom tighter simply because there are more frames (stitch boundaries) for a given size pano. Notice the right hand side of my image in the first posted pano as the subjects were closer. The stitching really chopped some of those people up because they were large in comparison to the frame and they were not sitting still.

Mechanically the Beta gigapan is so so. Ok for a light point and shoot. Because of the crush of trying to be competitive in ATL, I did not have the time to better integrate the camera with the Gigapan to ensure that the camera c of g was always on one side of the tilt axis for all angles of tilt. As such I got vertical smearing on some images. The shutter servo induced flex due to use of that small plastic spacer instead of the big aluminum spacer.

Also, I did not really fully test the delays associated with my auto focus to see if the gigapan was actuating the shutter before the autofocus settled. . To get great panos, you have to characterize all of the idiosyncrasies of your camera in the context of the Gigapan mechanism. .

I am going to add a bearing support on the STBD side of the Gigapan and remake the camera and shutter servo mounting plate out of 1/8 wall plate or extrusion to get it really rigid. This should also help the tilt axis "stiction" get a bit more deterministic.

After having to build that swerve steered drive for 09 , this will be a snap!!

Having a remote control (even if wired) to pause it for people to walk past would be another great addition. I hate having to touch it in case I push too hard an make the stepper slip. Not sure how to do this. Need to check if the code is open source and if there is some I/O left on the board.