Hi!

I am desprerately trying to stitch my first 360° x 180° panoramic images I shot with a Canon 500D/T1i and a Tokina 11-16mm ultra wide angle lens on a Nodal Ninja 3 MKII.

I have already spend evenings to setup and finetune the NPP using various methods and to experiment with the different settings of Autopano Pro without success. German speaking people might wish to read the history in my thread in the Panorama-Community.

The stitched images using Autopano Pro (2.0.9, 64-bit) always have a lot of errors. I tried different settings including lens correction (Linsenverzerrung) and heavy lens correction (Extreme Linsenverzerrung).


Here are some examples using different settings:
http://picasaweb.google.de/jens.remus/

Here are the source images of two of these panoramas:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/944445/2010-08-02.7z
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/944445/2010-08-12.7z


In my desparation I have tried the demo of the new PTgui beta version and found it to be able to stitch my images without issues if I enable the correction of lens shift (Minimize lens distortion: Heavy + lens shift). I even get a very good average control point distance of 1.519193 (measured in source image pixels).

Searching this forum for hints and tips regarding the use of an ultra wide angle lens, I found that Autopano Pro is said to have difficulties with such lenses and that it might work if I strip the EXIF and let APP calculate the focal length, but this did not help.

I had a look at the cameras.txt and lensid.txt and stumbled about a wrong camera scale factor for the Canon 500D in the cameras.txt: it must be 1.622 instead of 1.587 (500D and T1i are the same cameras, just different names for different markets).
At first I was so happy and thought this would now fix the issues I had stitching my images, but it did not change anything. I then tried the trick to strip the EXIF information, but that did not help either.

As PTgui is able to stitch my images without issues I assume that the NPP is already correctly setup and that it must be either me not correctly operating Autopano Pro or Autopano Pro having issues with the distortion of my lens.


Can you please help me?

I don't want to spend money on PTgui, as I already own Autopano Pro. Beside of this Autopano Pro already did a great job on my hand held single row panoramas and I really do prefer its user interface over PTgui.


Thanks in advance, kind regards,
Jens

Last edited by No-Nonsense (2010-08-18 22:13:06)