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GigPan Epic Pro - Panoramas made easy!

by Mike McNamee

Our involvement with making images for wall decor for recent issues of Imagemaker led to a number of conclusions but one stood out more than other - nothing trumps having lots of pixels. Accordingly we have since purchased a GigaPan Epic Pro for our own use (purchased as in 'handed over cash', not a journalistic euphemism!). It is a few years since we first tested a GigaPan and so it is timely to take another look. This review is somewhat about face to other reviews in that we have purchased the kit first, the reverse of the more normal sequence of events!

The Concept

The original GigaPan prototype and related software were devised by a team led by Randy Sargent, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon West and the NASA Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California, and Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. The GigaPan EPIC series of panoramic photography equipment is based on the same technology employed by the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to capture the incredible images of the red planet. (see http://www.gigapan.com/galleries/10327/gigapans/129486)

GigaPan was formed in 2008 as a commercial spin-off of a successful research collaboration between a team of researchers at NASA and Carnegie Mellon University. The company's mission is to bring this powerful, high-resolution imaging capability to a broad audience.

This they have certainly done as the endlessly fascinating GigaPan website brings new pans to the public on an almost daily basis. To date, important events covered by GigaPans have included Obama's inauguration and more recently the London Olympics. Indeed our own Ian Cook features twice in the pan made of the gymnastics, once at either end of the hall as he followed the GB team around their rotations.

The Gear

The unit of choice for a DSLR is the Epic Pro which can take a payload of up to 10 pounds. We have used a 300mm f4 Nikkor and a D800 equipped with an MB D12 battery pack. The battery operated pan head is fitted to a (sturdy) tripod via a 3/8-inch thread. We used a Manfrotto MPRO 535 which is certainly beefy enough for the task. The camera may be moved in both the horizontal and vertical planes to position the nodal point of the lens on the axis of rotation. This is more important when using wide-angle lenses, less so with the telephoto lens we normally used for the sweeping panoramas of river scenes. Certainly for indoor pans, with close objects and lots of distortion, it is vital to set the camera carefully on the equipment.

The Workflow

There is a 53-page pdf manual for the equipment and it is pointless repeating it here. However, the basic workflow is to set the equipment up on a level tripod and then connect the camera to the onboard microprocessor (a number of leads, covering almost all eventualities are supplied). You then follow the onscreen menu which tells you to set the field of view first and then move the camera manually to set the corners of the panorama you wish to shoot. Just to be sure the menu then runs through a sequence getting you to check that things that should be locked (eg exposure, focus, white balance) are fixed down. It tells you how many images are going to be required and how long it is going to take and then, if you press OK it kicks into life and you can sit and have a flask of coffee.

Your greatest enemies while making a pan are vibration due to shutter/mirror movement, slow damping of the system after moving the camera to a new position and wind. The latter is more critical because the rig is quite large and will catch any boisterous gusts, more especially if you are on a high platform. Removing camera straps, keeping the camera as low as possible and not stamping about on a platform all help a little. You may also control the mirror lock-up and dwell time.

Things To Watch For

If you are using a telephoto lens to pull in a wide cityscape then atmospheric dust is a real problem as it will significantly degrade the contrast. Flare an also be an issue with a 360° pan as the sun will be somewhere in the scene. You can overcome dynamic range issues because you can set up to shoot bracketed exposures and do some HDR. However, if you have a river scene with slow moving boats, or slow-moving traffic then these too can be a problem. We call them 'muggles' and you can take a policy decision to repair them using Photoshop or leave them in as curiosities. It is quite normal for moving pedestrians to appear several times. For boats on a river you can hit the pause button after the first shot and then wait for the vessel to clear the area before carrying on.

The Software

Shots made and assembled from a GigaPan are much more regularly spaced and well-ordered that other types of pans, especially compared with, say, hand-held camera shots. This appears to influence the ease and speed of assembling a stitched pan; it is hard to know without being familiar with the computer code, but presumably the software has less to do in terms of trying to find matches in the image content. How well a particular set of images will stitch together still seems to be something of a black art and the outcome is always in doubt until the final, compiled image appears. In the image shown the arches to the side walls of the church are incorrectly rendered in a 360° panorama. Despite this the GigaPan Stitch is one of the more reliable ones that we have tested, it certainly never did any of the really silly things other programs have managed such as placing building high in the skies.

Panoramas take around about 10 minutes for a 120-image pan although the actual timing depends greatly upon the computing power brought to bear and the number of images. The 320 gigapixel image - taken by expert photography firm 360Cities during the Olympics - comprised 48,640 individual frames which were collated into a single panorama by a supercomputer and required three months of work to finalise. It was, at the time, the world record stitch. It was not shot with a GigaPan system (but it could have been!).

One thing to be alert to is the fact that a stitched export does not have a profile but seems aimed at sRGB so you will need to do an 'assign and convert' to keep you colour accurate if you use a larger colour space as your Photoshop default. A peripheral snag that we came across was when building our Portfolio database. We set Portfolio to collect only TIFF and JPEG assets but noticed far more than we expected. Looking at the GigaPan Stitch folder revealed that our 368 Raw files had expanded to 14,544 files (during the pan build), the majority of which were JPEGS 256x256 pixels (less than 10 Kbytes). This is not a problem until you try and catalogue them in a database, it added almost a day to the process.

The trick is to exclude the offending 'data' folder from the cataloguing process.

Panning for Welsh Gold

Our next port of call was in the hills of Wales. Our main issue here was the blazing sun of this July which made for uncomfortable hiking and a dreadful, muggy, heat haze on the hills. Despite prior knowledge of this, we headed out anyway so as to reconnaissance the location and also test the problems of getting the gear into place.

A 40-litre mountaineering sack just held the gear which consisted of the Gigapan, 105mm, 24-70mm and 14-24mm Nikkors along with a D700 and MB D10, an electronic cable release, a geared tripod head, food, drink and a very light wind top. The Manfotto tripod does not readily attach to the pack and was eventually carried separately in its case. Now this little lot did not seem much in the hall at home but seemed to grow in weight with every step. Lesson number one was therefore would be to leave the zooms, MB D10 and cable release behind and devise a way of attaching the tripod to the sack (or find a more modest-sized one!).

On reflection, it was too ambitious to carry the zooms on the off chance of getting some macro or wide-angle landscapes - having chosen pans as the objective we should have stuck rigidly to that. The other notion which has become obvious over the testing of the past couple of months is that if you are working with a companion it is better to split the gear and take just one camera rig with spare Flash cards if both of you wish to shoot. Each taking your own camera gear is a luxury too far!

Our chosen location was the shore of Cwm Idwal a mile or so above Ogwen Cottage, Snowdonia. The path up to the cwm is well surfaced and a very moderate gradient. Once there, we dumped the gear and walked about a bit trying to decide the best location. This is where we made our second crucial error. The image above is un-cropped so as to demonstrate the dominating effect of the paving just in front of the camera. Viewed by eye it looked OK but in the finished pan it is a disaster - too large and too bright. The second lesson we learned is that the background is relatively insensitive to the location chosen (to within tens of metres) but the foreground is influenced on a scale of metres.

Bear in mind that the objective is to grab extraordinary detail of the distant surroundings, if you just want a pretty picture a single wide-angle shot is much easier. Four steps further forward and most of the paving would have been eliminated. Our chosen spot was also to challenging as a location for working, the rock might have made a stable base but there was no room to get round the back of the camera and look at the LCD back in the bright sunshine which might have alerted us to the issue (the Gigapan will sweep the intended pan before you start - if you use Live View you can take a peek). Next time we will be better prepared and much wiser!

The Image

153 frames 19 columns x 9 rows, 105mm Nikkor Time to shoot 13 minutes 40,000 x 15,000 px stitch 28ft x 10 ft nominal output size

CONCLUSIONS

Overall then there is nothing quite like the GigaPan on the market especially at the price, it really is a bargain and as we described in previous issues of Imagemaker, the business opportunities for these large images are quite considerable.



Updated 27/04/2026 16:44:22 Last Modified: Monday, 27 April 2026