Creating Panoramas with the Mavic Pro

RCPano supports the DJI Mavic Pro. The Mavic is one of the best selling drones in Germany and due to its outstanding features interesting for beginners and advanced pilots.

With this drone DJI did not mount the camera below the body but at the front, thereby reducing the height of the drone and simplifying transport and storage of the drone.

Rotation of the Mavic For the creation of panorama images the position at the nose is not optimal. The camera is far out of the nodal point (no parallax point). With objects near the camera this can lead to stitching problems as you might know from panoramic images taken with a cell phone.

As with the other drones RCPano tries to compensate the suboptimal position of the camera by rotating the drone around the center of the camera, not the center of the drone.

This can increase the quality of the shots significantly.

There are some things you should keep in mind when creating images for panoramas with the Mavic Pro:

  • Weight
    Due to its low weight the Mavic is more prone to wind than its "fat" relatives. If the drone is positioned and ready to shoot a small puff is sufficient to change its position in a way that stitching of the images might become problematic. Expect that not all panoramas will be error free when shooting in windy conditions or at low altitude.
  • Autofocus
    You will find a lot of complaints regarding the picture quality of the Mavic Pro on the internet. Most of them can be traced back to wrong usage of the autofocus. DJI is constantly enhancing its DJI GO App to make the auto focus more user friendly. To enable focussing in RCPano, autofocus has to be enabled in the DJI GO app. For the creation of panorama images I suggest to turn off the auto focus for every picture in the program settings and manually focus to a point approximately between the nearest and farthest objects before beginning the shooting.
    If auto focus is turned on, RCPano will try to focus a point about 10 degrees below the horizon when the camera is tilt upwards, otherwise it will focus to the center of the screen. Focussing can take some seconds and might not be successful with some subjects or scenes.
  • Camera
    The camera of the Mavic has a smaller field of view than the ones of its bigger relatives. This is no disadvantage, but keep in mind that you have to shoot more images, which increases the time to create all panorama images. RCPanos' optimization of the number of images comes in handy here.
    The Mavic is capable to shoot images in portrait mode. In portrait mode the number of positionings needed increases, which in turn increases the chance of stitching errors.

 

If the weather conditions and settings of the drone are fine, you can shoot good panoramas with the Mavic. With bigger an heavier drones your panoramas will be better and easier to stitch. But the Mavic almost fits in your pocket and you always have it with you.