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I want to build a camera rig with 3 canon 60d's to get some kind of panorama video. To verify my idea before building the real rig, I've implemented the setup in Blender to test all possible cases:

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Unfortunately I don't have much experience to stitch the images/videos correctly. How can I achieve that? Which software is suitable for that? How far the images of the cameras should overlap to get the best results? Besides the lens distortion, is there still something to consider?

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  • I to have thought about this idea, I saw it in a video explaining the different types of film sizes. they had a similar rig to this but the cameras faced inwards rather than out which gave them immense widescreens but there was a lot of trial and error back in the days and the cameras were huge filmmakeriq.com/lessons/…
    – Adam Mann Pro
    Jan 19, 2015 at 12:05

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You could try if kolor works for you. It's not free but it's made for your exact needs. Check out the gallery for what they did. Or you can do it manually as Adam explains.

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Here's a labor intensive solution.

http://punkoryan.com/2011/02/08/shooting-360-degree-video-with-four-gopro-hd-hero-cameras

Post if you have found another solution.
I have some 3 camera video panoramas from the 1980's I want to stitch. thnks chris

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  • Thanks Chris! +1 Welcome to video.se :) In order to have a solid answer here, it would be nice if you could explain more on how to use ptgui, because link only answers are poor practice, see: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/… I'll keep you posted if I've found a suitable solution. Thanks again.
    – p2or
    Jun 12, 2015 at 9:02
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From the ffmpeg docs

ffmpeg -i LEFT -i RIGHT -filter_complex framepack=sbs OUTPUT

framepack only works with 2 inputs, but you could merge 3 with a more complex filtergraph. sbs means side-by-side.

This doesn't correct for perspective or handle the overlap or anything else needed for it to look good, and the word "panorama" doesn't appear in the ffmpeg docs. If it's possible to do it properly with ffmpeg, it will require non-standard video filters. (And by properly, I mean without manually finding how many pixels to crop from the inputs before feeding them to framepack).

Just posting in case people were wondering if ffmpeg did this. Turns out the answer seems to be no. It does have filters called "perspective" and "lenscorrection", but nothing for smart-stitching panoramas that I can see.

edit: After further questions from poor, I googled for ffmpeg panoramic, and found http://krpano.com/. It says it can do panoramic video, but I'm not exactly sure WHAT it can do with it. It doesn't list any video formats as input formats, but maybe it can work with image-per-frame PNGs or JPEGs or something. Ok, no nvm, http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.misc.ptx/24263 says krpano can play back / "explore" panoramic video.

The other google hits were from people trying to make a panoramic single image from multiple frames of a panning shot.

Hmm, this looks interesting. Says it uses ffmpeg and pano tools. http://webuser.hs-furtwangen.de/~dersch/mp/MotionPanoramas.html Not sure it can actually stitch, though. Might just correct fisheye->panorama.

Maybe this one: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/hugin-ptx/NroNAfQTz-8 mentions http://www.video-stitch.com/. Commercial software with a free version that watermarks videos larger than 1024x768, but does have a download for Linux. (presumably a statically linked x86 32bit binary. It might use NVidia CUDA, at least on Windows.)

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  • Thanks for your response. For "exact" measured rigs this can be interesting maybe. Can you elaborate how to lens correct with it? New question on this?
    – p2or
    Feb 1, 2015 at 14:27
  • No, I can't sorry. All I know is that ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-all.html#lenscorrection exists, not what it does, how good it is, or what options it has.
    – Peter Cordes
    Feb 1, 2015 at 16:08
  • Very interesting. I asked a new question on this: video.stackexchange.com/questions/14772/… In terms of the process it could be useful/of interest to move the outer plates inside pixel wise to match the center plate. Is this also possible with ffmpeg? If yes could you add this to your answer?
    – p2or
    Feb 1, 2015 at 17:14
  • To crop the center stream before tacking the left/right streams onto it? (or crop each of them before attaching them to the center)
    – Peter Cordes
    Feb 2, 2015 at 8:22
  • ffmpeg alone isn't a good tool for this job, since you don't want to be calculating pixel offsets manual each time you do it. I posted some stuff I googled.
    – Peter Cordes
    Feb 2, 2015 at 8:42
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I would guess you would need to make a canvas size in your NLE to match the full width of the video ie: 3*1920=5760 with a height of 1080, I would assume this would work as long as your NLE and PC/Mac can handle the throughput of playing 3 videos simultaneously. baring in mind as well, who is going to be able to play this back at this resolution.

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    Perspective and depth issues as well as lens distortions are going to prevent this from working properly. It isn't that simple.
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Jan 20, 2015 at 0:53

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