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Polish photographers Radosław Piotrowski and Piotr Galas took panorama photography to another level as they successfully created a seamless 360-degree gigapixel panorama of the City Stadium in Poznan called the Red bull Project in witness of the Red Bull X-Fighters Freestyle Motocross Event last August.

Experience the 360° gigapixel panorama:  2011 Red Bull X-Fighters FMX competition in Poznan’s Stadium

Radosław has panorama photography as a hobby turned into business over the years. Being the head of this whole project, he assigned himself as the one in charge of the photography and since Piotr is great in programming, he was assigned for the processing procedures.

Materials Used were the following:

• Kolor’s Panorgear, the gigapixel head

Created by Kolor, the world’s reference for panoramic imaging solution, the motorized Panorgear allows you to create large panoramas from hundreds even thousands of images giving you extraordinary pano experience.

The reason why Kolor’s Panorgear according to Radosław is, “It was the only way to freeze the shooting remotely on a 15-meter high mast during the results presentation when the light was quite variable. A 145 focal length provided a necessary zoom and autofocus helped us to overcome a focus problem. It is worth to mention that white light was turned on only during jumps, which is under two minutes for one rider.” He recommended Panorgear to all 360-degree enthusiasts as he added by saying, “In my opinion, if it was quicker it would be almost perfect. Collaboration with computer is easygoing with Papywizard software. Wireless control allows to move the head back and reshoot an image if it’s necessary, in the absence of direct access. We use masts and poles very often.”

• Kolor’s Autopano Giga Software

“Shooting event panoramas has a big inconvenience. You can’t reshoot an image if something went wrong. We had to manually find most of the common points between the pictures. Fortunately, this work was enough to mark proper areas and then let the software assemble the photos by automatically adding more control points. We manually positioned a part of the images because the lack of overlap I mentioned before. Color anchors and image grouping were very useful options.”

Reference: http://www.kolor.com/blog-en/2011/09/02/red-bull-freestyle-motocross-2011-giga-panorama-panogear-head-autopano-giga-by-radoslaw-piotrowski-piotr-galas/