Hi,
I have been rendering a set of panos from a dog training facility - lots of tiled walls and vertical bars. This has shown up the deficencies in my technique as small stitching errors. My setup is as follows: Canon 1DS Mk2, 15mm fisheye, 360 degree precision adjuste with precise nodal point settings. I take great care with leveling etc. but still seem to get small stitching errors in nearly every pano. I am using Stitcher Unlimited with smart blending.  Does anyone know how the stitching can be fine-tuned or am I just expecting too much?  
Any help greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Stephen.

Hi Stephen!
 
I have worked with two 1DS users (though not Mk2) in the past and the conclusion we came to was Stitcher was not up to the job. But that was a while ago (circa Stitcher 4.x).
 
Could you post some high quality JPEGs of an example pano at full res for me to download?
 
RE: "small stitching errors" - I do believe these are endemic to fisheye images. Let's see what you are dealing with.

Stephen
Leveling the camera & lens is not a requirement of accurate stitching. Shooting automobile interiors is often done with the cameras, lens & rotator turned horizontal (sideways). After stitching, the axis is tilted  within the image.
 
I disagree about "small stitching erros" being endemic to fisheye lenses. I've seen too many flawless images taken with the Sigma 8mm and Nikkor 10.5mm. I haven't seen as much work with the Canon 15mm

Hi Doug!
 
"I disagree about "small stitching erros" being endemic to fisheye lenses. I've seen too many flawless images taken with the Sigma 8mm and Nikkor 10.5mm."
 
I often get a little micro "burble" in the top cap of my panos with my 10.5mm; usually with a companion burble 180 degrees opposite. Sometimes they appear in other areas. The only way I can get rid of these anomalies is by using enblend or SmartBlend. i.e. the source images have these inherent errors in them.
 
Do you know where to contact the photographers who use the 10.5mm who do not need the corrective measures of enblend or SmartBlend... I would love to learn how to skip this step in my renders, as when I was shooting rectilinear.

Jim
There's 5 sets of photos taken with a Nikkor 10.5mm that can be downloaded from the home page of www.360precision.com. I've tried out a couple of them with RealViz Stitcher Unlimited DS 5.5 Demo and I can't find any problems with the results. I don't remember which interpolation I used.
 
The "burble" you're talking about sounds like a limitation of the the lens itself. The Sigma 8mm produces a hockey rink shaped image on most APS/DX cameras. The Field of View is 180° accross the curved part of the image. If a photographer takes 4 level shots around horizontal and stitches them there's a dimple at the top (the bottom too) in the examples I've seen. This isn't a "stitching error" is just a limitation of the FOV of the lens. The solution is either to shoot a Zenith shot or tilt the camera up 10-15° to create enough overlap to stitch. That eliminates the "Zenith burble."  
 
Any misalignments I've gotten testing RVSUDS with my Nikon Coolpix 5400/FC-E9 can usually be fixed with the "Calibrate Fisheye Lens" function. Particularly at the Zenith when aligning three 190° FOV circular fisheyes. I would imagine the same would apply to the 10.5mm

SeScott,
I have the canon 5d and use the 15mm fisheye as well. I tend to have the same poor stitching that you mention. I've tried to manually stitch but the documentation for this program is lacking. When you pay over $500 for a piece of software you tend to expect a nice manual to help you decipher the product.
 
I"m impressed with how close this software gets but am left in the dark  when it comes to getting it right on the mark.
 
Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Carl

jim this is a full frame fisheye by the way. not sure how to calibrate such a beast.

Hi Doug & Carl!
 
Doug
====
Indeed, I believe the burble and other random artifacts are, as you noted, a product of the 10.5 lens which Stitcher itself can not resolve using the just the geometry of the pano. I believe this is due to the nature of the fish eye lens which has a shifting entrance pupil (unlike rectilinear lenses) depending on the angle of incidence of the light entering the lens. And which is why in my experience, you need to use a blending program to adjust the discrepancies. I have calibrated my fish eye lens, tweaked the entrance pupil to the sub-millimeter level, and use a 6 around, 1-up; 2-down shooting schedule -  a 25% overlap (minimum) all around.
 
I do appreciate your reference URL as an example of no blending required: www.360precision.com but the site seems to be down for now. I do look forward to examining the source images for these files. Though I can't see them currently, would they by any chance be the "Oxford Market" panos? If so I worked with these images over a year ago - and it proved to be quite an interesting exchange on this forum with Matthew Rogers, who was one of the principals of 360precision at that time (and maybe still is), involving this topic.
 
 
Carl (Welcome to the forum!)
===================
You calibrate your fish eye in the "Edit" menu > "Properties" dialog.
Click on the "Calibrate fisheye lens" button.
You want your lens circle (red) to just touch all the corners of the image.
You can zoom in/out of this proxy by holding down the "CommandKey".
Hold down the "OptionKey" to adjust/drag the location of the proxy on your screen.

Jim
There is something going on with the www.360Precison.com website, it takes forever to load the home page, but does finally load.  
 
And yes the source picture sets I talking about are of the Oxford Market.  
 
I've stitched them into equirectangular projections/spherical images with both the demo of RealViz Stitcher Unlimited DS 5.5 and PTGui, then viewed them with FSPViewer to see how good the stitches are and I can't find any mis-alignments. That's pretty impressive considering all the boards & beams in the top of the image.