Talking Turkey with RICOH THETA

Just sharing some Thanksgiving photos. This was the first year that I spent some time recording my family’s Thanksgiving activities with a 360 degree camera. I’m good enough now setting up shots and being less intrusive that it almost feels easier than having people pose for regular pictures. The RICOH THETA seems to nicely fade and people just keep doing what they’re doing. I like that.

Here’s a first toast, with family and friends focused on the camera. Sometimes, that level of focus produces more interesting picture. It’s a cherished tradition each year to take stock and talk about what we’re thankful for:

Throughout the afternoon - we eat around 1pm so we have the day to digest - I had set up the camera on a homemade tripod in the middle of the dining area. I set interval timing to 10 minutes per shot at first and then 2 minutes per shot. What you see here covers about an hour of chatting and eating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4g_llQe0tE&feature=youtu.be

And… after several hours of eating and sitting around talking, it’s a mini family tradition to go to the nearby park and move around some. We captured us kicking around the soccer ball with a RICOH THETA S, made sure not to video for too long so the size of the video file doesn’t get too big, transferring the video from the THETA to my smartphone using the THETA+ App, then editing the video using the THETA+ Video app (turning into Tiny Planet, trimming ends so you don’t see me turning the camera on and off, and adding the “libra” filter to make the sky color pop a little more). Probably 10 minutes of effort, total. Other that working to get my family members to cooperate.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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This is wonderful. Is there any reason you didn’t use the higher resolution images in the timelapse to produce a video at 4K resolution? I’m just wondering if it is a limitation of the app?

In this video that my son made, you can set the quality to 2160s (4K). The awesome video of the Turkey is limited to 1080s.

Dammit, didn’t really think about that!

Do you normally have your THETA set to take still images at 2048x1024 instead of the default 5376x2688? I’m just wondering why the timelapse software did not take the higher-resolution images by default? Did the software you used automatically scale the images from 5376x2688 down to the 1260x1080 video?

Is it a setting? I don’t use the apps for timelapse.

Also, with the THETA+ video app, is there a way to rotate the video to get rid of the wide black borders on each side?

For example, in this type of tiny planet video, there’s no wide black border.

Is there a way to set the filter on the THETA+ Video app to eliminate the border?

Thanks for testing the apps.

The images are set at 5376x2688. I first had it taking them at 10 minutes intervals, and then switched to 2 minute intervals. I think you took many more images, and over a longer time span, and were able to overlay them and get the 2160p (4k), maybe? And, yes, I’m just using the THETA+ Video app, I think I needed to take the original video in landscape mode in order to not have the black border. I haven’t looked into this too deeply, however.

I didn’t overlay the images. It seems like the THETA App automatically reduces the resolution of the images? It may do this to make the video file size smaller. If this isn’t a user-configurable setting, it means that the video quality of timelapse videos is significantly worse than other methods of producing timelapse.

For example, the timelapse that Svendus made is much higher quality resolution.