Hi Agisoft!
I've been playing around with Photoscan for a couple of months now and I think a really cool feature to add would be an "Add Videos" button (like, right next to the "Add Photos" button). I'm sure lots of others have already considered this so please +1 if you agree with my arguments and think this should become an awesome Photoscan feature.
Advantages of video input would include:
- very dense overlaps between frames
- reduced recording times
- often a larger depth of field compared to pictures
- ... (maybe other people can think of other advantages?)
Workflow could be:
- click "Add Video" button, select video and add it to Photoscan
- Photoscan extracts frames of just one second of video footage, in order to analyse frame rate and resolution + matches points within that one second (so say 30 frames) of footage in order to determine quality for Photogrammetry.
If after analyzing, the footage is deemed unsuitable for Photogrammetry, Photoscan alerts you that you will probably get poor results -> "do you wish to continue anyway?". - based on the above analysis Photoscan offers you several quality options from very low (bare minimum of frames extracted) to very high (based on the analysis Photoscan knows how many frames it should extract for a good model) to ultra ridiculously high (every single frame extracted just for overkill purposes).
-> remaining steps are the same as with pictures.
Now, before people start hitting me with a stick for suggesting video rather than picture input, consider the image in the attachment. It's a model of a shipwreck site generated based on 44 images extracted from a 2:11 minute unstructured video recording (as you can see from the camera positions) with a GoPro HD2 underwater.
So no EXIF data + fisheye lens + unstructured recording + underwater distortion = still a very good model. And this has worked time and time again on multiple projects
Regards,
Tom