How to mount a Ricoh Theta m15 spherical camera to a DJI Inspire 1. The Ricoh Theta m15 is a $300 360º spherical stills and video camera. It is designed to be fun to use (it reminds me of the memory eraser in Men in Black), and has only 3 buttons: take a picture, turn on/off, and enable/disable WiFi. The interface is a little strange, but allows you to take pictures, start/stop video, and connect via wireless to a smartphone to view, share, and enable interval shooting (timelapse).
It’s easy to take pictures with the Theta m15, but almost everything else is awkward and/or difficult to do. For example, to shoot video, you have to turn the camera off and then hold the on/off and WiFi buttons down to turn it back on to enter video mode. A connected smartphone is required to set up interval shooting, and you can only delete pictures and video by connecting the camera a smartphone or computer (deleting videos requires a computer—can’t do it from the phone).
Viewing and sharing is a mess as well, and requires custom players for mobile devices, computers, and the web. I’m reminded a lot of trying to share and interact with Lytro living pictures, only this is a worse experience because the sharing environment doesn’t have any standalone capability. To share to the web, you must first create a Theta360 account using a Facebook or Twitter account. If you do both, you end up with 2 accounts—you can’t associate both with a single account. To share, you must also post to social. You can’t just upload to Theta360 without posting to social. (Update: you can share without posting to social—just un-tick all sharing options when you post, and you’ll get a chance to click through to the Theta360 site after the uploda happens. If you don’t click through to get the URL, you have to login to the site on the web to get the URL; you can’t browse from the app.) Sharing also happens one picture or video at a time. While this helps users to be selective about sharing, it is annoying that there is no concept of private or batch sharing. For privacy, you could create a Theta360 account with Facebook, authenticate the app, and then change app permission to “only me” instead of “Friends” or “Public,” but most people would probably give up long before hacking privacy settings.
It is also possible to share spherical video to YouTube, although the current process is painful. To share a Ricoh Theta m15 video to YouTube, you have to do the following:
1. Connect the camera to a computer and copy the video to your local drive. The Theta shows up as a camera and doesn’t allow direct access to the filesystem, so you have to use a supported app to transfer media.
2. Drag the video into the Theta Spherical Viewer, which will decompress it, process it for local viewing, and allow you to export the converted version as a file. This is extremely processor intensive. A 3-minute video, the longest video the Theta m15 can capture, took minutes to process using my modern Mac Pro (maxing out 8 CPUs). The Ricoh Theta viewer app is an Adobe Air app, and the installer isn’t recognized as being from an identified developer in OS X, requiringa trip to the Privacy Preferences Pane before install. Most people will fail here. The app itself, in addition to requiring lots of CPU resources, has an interface that will make you feel dirty.
3. Inject the appropriate 360 metadata for YouTube. This can be done via an app for Mac / Windows, or by using a Python script (both available at the link, above). The Python script is convenient, but obviously requires familiarity with the Python and the command line. The app is terrible and doesn’t support drag & drop nor keyboard shortcuts. You have to use the mouse to click on File->Open in the menu, find a single converted video to open (from step 2), click on “inject and save,” and then specify an output directory. You get a 3rd file from this step.
4. Upload to YouTube the video that has been converted by the Ricoh app and has had metadata injected by the YouTube app.
Here’s a sample video on YouTube:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2nUN0srOQ4&w=560&h=315]
The process is not fun, but is currently the only way to get spherical videos from the Theta to YouTube.
Mounting the Ricoh Theta m15 to an Inspire 1
The Ricoh Theta m15 is fun to use, but has a pretty horrible design if you want to mount it somewhere. It literally features no integrated attachment possibilities, and doesn’t even support a good way to put it down on a table. You can lay it on its side, which doesn’t feel very secure, or use the included case to protect the lenses before setting it down. I assume that everyone will end up with a scratched lens or two not long after purchase.
To mount the Ricoh Theta m15 to my DJI Inspire 1, I used a GoPro curved helmet extension kit and a standard GoPro flat adhesive mount, which I attached to the rear plate on the Inspire. I used self-fusing silicone tape to attach the camera to the extension. I love self-fusing silicone tape because it’s elastic, fuses completely, and is adhesive-free so it can be removed easily (you have to cut it). I put a small bit of Sorbothane between the extension and the camera for vibration isolation.
Longer term, I’d like to hang the camera from the bottom of the Inspire 1 using fishing line, but I didn’t have time to make the appropriate mounting mechanism.
Still, using the camera to take spherical images from the air is a ton of fun. I found that shooting in 5-second interval mode yields the best results, and will likely stick to that mode when this camera is up in the air.
Aerial 360 of the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, taken from @djiglobal #inspire1 and Ricoh Theta m15 #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
https://theta360.com/widgets.jsHave you experimented with aerial, spherical video? Please post some links, if you have!
Special thanks to Romeo Durscher for taking the first two images in this post. Romeo also flew the 2nd Inspire 1 that you see in these shots. A video from his perspective is over on Facebook.