FFT registration script

[multiweb]

Like a lot of other people around Sydney I did my first solar/lunar timelapses with the 4th of June Partial Moon Eclipse and the June 6th Transit of Venus. Did a little research on the best way of aligning all those subs. They're 14MP each, 400 lunar and 800 solar approx.

CCD Stack and Photoshop have an alignment method that seems to work but you have to load all the frames into the software prior to align them which is a bit daunting memory wise unless you do batches of 50 let's say and that's tedious.

PI has a different approach which is more attractive. You can batch a large number of files and output them separately to another directory. I used the script FFTRegistration.js which seems to do the job. Just one little issue. It outputs to FIT and I would like to output 16bit scaled TIFF files which is what I'm feeding it.

I have already processed all the variations in luminosity, noise reduction, levels, color saturation, etc... with LR Timelapse and Adobe Lightroom 4.1. So all my files are spot on but for the alignment. I don't want to rescale or modify the dynamic range or alter the histogram and colour balance in any way. I just want to register the discs (lunar/solar) in each file so I can load the output sequence in AE or Premiere to encode a final video and also keep some full res to stack/composite as stand alone shots/blends.

The image container allows you to output to a specific file format but this script doesn't. Unless I missing something. Any help/pointer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

[georg.viehoever]

Look at the BatchFormatConversion script that is available in the Script/BatchProcessing menu entry. It allows to change the format of files, and you can also choose the bit depth.
Georg

[multiweb]

Look at the BatchFormatConversion script that is available in the Script/BatchProcessing menu entry. It allows to change the format of files, and you can also choose the bit depth.
Georg

Thanks Georg. So you're saying output to FITS then batch convert back to 16bit TIFF with the Image Container?

[georg.viehoever]

Yes, that's how it should be possible to do!

[multiweb]

Thanks Georg. I had a look at the script and there is a line you can edit to output to TIFF without a suffix as well. Will try when I finished batching my 800+ solar shots. Not long to go now. It takes about 55min to do 100 frames (4592x2164 24bit TIFF input). System is I7 24GB RAM. I tried to run an action to register the TIFF files in Photoshop CS6. It batches quite well and it is very memory efficient but it will not register the discs if the offset between two frames is too important other than that it's much faster. I suspect with guided shots it would be good enough and work. So far PixInsight is the only piece of software that has done it all for me. I tried Registax 6 and AVIStack 2. No luck either with accurate registration. I guess they're more suited with video input and very little error in adjacent frames mostly related to seeing during the sequence acquisition with a DMK or other. I shot the transit with a SONY Nex-5 in 30s intervals, down to 2s on last contact so there is a fair bit of translation in DEC between frames.