Stretching 43 Comet Images....

[sreilly]

So going back to 2015 I discover some long forgotten images I took of Comet Lovejoy and they have been processed but now that I've found them I want to make a video (avi). I looked at the feature in Blink and it went through the stack but each time it fails to execute an external program to complete. So now I just want to get as far as stretching these frames. I have no issues with the automatic strecth feature used in Blink but is there a way to use this and then save the stretched images. I realize the blink images are just screen stretched but can they or is there a process to strect a batch of like frames at one time versus doing 43 one at a time?

[pfile]

by necessity the movie button saves the stretched files to disk in the directory you have specified in the interface. they are not just screen stretched, they are actually stretched. by default these are PNG files. you should be able to change the save format if you don't like PNG... but anyway the stretched files should be right there on disk (provided you didn't tick "delete video files")

by the way if you download ffmpeg for windows and install it somewhere, you can change the "program" to "C:\wherever\ffmpeg.exe and then pixinsight should find it.

rob

[sreilly]

Thanks Rob,

I had done that thing I'm not supposed to an "assumed" it was embedded in PI but with you guidance I'm on the right path. I did get it to work and created a folder on the root drive , found the executable in the /Bin folder and pointed it to that location. Now to get the speed adjustment to a bit slower. I was hoping it would read from the Blink process but maybe not. The process set to 0.10 gave a good smooth look but it doesn't quite get there in the avi file. Need to get in the shop and plane some boards....maybe play a bit later.

Thanks Again,

Steve

[pfile]

ffmpeg is like one of those giant swiss army knife displays you see at the hardware store with 10,000 tools sticking out. there are truly a zillion ways to configure it. but there are a lot of tutorials out there which can point you in the right direction on quality and encoder settings.

i think besides the output FPS setting there are also settings saying how long each input frame should last in the output. i have made similar movies but i didn't write down my configuration so i'm not much help!

rob