How to Pre Process Faster?

[timtrice]

I have close to 1,000 images I will need to pre process this afternoon. These are my lights and all calibrations and sadly are necessary for my camera and location to get the best I can get. They are in four ISO groups ranging from 400 to 1250.

I'm planning on processing these by ISO one group at a time. But even with maybe 250 per group, my computer is just slow despite 2.7ghz processor and 4GB ram (if i recall correctly).

Is there anything I can do to speed this up as it will take hours. A few nights ago I did the same with over 500 images and PI kept giving errors forcing me to restart. Eventually I got through it but the final image turned out like crap. I have to start over but haven't yet.

So I'd prefer to save as much time as possible. The images I'm processing today are of Ison and to extract the comet and then the star field obviously will be a task in and of itself.

Any suggestions to get more performance would be significantly appreciated!

Thanks

[Phil Leigh]

What format are the files in? - if not FIT, batch convert them to FIT first.

[timtrice]

They're RAW and will do so but that's one of the longest parts. Right now I'm still getting dark and bias, flats later but I'm hitting road now and can't do that till this afternoon

[georg.viehoever]

Preprocessing FITS is much faster than .CR2. So convert them to FITS before doing pre-processing.

[Carlos Milovic]

Try Phil's suggestion. Since FITS allows proggresive reading, it will stress the RAM memory a lot less, and things will go faster.

[timtrice]

I thought the conversion was one of the first things the batch script did?

[pfile]

the conversion to fits happens as part of the ImageCalibration process - IC reads the CR2s, calibrates them and writes them out as fits.

rob