Planetary imaging with Canon "LiveView"

dean_kos · Post by **dean_kos** » Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:04 pm

Do we know of a way to capture the live view feed as an avi or something similar? I must admit I not had a great deal of success with live view and tend to just look through the camera viewfinder to focus when attached to the scope. The only time I have found it useful was imaging the moon .....

DRatledge · Post by **DRatledge** » Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:44 pm

Dean,
This is the software to capture the live view stream as an avi:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eos-movrec/
Depending on the Canon model you will need to set live view to either 5x or 10x to get 1 pixel equal to one pixel. Try 5x first. For Saturn I guess you may need to up the ISO to get a decent frame rate although I wouldn't go higher than 800. The Canons are USB2 so a high frame rate is possible and desirable - by high I mean 10 to 20 frames per second.
You can use non-magnified 1x live view to centre the object then switch to magnified view - it isn't magnified view really - it is one to one pixel outputting just the middle part of the chip.

dean_kos · Post by **dean_kos** » Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:59 pm

Ok David great stuff thanks, will give it a bash next clear night .

bbones · Post by **bbones** » Mon Apr 23, 2012 9:45 pm

Hi David.

Now got my 600D streaming to my PC / Laptop, I'm also able to see what it's recording on the live view. looks like i'm going to be very busy.

You never said what you were sitting in, looks like a single seater glider?

Thanks

Bill

DRatledge · Post by **DRatledge** » Tue Apr 24, 2012 11:52 am

Bill,
For you with the 600D you have an even better option!
Check the manual but I believe that this model supports movie crop mode (see video recording menu). This is built-in and doesn't require capture software (but see later). What it does is allow movie recording of the central 640x480 pixels direct to the camera's memory card. This is much much faster than sending it down a USB cable so up to 60 frames per second are possible. This is a similar rate to that of the specialist (and expensive) planetary cameras that the experts like Damien Peach use - their wonder pictures are not from webcams!

There is a slight snag in that the video is recorded as a .MOV file and as yet Registax doesn't support .MOV files - I guess this will change very soon. In the mean time you will need to convert the MOV files to AVI using other software such as SUPER.

The 60 frames per second means many more frames to select just the best so it is well worth the trouble. You won't need as much magnification either as the pixels in the latest Canons are smaller.

PS sitting in a Caterham (borrowed!)

bbones · Post by **bbones** » Tue Apr 24, 2012 12:03 pm

I will take my manual with me and take a closer look at the settings and carry out some test recordings. Will keep you updated.

OK on the Car looked like a small Glider, how wrong can you be:-)

Cheers and thanks again

Bill

Amartin · Post by **Amartin** » Tue Apr 24, 2012 12:37 pm

David - PS sitting in a Caterham (borrowed!)
Was it a proper Caterham, or a Robin Hood kit? I owned both a Caterham & a Cobra... Sadly both now departed!

rwilkinson · Post by **rwilkinson** » Fri May 18, 2012 6:57 am

DRatledge wrote:Registax doesn't support .MOV files - you will need to convert the MOV files to AVI using other software such as SUPER.

This video conversion business seems to be a complete minefield - I've been experimenting with one of Dave Walker's .MOV files and a number of different programs. I thought I'd hit on a solution yesterday, but that only worked on one the four PCs I tried (depending on which video codecs are installed).

I've now found a method which works on all my (WindowsXP) machines: use the WinFF program:
http://winff.org/html_new/ (which is just a simple front-end for the FFMPEG conversion engine)
to create an MPEG-1 .MPG file (I've made a custom "preset" to do this) which RegiStax5.1 can read OK.

The additional advantage of this program is that it can crop the video stream when converting (i.e. discard unwanted pixels). So as Saturn appears only in the lower-left quadrant of Dave's .MOV 1920x1080 video, my .MPG version is just 860x540, and all the subsequent processing should therefore be four times faster?

Next to try this on Keith's Windows7 64-bit machine...

rwilkinson · Post by **rwilkinson** » Fri May 25, 2012 7:20 pm

Further to the discussion of conversion software for Canon .MOV files, Dave Walker has a couple more suggestions:

Apparently ZoomBrowserEX can export a MOV to AVI: anybody who owns a Canon camera should have a copy already

This might be worth a look:-
http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm
- download “The RAD Video Tools”

But if you choose the uncompressed video conversion option the files will eat up GB of disk space!

DRatledge · Post by **DRatledge** » Fri May 25, 2012 8:22 pm

Ross,
Sounds like Dave was using HD video not video crop mode. The latter is best for the planets as it is just the central 640x480 pixels of the chip.
SUPER Video Editor is recommended as this converts the mov file to lossless avi. If you convert a lossy video file to a different lossy video file then the results are usually rubbish. As you point out lossless (uncompressed) avi files are gigantic (especially if not 640x480) but that's the price you have to pay for a useable conversion. I suspect the registax people will be working on mov support and this is just a temporary problem.

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