How to set video resolution in planetary mode?

[chris1986]

Hello,

 

I recently purchased BYE (3.1.18) to use with my Canon 550D and a Celestron SLT127 for astrophotography. Up till now I used the Imaging function which produced amazing results for stacking Deep sky Images. Recently I tried planetary Imaging and wanted to utilize the planetary option since for such short exposures i figured that videos are easier to produce and handle for later processing. What i figured is, that i cannot change the video resolution within BYE for the videos. It only produces 1056x704 or 1024x680 (5x-mode) which is far less than the single picture Resolution (5184x3456) or even the fullhd-resolution which the Canon 550d supports (1920x1080). Now i don't know how to shoot Videos in higher Resolution using BYE. Especially for the moon i want to utilize the full Resolution of my camera and with 1024x680 a lot of Detail is getting lost in the final stacked Image.  

Any advice how to shoot fullHD Videos using BYE? Otherwise it's back to single shot series.

Thanks,

Christian

[astroman133]

BYE does not use the video mode of the camera. The main reason for this is that Canon does not support 3rd party control of the video functions.

Instead BYE captures LiveView frames and assembles them into a video on the PC. The problem is that LiveView frames are scaled in the camera to display on the LCD back panel of the camera. The highest resolution is to zoom to 5X. This gives you a 1-to-1 ratio between sensor pixels and image pixels. Fortunately using the 5x zoom mode works well for planetary imaging because even with the long focal length necessary for shooting the planets, they only take up a small portion of the field of view.

 

[admin]

Video resolution = quality = MYTH.

In-camera video resolution is a marketing thing, it has nothing to do with good quality.... in fact it destroys quality.

The best resolution you can get a 1:1 pixel resolution, meaning 1 pixel on the sensor = 1 pixel on your image. On most Canon camera you can achieve this perfect resolution in live view mode 5x zoom.

So, if you want the best resolution your camera can provide you set it to 5x zoom mode in live view and never look back. The only reason IMO where you want to *not* use the 5x feature is if you are imaging the moon and you want the full disk, otherwise it's 5x all the way. 

[chris1986]

Thanks for the infos. I was actually using the normal live view option for the full disk of the moon. I have a 1500mm focal length and therefore an already quite small FOV and not even get the full disk in that case. But for partial segments I'll try out the 5x mode. For the (full) disc I recorded 1000frames in the live view mode and 150 single frames. Unfortunately for stacking partial moon images I figured, that the available software has lots of trouble with aligning full raw images (pipp, autostakkert and registax) compared to the lower res avis. 

[astroman133]

I was imaging at a shorter focal length but was able to use the BYE Planetary mode at 5X to capture frames of part of the lunar disk. Then by moving the zoom box and repeating the capture I was able to collect 6 videos that between them covered the entire visible part of the disk. I reduced each video into a single image with RegiStax and then combined the 6 images into a single image with a program called RegiStar. This was back in 2012 when I first started using BYE with my XSi. The result came out quite good. Now if I could only find it.