Planetary captures sometimes don't finish

[gfunkernator]

I am using Backyard EOS 3.1.18.  When capturing 2500 frames into an AVI it will sample the fps, begin the capture, then when 2500 frames are captured, in that same area where it showed the fps and frames captured, it shows the word "memory" with a number counting down from about 900.  When all works properly, when the counter reaches 0 I see the queue in the camera panel blinking "1".  Then eventually I hear the tone indicating that the capture is complete.  I check to see if the AVI was created and it was.  When it does not work, the memory counter never reaches zero, will stop anywhere from 200-500, then nothing happens.  No tone, no queue indicator, no AVI file.  This started happening in version 3.1.18 for me.  I am using a Canon EOS Ra in "M" mode.  Also no errors were shown in the log.

 

Note that this has happened only when I try to capture more than 2000 frames.  I am using a Surface Pro 6 with Windows 10 8GB RAM.  The RAM usage never goes above 4 or 5GB while capturing AVI's through BYE.

[astroman133]

LiveView is always on while you are in Frame & Focus, Planetary, or Drift Align. It does not shut off even when you change between those functions.

[gfunkernator]

10 minutes ago, astroman133 said:

LiveView is always on while you are in Frame & Focus, Planetary, or Drift Align. It does not shut off even when you change between those functions.

Unless it shuts down due to overheating or whatever safeguards are in place to save the electronics right?

[astroman133]

As Guylain said, you are not capturing AVIs. You are capturing JPGs that BYE is turning into an AVI.

Memory does not seem to be the problem. Neither does the memory usage by BYE which is limited to 2GB, regardless of how much RAM you have. The 2GB limitation is the max size of a 32-bit .NET application.

Neither do I think that capturing 2000 JPG images and then assembling them into an AVI is the problem. I think that the camera is shutting down because the LiveView limit has been reached; however the camera calculates that.

[gfunkernator]

12 minutes ago, astroman133 said:

As Guylain said, you are not capturing AVIs. You are capturing JPGs that BYE is turning into an AVI.

Memory does not seem to be the problem. Neither does the memory usage by BYE which is limited to 2GB, regardless of how much RAM you have. The 2GB limitation is the max size of a 32-bit .NET application.

Neither do I think that capturing 2000 JPG images and then assembling them into an AVI is the problem. I think that the camera is shutting down because the LiveView limit has been reached; however the camera calculates that.

Ok so if the live view is shutting down then why am I still seeing a live view of my target?  I can tell it is live especially in my case because Jupiter is somewhat low in the sky I can see the atmosphere fluctuating in front of it. 

 

Sorry if I said capturing avi's before after being told that jpegs are being captured then combined into a single avi.

[astroman133]

We are going in circles and I am at a loss as to how to move forward.

[admin]

There is nothing more to discuss here before the backgroundworker is used.  The backgorundworker will  push all the heavy lifting into a background thread using a single CPU to make sure there is no cross thread/memory contention.  If the issue is memory contention this should solve it.

If this still occurs with the background worker enabled I'm afraid I'm out of ideas...perhaps forgo the AVI and just capture the JPGS and see if this works.

Regards

[astroman133]

In your original post, you said

"When capturing 2500 frames into an AVI it will sample the fps, begin the capture, then when 2500 frames are captured, in that same area where it showed the fps and frames captured, it shows the word "memory" with a number counting down from about 900. "

When I capture 2500 frames into an AVI I do not ever see the word memory with some number counting down. In my version of BYE (3.2.0 RC 6) the circle where the frame rate and image counter were displayed is empty while the AVI is being displayed. This may be a clue.

BTW, I am running Windows 10 x64 on an i7 system with 8GB of RAM.

[admin]

When a liveview frame is downloaded from the camera it is stored in a memory queue, then the next live view is downloaded and is added into the memory queue in a FIFO fashion.

A background thread, separate from the one downloading liveview frames, takes each image in the memory queue and save it to disk until no more images is left in the queue.  When the planetary recording is over, if images are left in the queue, you'll get a countdown with the number of images in the queue until they are all written to disk.

If you have a fast ssd drive and your system is able to write all files almost simultaneously you'll never see the memory countdown.

If you have a slower write speed hard drive you'll get the memory countdown on recordings with lots of frames.

Regards,

[astroman133]

So if the queue is still showing frames, but they are not being processed, then perhaps there is a bug in the queue management? Or a hard drive getting full???

 

[admin]

23 minutes ago, astroman133 said:

So if the queue is still showing frames, but they are not being processed, then perhaps there is a bug in the queue management? Or a hard drive getting full???

 

Perhaps.

[gfunkernator]

The queue indicator never said 1 or 2.  The memory countdown at the top right where it  previously showed the frame count would end before going to 0.  The surface uses solid state storage.  Drive storage capacity never reached it's max.  

[admin]

Try the backgorundworker, nothing else matters until you try this.

[astroman133]

The queue indicator would not show a number until there was a full set of JPG images to be combined.

My system has a SATA rotating hard drive. I get a LiveView frame rate a bit above 15 fps.

[admin]

22 minutes ago, astroman133 said:

The queue indicator would not show a number until there was a full set of JPG images to be combined.

My system has a SATA rotating hard drive. I get a LiveView frame rate a bit above 15 fps.

Correct, while recording count priority is on the number of frame remaining to take/capture.... then is shifts to display the images in the queue until it hits 0... then and only then the avi encoding starts if selected.

[admin]

2 hours ago, gfunkernator said:

I wanted to confirm that enabling the Background Worker Process did the trick!  I haven't tried capturing over 2000 frames but each 2000 frame capture completed successfully.  Thanks!

This is great.

[admin]

You may also try VirtualDub to encode the AVI... it's much more efficient than the built-in commercial encoder I use in BYE... because of copyright I can not bundle VirtualDub with BYE/BYN so you need to download it separately.