Thank you everyone for your kind words of encouragement – it certainly was a long journey and I’m thankful that you enjoyed the results!
The original 160 off, 3888 x 2592 pixel exposures at 30 sec intervals from the Canon 40D were approx 10Mb each and of those, 30 were of a blank screen, or should I say clouds, so I discarded those and selected the best 130!
Here are the somewhat tortuous steps I had to take to produce the final movie:
- Canon Digital Photo Professional to batch convert the 160 images to 1400x933 pixel TIF files at approx 3.9Mb each.
- Corel PhotoPaint to batch convert the white/pink/blue hue of the Baader solar film to a more pleasing yellow by writing a macro to adjust colour saturation and levels of the yellow/orange components. This produced 1400x933 pixel JPGs at approx 0.5Mb each.
- ImagesPlus to Align the images and Crop to 800x600 pixels.
- ImagesPlus to resize the aligned images to 400x300 pixels, approx 36Kb each.
- K3CCDTools to produce the AVI.
- Advanced Gif Animator to produce the final animated gif.
Cheers
Dennis