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Jay
Autostakkert 3 procedures
Autostakkert 3 Basic User Guide
Image stacking prerequisite - use between 1000 and 2000 frames of AVI video file or jpeg frames to stack. Number of frames and length of video depends on quality of seeing conditions
Open Autostakkert 3 on your laptop or PC
“Expand” or “Limit Frames” options are not normally used or required
Press (1) Open button to select and load your image files
A single frame image of your selected file should appear in the right hand side window
Image Stabilisation - set to “Surface” for close up lunar or planetary surface images or set to “Planet” for whole lunar or planetary images with black space surrounding the planet or moon
When “Surface” is selected a box pops up called “Improved Tracking” just tick it. Also 2 other options appear “Expand” or “Cropped” . Try either option to check quality of your results
When “Planet” is selected a box pops up called “Dynamic Background” just tick it
Next is “Quality Estimator” tick “Laplace” only for poor quality video and increase “Noise Robust” to 6,7 or 8. For average quality video set “Noise Robust” to 3, 4 or 5. For good quality video set “Noise Robust” to 1 or 2.
Set Quality Estimator to default or Local (AP)
Press (2) Analyse button - set reference frame to “Auto size”
Analyse will provide a Quality Graph showing best to worse frames from left to right and a green quality line which provides an average of the best to worse frames
Stack Options - click on TIF file
Use the “Frame percentage to stack” boxes to choose the number of frames to stack. Using some default values like 25% in 1st box, 50% in 2nd box and 75% in 3rd box (leave 4th box empty as I found 3 different stacked results enough to compare )will give a good balance of stacking across your whole video and allow to compare results. Your output stack files will show folders P25, P50 and P75 so you can choose the best one out of the them.Alternatively you can hover your mouse over the Quality Graph and select an area on the graph just where the green quality line just passes the 50% horizontal line. Press CTRL on keyboard and right click mouse at the same time and the selected frame percentage will appear in the first left hand side box which usually ends up being between 20% and 40%. I usually leave box 2,3 and 4 empty.( this is a short cut way to select the best percentage frames but only gives you one selected percentage option)I usually get good results anyway using this method )Try both methods and compare your stacking results.
Go to “Frame View” window and set your align points automatically or manually on bottom left hand side buttons. Set between 100 to 500 align points depending on Surface or Planet. Surface option will require more align points to produce more detail. More align points will take the computer longer to process
In “Stack Options” do not select “Sharpened” or “RGB Align” as this can be done later in Registax 6
Tick “Save in Folders” so that your new stacked folders will be placed in the same folder as your original video files
Do not use “Advanced”settings like “Drizzle” or “Resample” as these reduce image quality
Press (3) Stack button / the status box will show the stacking progress with green ticks top to bottom until complete
Stacked image file will be saved as a P number in the same folder as original video file ready for further processing in Registax 6
Cheers
Martin
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