Thank you Al, David, Stu, Matt, Jeanette & Jen, I appreciate you looking at, and commenting on, the animation – I probably made it sound more painful than it really was!
I did most of the processing in CS6 but had to use CS5 for the final animation as it seems that the “Animation” capability disappeared between CS5 and CS6?
The main processing challenge was that CS5/CS6 kept running out of memory with the larger 5D Mk III files, so I had to open small batches to manually align, crop and re-size to reduce the file size.
Once that was achieved, I recorded an Action to apply a couple of the Topaz Labs plug-ins (Micro Contrast Enhancement & Photo Pop) and saved the output to a new folder. I then used the onOne PhotoTools 2.6 plug in to produce the more natural looking yellow colour (Auto Tone & Colour) compared to the cooler white of the Baader solar film. Thankfully, this was done in Batch mode whilst I made myself a refreshing cup of Earl Grey tea...
Finally, I generated the animation in CS5 but when saving for web as an animated gif, I kept encountering the dreaded out-of-memory error message problems, but then, magically, during one session immediately after a re-boot, it just worked.
I see a new Win 7 box with 32GB of RAM and an Intel 480 GB SSD in my future!
Cheers
Dennis