Folks, I seek your planetary imaging wisdom...
I've just upgraded from a Neximage to a QHY5ii and while experimenting I noticed something weird with capture rates on my 2 year old ultra portable (AMD E-350 dual core with 4GB memory running Windows 7 64-bit)...
The old Neximage was limited in that it could only capture at low frame rates in lossless mode, and at 640x480. But that's a well known limitation of the camera.
The new QHY can, theoretically, capture at up to 30fps at max resolution in raw mode. When I use the bundled EZPlanetary it gives a read out in the bottom of the status bar that gives displayed and 'HDD' fps. I read on the QHY forum that some people can't display at full rate on older machines because they can't handle that much throughout over USB...but I get the full 30fps reading and it looks legit...I tested this looking at a swaying tree in the garden in daylight and the motion is smooth and natural just as with the naked eye. So, it looks like my machine can at least get the data from the camera to the screen!
Anyway, when capturing the displayed rate stays the same but the HDD value varies between 2 and 7 fps
the software isn't reporting that it's dropping frames, and I get an output file with the number of frames requested, but how can I tell if the frames were all sequential and the machine was just buffering? What I really want to be sure of, before I go out in the field, is that I'm capturing every frame and therefore capturing the good seeing frames as well as the bad ones
But how can I be sure? How can I inspect the time code?
If it's a problem with my machine not having enough juice, then I can look into remedying that
but I've ran a few disk benchmarks and it all comes I roses with write speeds between 86 and 111MB/s...which should be more than enough, as USB(2.0) can't carry that.
Any suggestions as to how I can check what's going on?
More generally, what's the preferred capture software for planetary?
