hhmm, interesting thought Paul! The capture program I use is the 'QuickCapture' feature of the Logitech Quickcam suite that comes with the camera. I'm not doing any compressing of the avi, but thats not say the program isn't automatically...something to look into!
I've tried using K3CCDtools to capture with but had problems with saving the avi's on the laptop - the file is written but it contains no data... I wonder if thats due to the laptop having trouble with the larger (100meg+) files that it should be creating... laptop is a 1.4Ghz Centrino with 512 RAM.....
Sorry Andrew, will try to do it this afternoon, unfortunately I put my back out again last night and am in agony right now. I promise I will get to it soon.
Well here it is, my processing of the AVI; pardon the clumsy attempt at cloning out the dust speck. Processed with stack of 69 frames, deconvolution in astra image, colour and despeckle and brightness, contrast in photoshop.
The clouds persisted on staying last night so I took the oppertunity to sort out this low file size fiasco with the QC. Nuked the laptop and did fresh install of Win XP and only a few astro programs installed (cartes du ciel etc).
I then did some tests of 60sec dark avi's (cover left on camera), 15fps. The QC suite still only saved 7 odd meg files while K3CCDtools now seems to be working correctly . Using the default compression codec 'Cinepak' resulted in 775 frames out of 899 being dropped = approx 4meg file. I changed the codec to 'Logitech Video' which resulted in 17 frames dropped from 899 = approx 97meg file. I then tried 'Full Frame (UnCompressed)' which gave 50 frames dropped (all were after ~30sec mark into the 60sec recording) out of 898, but weights in at 186meg.
Version of K3CCDTools is 1.0.6.460, I know its a very old version but it doesn't have the registration requirements the newer versions do .
Hopefully testing of real world targets produce similar results and not the lock ups/file problems that plagued me previously.
Ice, not sure what the current versions of K3CCDTools are like but my version has it in Options->Settings-> this opens a window that has 'Video Capture' tab selected and in here is a button labelled 'Compress...' This opens another window 'Video Compression' where you can select different codecs/compressors - mine has 9 different codecs to choose from...
. Using the default compression codec 'Cinepak' resulted in 775 frames out of 899 being dropped = approx 4meg file. I changed the codec to 'Logitech Video' which resulted in 17 frames dropped from 899 = approx 97meg file. I then tried 'Full Frame (UnCompressed)' which gave 50 frames dropped (all were after ~30sec mark into the 60sec recording) out of 898, but weights in at 186meg. 
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