From: "Milton Aupperle" <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: October 28, 2005 12:40:34 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: Mars Dust Storm Movie

Hi Duane;

Actually it took from conceptional start to work finnish about 6 hours

to assemble the frames. I'm excluding the stacking part which took

around 6 to 8 hours. Since stacking is all done in batches in Astro

IIDC, it reqired almost no manual intervention, and that's "a good

thing" since this represensts 48 gigabytes of raw video to generate

the stacked frames. It's something I would not want to even

comntemplate with KIS or Lycos or any other manual stacking tool.

The hardest and longest part was balancing each stacked frame so that

it wasn't too "whacked" for either color, saturation or brightness -

which was done in Astro IIDC 2.1 (still in alpha). Not only was I

varying things when shooting at the scope, so was the weather with

haze or clouds and Mars chipped in some too with the dust storms.

Once I had created the balanced frames for each night sequence, I then

create a movie from all those frames in the correct order. Then I ran

that movie through Astro IIDC in a special hack mode that will align

the frames to each other without stacking them. After that, an old

(from my QuickTime 2.5 days which predates iMovie) tool I wrote was

used to create amovie form the aligned frames, add the text, crop the

640x480 down to 320x240 and then compress using mp4.

HTH..

Milton Aupperle

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, "Duane" <macastronomer@m...> wrote:

Applause!

That is really cool. I don't know if I have enough patience to do

that myself, but I sure

enjoy watching it when you do.

Duane

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Milton Aupperle <milton@o...> wrote:

Hi Alan;

On 27-Oct-05, at 4:59 PM, Alan Friedman wrote:

Fantastic! One of the best movies I have seen.

I don't think it's going to get 2 Thumbs up from Eibert though - nor

will it win an academy award either :) LOL..

Isn't it cool how the resolution appears so much better on the

moving image than the individual frames?

Yep, your brain fills in the missing details that are present in one

frame but not the next.

The other thing I like about doing these is that features are barely

perceptible frame to frame look more like actual features rather

than

artifacts when animated. My acid testing for proving I actually am

resolving something is to shoot it several times and see if it's

consistent or not. Sometime turbulence make sit nearly impossible,

but that's the way it goes.

TTYL..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@o...