From: "Steve Bryson" <stevebeam@yahoo.com>

Date: November 22, 2005 12:48:15 AM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: Having fun with my Fire-i, but what about better cameras?

Hi Milton - Thanks for the quick reply.  Some followup:

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

--- snip ---

I just tried the alignment and stacking in Astro IIDC for the first  

time,

and I'm very impressed with its ease and quality!

The next version is better.

Can't wait!

--- snip ---

That works if you just copy and paste each frame into a new movie and  

then do a Save As. It will preserve the 16 bit nature of the movie.  

that's exactly what I'm doing.

--- snip ---

Will that preserve the 16 bit depth of movies using mpgs?

MPEG is a horrible lossy format. It's fine for showing people your  

end product, but it's really bad for a format.

What format do you recommend?  In your documentation you specifically 

refer to loading mpegs and AVI for stacking.  Perhaps I'm confused: 

I thought .mov is a form of mpeg.  I've been sticking to the .mov 

format.

AVIs are somewhat problematic on 10.4 since the AVI codec doesn't

work there yet.  But my laptop is still 10.3...

I'm not sure what your saying here. Your monochrome camera should not  

needed any other codecs for QuickTime movies. The bayer codec is only  

needed if your playing back color movies recorded with Astro IIDC.

QuickTime Pro won't load AVI movies without the AVI codec, so we're (hopefully

temporarily) out of luck on 10.4.  I'm only mentioning 

it because you mention AVI in the docs.  

--- snip ---

The main limitation with the Unibrain cameras are that they are  

noisy

(both pixel and fixed pattern), have limited gain boosting (which is

a good thing considering noise levels) and have a narrower dynamic

range (the range problem is because of the TSLB15V01 processing

chip). All cameras built that use the TSLB15V01 processing chip

suffer form these problems.

--- snip ---

It actually will be 1 bit better than the 640x480 Unibrain or the  

earlier Imaging Source 21F04 series. There is a flaw in the TSLB15V01  

chip set that Texas Instruments developed. Basically the TSLB15V01  

chip  delivers 7 bits and you get a range of values from 0 to 254,  

but as gapped pairs of values.

--- snip ---

The Imaging Source's new 640x480 cameras (21BF04 or 21AF04) don't use  

the TSLB15V01 chip set, so they don't have that problem at all, nor  

do most higher end cameras.

I suppose that explains some of the dropouts I see in the histograms?  

Thanks for all the info!

Steve