iPrep software - flats, darks and hot pixel removal for videos

[michaelmorris]

If, like me, you're into capturing video of fast moving astronomical objects such as meteors and the ISS, there isn't much out there to allow you to apply astronomical processing techniques to videos. iPrep is a great little piece of software from the makers of the well-used iMerge astro-mosaic-making software that I've recently discovered.

I use a Samsung SDC-435 video camera as an all sky camera for capturing videos of bright meteors. https://www.youtube.com/user/michaelmorris4

However, I have a problem with three bright hot pixels to the right of centre of the field of view. iPrep lets me remove these hot pixels on every frame of a video.

To prepare a ‘hot pixel dark frame, I used VirtualDub software to save a single frame from one of my videos as bitmap file. I then loaded this bitmap into Photoshop and painted out all the stars and brighter area (leaving the hot pixels), and saved this file as ‘hot pixel’ bitmap. Going into iPrep, I loaded the hot pixel bitmap as a dark frame, set the threshold to 90 and expanded the resulting selection by 1 pixel. I was left with three white dots on the dark frame. I then load the original Avi I want to remove the pixels from and select every frame and all the hot pixels are gone. Finally I save the output Avi This really works!

Original video

http://youtu.be/InxsthigYHQ

... with hot pixel removal using iPrep

http://youtu.be/KwVUlafxPEA

I have however, come across two problems with the output Avi files produced by iPrep

1 - the output Avi file appears to be about 60% larger (more megabytes) than the input file.

2 - it saves the output file at 5 frames a second. I have to load the output file to VirtualDub to convert this back to 25fps.