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The best AS!2 options.


NIGHTBOY

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What's the best way to use AS!2 for the greatest results?? I'm not bothered about the time it will take as I'm in no rush. Is it better to use as many alignment points as possible??

Also, say I have 1800 frames, do I have to change the 'Number of frames to stack' from 100 (default) to 1800???

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So ,let me just get this right....

After you've ran it through pip then imported into AS!2, you look how many frames there are then change the 'Number of frames to stack' (box on top right) too how many frames it says there are on the info displayed on the picture??

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that green line in the graph on the left hand pane that slopes down from left to right is a graph of quality by frame - so the best frames are to the left of the graph and the worst are to the right and you can see how the quality deteriorates.

if you have a green line that stays high for a while then falls off towards the end, you can go for a higher percentage, but if it falls off early, go for a lower %age.  doesn't help that the axes aren't labelled and you can't click in it though...

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I think you have a few different ways of working.

First of all, what does the graph mean?

As Stuart says, left to right (the X-axis on traditional school graphs!) you have the frames arranged in order of quality. The best frame is left-most, and the worst frame is right-most.

Top to bottom (the Y-axis) is showing you the percentage quality of the frames (whatever that means!), from 100% at the top, to 0% at the bottom.

You could think, right, I will use half of all my frames, like 100 out of 200 frames that you shot. In that case, no need to Control-click on the graph. Enter '50' into the box for 'Or frame percentage'. This will stack 50% of all your frames (the best 50%). I don't tend to work this way in AS as I like to look at how the green graph curve looks.

Or you could look at the green curve on the graph, which is how I use it, and Control click on it where the green curve falls down to, say, 50% quality (I tend to pick halfway between the 75% and 50% lines, i.e. at around 62.5%, but that's just me sticking with what I've done so far that seems to work okay for me). If you clicked at where the green curve hits 50%, what you are saying in this case is, stack every frame that has a quality of 50% or higher. Exactly what 50% quality means, I don't know. It's a reasonable-ish frame to me. :)

There's nothing wrong with working either way. I tend to enter a set percentage of frames when I use AVIStack to stack - with that, I normally stack 25% of all the frames, which seems to work okay for almost all my movies. This will normally give me a stack of fairly decent quality frames. If I can see from the movie that the vast majority of frames were poor, then I might drop it much lower than 25%.

Hope that makes sense.

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I think you have a few different ways of working.

First of all, what does the graph mean?

As Stuart says, left to right (the X-axis on traditional school graphs!) you have the frames arranged in order of quality. The best frame is left-most, and the worst frame is right-most.

Top to bottom (the Y-axis) is showing you the percentage quality of the frames (whatever that means!), from 100% at the top, to 0% at the bottom.

You could think, right, I will use half of all my frames, like 100 out of 200 frames that you shot. In that case, no need to Control-click on the graph. Enter '50' into the box for 'Or frame percentage'. This will stack 50% of all your frames (the best 50%). I don't tend to work this way in AS as I like to look at how the green graph curve looks.

Or you could look at the green curve on the graph, which is how I use it, and Control click on it where the green curve falls down to, say, 50% quality (I tend to pick halfway between the 75% and 50% lines, i.e. at around 62.5%, but that's just me sticking with what I've done so far that seems to work okay for me). If you clicked at where the green curve hits 50%, what you are saying in this case is, stack every frame that has a quality of 50% or higher. Exactly what 50% quality means, I don't know. It's a reasonable-ish frame to me. :)

There's nothing wrong with working either way. I tend to enter a set percentage of frames when I use AVIStack to stack - with that, I normally stack 25% of all the frames, which seems to work okay for almost all my movies. This will normally give me a stack of fairly decent quality frames. If I can see from the movie that the vast majority of frames were poor, then I might drop it much lower than 25%.

Hope that makes sense.

That's great info, Luke...Thanks for posting.

This has been a mystery to me but hopefully I'll get it now.

Thanks again

Steve

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First of all, what does the graph mean?

As Stuart says, left to right (the X-axis on traditional school graphs!) you have the frames arranged in order of quality. The best frame is left-most, and the worst frame is right-most.

Top to bottom (the Y-axis) is showing you the percentage quality of the frames (whatever that means!), from 100% at the top, to 0% at the bottom.

Worth noting that 100% is merely the best frame of that video, rather than a universal measure of quality.     Though not sure I understand the bracketed quality figure in the Frame View window - is this giving a standard/comparitive quality reference?

post-26731-0-39930800-1386753503_thumb.p

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Do you have to start by picking the best frame out the lot to give as!2 a reference???

AS!2 will analyse and sort the frames in to quality order based on its own algorithm, and allow you to set the AP's on the best image - works pretty well, but you can advance the Frame slider and choose any one frame manually before setting the AP's.

I think this is one feature missing from Registax, where I would spend hours trying to choose the best image by eye.

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How so you get the best image on screen, click on the graph??

After analysing the frame view window re-orders the sequence based on quality, if you grab the slider and move to the right you will see the quality estimate drop, the original frame number of the video is shown after the # and you will see this figure jump around as you move the slider.     Clicking on the Quality graph in the main window also moves the frame slider to that point in the re-ordered video - though the graph window offers little resolution and can't be scaled.

As an alternative you could use Chris Garry's excellent PIPP to do the quality estimation and limit the clip before hand.     I tend to use this for archiving data, saving only the top 25% of frames in my best captures.    It's nice and fast and processes batches nicely - though generally  I will just run it through AS!2 to see what I've got at the end of the night.

PIPP does allow you to vary and tweak the quality selection algorithm - though I've never played with any of these options, but using the Default PIPP Quality Algorithm, tends to produce an identical result to what I would get using AS!2 for the same number of frames (at least to my eyes).

post-26731-0-11660900-1386779445_thumb.p

AS!2 quality best 1500 frames of 6000 Green channel:

post-26731-0-51357800-1386779645_thumb.p

PIPP quality best 1500 frames of 6000 Green channel:

post-26731-0-50540200-1386779704.png

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