Video bit depth and planetary imaging

[spaceman_spiff]

Hi there,

I have a Canon 550D which I use to capture 640x480 video at 60fps. I have got some good results on Jupiter but I think the video is compressed and only 8 bit for each colour channel. 

Would I get better results using magic lantern and recording raw video at a lower frame rate (~20fps)? 

When I stack the video in Registax, does it combine lower bit depth frames into a single higher bit depth image?

Many thanks!

Dan 

[spaceman_spiff]

Well I think I have found an answer:

http://www.stark-labs.com/craig/resources/Articles-&-Reviews/BitDepthStacking.pdf

Bottom line is that if noise is present between the frames of a video (which is almost certainly the case!) then this acts to increase the bit depth of the final stacked image. In fact even 10  8-bit frames containing noise stack to about 11.3 bits which is perfectly acceptable. In addition, noise within in the frames can make high bit depth video partly redundant since a proportion of the accuracy in rgb values will be useless because it will be finer than the noise level present...

I think I will stick with 8-bit 60 fps video!