Any recommendations for planetary video capture and processing software for Mac?

[Ouroboros]

Can anyone recommend some planetary video capture and processing software for Mac please? 

Edited September 24, 2020 by Ouroboros

[JamesF]

(Ahem) oacapture   For the former, at least.

James

[Ouroboros]

2 minutes ago, JamesF said:

(Ahem) oacapture   For the former, at least.

James

Thanks. Quick response. Is it good? 

[JamesF]

1 minute ago, Ouroboros said:

Thanks. Quick response. Is it good? 

Of course.  I wrote it

James

[Ouroboros]

2 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Of course.  I wrote it

James

Ah ... OK, sorry I didn’t know that.  Hence explains the ‘ahem’.  

[JamesF]

Have a play with it.  See how you get on.  Once I'm relieved of the opportunity to work at the end of the month I shall be spending more time on it, too.

James

[Ouroboros]

7 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Have a play with it.  See how you get on.  Once I'm relieved of the opportunity to work at the end of the month I shall be spending more time on it, too.

James

OK. When I’ve got a brain tomorrow I’ll have a go.  I’m slightly concerned about a thread on SGL which seems to refer to an issue between oacapture and KStars/ekos/INDI. I don’t want to muck up my KStars set up I use for  imaging. 

[JamesF]

17 minutes ago, Ouroboros said:

I’m slightly concerned about a thread on SGL which seems to refer to an issue between oacapture and KStars/ekos/INDI. I don’t want to muck up my KStars set up I use for  imaging. 

That should be a Linux-specific problem.

James

[Ouroboros]

Lynkeos is the only planetary processing App for Mac that I have found so far. Anymore? 

[Ouroboros]

@JamesF   OK Progress so far ....  I've downloaded oaCapture 1.7.0. onto my MacBook.

 At present I'm just using a QHY 5-II-M  mono camera to test it with. 

oaCapture finds the camera as:  (QHY) QHY5 (no firmware).  Can I assume from this that I don't have the right drivers installed?  Interestingly KStars has no problem finding the camera.  

When I click on the camera oaCapture closes and I get an error message saying "oaCapture quit unexpectedly" 

Sorry to trouble you. 

Edited September 25, 2020 by Ouroboros

[JamesF]

1 hour ago, Ouroboros said:

@JamesF   OK Progress so far ....  I've downloaded oaCapture 1.7.0. onto my MacBook.

 At present I'm just using a QHY 5-II-M  mono camera to test it with. 

oaCapture finds the camera as:  (QHY) QHY5 (no firmware).  Can I assume from this that I don't have the right drivers installed?  Interestingly KStars has no problem finding the camera.  

When I click on the camera oaCapture closes and I get an error message saying "oaCapture quit unexpectedly" 

Sorry to trouble you. 

I'll check on that.  I have a QHY5-IIm I think.  If it says "no firmware" it means the camera does not have the firmware loaded, but it should load automagically so I don't know why you're seeing that.

James

[Ouroboros]

@JamesF  I think this camera might have an intermittent fault.  I've found that sometimes oaCapture can connect to it.  Interestingly in the drop down menu I'm offered two cameras now:  QHY 5-II-M or QHY5.  No mention of the 'no firmware" so presumably it's found it.  Also when the little red light on the back of the camera flashes the app connects to it successfully. I have noticed that connection to EKOS with this camera is intermittent too.  

In fact I had intended to buy a new colour camera for some planetary imaging. I hadn't intended to use the QHY5 at all for that.   

[Ouroboros]

I'm still playing with this camera in oaCapture which for the moment seems to be behaving itself.  I've taken an AVI movie and MOV movie.  Neither Quicktime nor VLC movie player will open and play them - in fact VLC shuts itself down when I try to open either of these files.  

Edited September 25, 2020 by Ouroboros

[JamesF]

Someone reported that there was a problem with Quicktime a couple of days back.  That definitely used to work, so I'm wondering if Apple have dropped support for some codecs.  I wasn't aware that VLC didn't work though.  There's a setting to write Windows-style AVI files.  You could try enabling that (or disabling it should it already be set).  I don't know it will work, but it's worth a go.  Really useful feedback anyhow, so thank you.  The project has become something of a beast and testing everything has got a bit beyond me with the last couple of releases.

Personally I prefer SER format for planetary imaging these days, but it does generate larger files.

James

[Ouroboros]

Eventually I just want to save the file in whatever form that works best. What app do you use to stack the frames from your SER files once you’ve got them? 

[JamesF]

I still use Windows for processing because that's what my copy of Photoshop is for, but I have been meaning to give this a try at some point:

https://github.com/Rolf-Hempel/PlanetarySystemStacker

James

[Ouroboros]

2 hours ago, JamesF said:

I still use Windows for processing because that's what my copy of Photoshop is for, but I have been meaning to give this a try at some point:

https://github.com/Rolf-Hempel/PlanetarySystemStacker

James

Yes, looks interesting. It would seem it will run on Mac, but there’s no installer. Mentions requiring Python3 and installing from the command line. No ... I’ve no idea what I’m talking about.