Dropped Frames, Previous Frame Not Processed

[Peterm]

Howdy,

A friend and I both capture multiple images for Solar animations. In order to take sometimes hundreds of individual ser files at a time for our animations we have to rely on SharpCap to keep capturing those files images even we are away from our computer. This is now not the case. We have both been long time users of SharpCap and have not experienced the following issue before we started using version 4.1.11433

When starting the capture process a green bar will show with "Capture Sequence Running" and a timer countdown to taking the next image. When it starts capturing the file that green bar will disappear until the capture is complete. The green bar reappears with the timer countdown to the next capture and so on. What is happening now (as can be seen (I think) at 9.53 in the attached log file) is that the green bar disappears it captures the image but the green bar does not reappear on the screen for the countdown to the next image. This is very random and yesterday it stopped capturing and I did not realize this until after 45minutes.

Interesting points: I do not appear to have the issue if I use avi files only SER files. If I press the "Stop Capture" button at any point after this issue has occurred the Capture Sequence resumes again. This means I cannot leave SharpCap unattended as I have in the past and this is not workable.

My machine is 6 year old HP Laptop with the latest Windows 10.
I use a a ZWO432MM with my Lunt 80mm

As I said I have been using Sharpcap for a long time and never experienced this. Could this be anything to do with the High Speed Frame Cache and Live Stacking Display memory? I use the slider bars set at about 75% of what SharpCap will allow. My machine is an i7 and has 16gb of RAM. It has the same issue whether I write to an external SSD or the internal SSD.



Thanks
Peter

I

[admin]

Hi Peter,

thanks for posting the log - it looks like the problem is that the capture doesn't quite complete for some reason, so SharpCap doesn't drop back into the 'ready' state to do the next capture. The last thing in the log before it gets stuck is trying to write the capture settings file, so I will look there to see if any recent changes can have had this effect.

Interestingly there are no errors reported at that point in the log, so it really seems like something is stuck waiting for something else to complete, rather than something failing.

cheers,

Robin

[admin]

Hi,

just to update, I have had a good dig through the log and the code trying to work out what went wrong. It looks like one part of the code decided the capture was complete very quickly (a fraction of a second after it started), but another part was waiting for it to properly complete. It's just possible that the bit of the code that decided things were over in an instant ended up checking the count of captured frames *before* it was reset as part of starting the new capture. Oddly the code has been like that for a long time, so no reason for it to start happening now (except sometimes other changes make a bit of code take more or less time than it used to and can make an issue that was previously possible but incredibly rare suddenly start happening).

I've implmented a fix for that possibility in the hope that it is the cause and also added some extra logging that should provide further info to track down what is going on if it turns out not to be the cause. Next update will be next Monday.

cheers,

Robin

[Peterm]

Thanks indeed for the prompt action and todays update. The next few days here are cloud and storms so I will try the new update asap. My friend who lives some 900km away looks like he may fare better, so will report back when we have some animation data.
Peter

[Peterm]

Hi Robin and all,

Yesterday I was able to run version 4.1.11491.0 (64bit) for 3 hours of ser files (every 30 seconds) with no issues. I think this issue is resolved.
Thanks indeed. I see more improvements with todays release which I will try before the end of the week.

Thanks indeed.
Peter