SharpCap Forums

Although over the recent months I have been trying (unsuccessfully so far, but that's the subject for another forum topic) to capture DSO's with Sharpcap and its live stacking feature, the other night I decided to try to go back to planetary just for one night, as Jupiter and Saturn were in about a perfect position for me. Therefore, I clicked on Capture, named the file, and then chose to take four 2:30 minute videos. However, even though 10 minutes went by, at the end it said something to the effect of nothing was captured -- I think all of the frames were dropped. Then I tried something a bit different, and instead just set the number of frames to 5000 (rather than set a certain time) and it did, in fact, seem to capture that many frames, with only very few of them dropped. So, I thought even with that initial failure, I was all set.

However, then when I got back home and looked in my Captures folder, while the date was listed there, when I clicked on the folder for that date, there were only three files listed -- Camera Settings, Histogram, and a .ser file. In other words, no video! Needless to say, this is probably one of the most frustrating things that can happen in this hobby -- thinking you've captured data but then finding out that you didn't!

What could have caused this to happen? Also, while I'm not obviously optimistic, is there any chance that a video WAS saved and just somehow sent to the wrong folder on my laptop and is retrievable in some way? Thank you.

Hi,

the SER file is your video - you can view it with programs like SERPlayer (https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/ser-player) and process it with most standard astro stacking tools (Registax, AS!2, etc).

AVI files have a number of drawbacks, making SER preferable for astro imaging - see https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.0/#Captur ... 0Explained for a discussion of the pros/cons of various formats. If you want to change to another output format, see https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.0/#!2!Cap ... and%20Area and https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.0/#Start% ... t%20format

cheers,

Robin

Okay, well I'm obviously very glad to hear that! Looking back at my old planetary files from last year, though, that certainly wasn't the case -- they were definitely avi files. I guess that's just something that changed since then with one of the updates?

I guess it doesn't really matter, though, as long as there IS a way to open them. Thanks again.

I know this is old but I've not found the answer to it - this thread started to address it but it wasn't answered ... I imaged Saturn the other night. I had Live Stack on, I selected, in Tools, the "Live stack Planetary stacking/enhancements" selection. This all seemed to work. I selected the box around Saturn and let it blast away.... I saved - I KNOW I saved 100 frames... I hit the button - it was below the 'save screen shot' (or something like this) ... and it save "save 16 bit" (I believe, something similar). I then did another run of 1000 frames and once again saved it.

I looked later and now don't see anything in the SharpCap Folder for that night other than the Deep Sky images I did.

HELP?!

Gary

Hi Gary,

first thing to check is if you have a SharpCap Pro license - without a license you can activate the planetary live stack feature to see how it works, but you are not allowed to save. You would receive a yellow warning at the top of the screen telling you that 'Saving is disabled' each time you tried to save. In testing, I also noticed that adding a license while the tool is activated is not sufficient - you need to restart SharpCap once the license is added to make saving work - I will fix that in a future update.

Anyway, provided you hada Pro license before your imaging session started then the saved files will (by default) be saved in a folder named something like
If you set the name of the target in the box at the top in SharpCap then it will say 'Stack of Saturn' rather than 'Solar System Stack'.

Hope this points you in the right direction - if not then you could post the SharpCap log from the observing session in question (see the documentation for how to find log files from previous runs) and I can check it out.

cheers,

Robin