SharpCap Forums

Hi Robin,
My stacks are saved as 16-bit. (QHY174m). After upgrade to V4.1 i get 32bit stacked files as well. Looking at the manual i have "32 bit floating point" set to off. So is there a setting to remove the 32bit files ?

This begs the question where do the 32 bit files come from if i have a 12/14bit camera, and what is their purpose ? I have looked at some previous dialog, but don't cover this exact question.

Cheers
Tim
(Abingdon)

Hi Tim,

getting the 32-bit files is a live stacking feature - when you are stacking, by adding more frames you add bitdepth to the stacked image. For instance if you have stacked 32 frames you get an extra 5 bits of data (2 to the power 5 is 32) - with your 14 bit camera that would mean that the stack now contains 19 bits of data, so saving to 16 bit means throwing away some of the finer details in the data. Because of this there is the ability to save the stack as 32 bit and avoid the loss of any data.

4.1 now saves the stack in all four possible options (16 bit stack, 32 bit stack, 'with adjustments' and 'exactly as seen on screen') when the autosave due to close/reset kicks in - at the moment there is no option to disable any of these or configure which ones you want. The theory behind that was that disk storage space is usually plentiful these days, so saving something extra when it might not be wanted is a smaller sin than ending up not saving it when it might be wanted.

cheers,

Robin