From left to right: The highest quality (in K3CCDTools) 100, 500 and 1000 frames were stacked.

Observations:

• The first image has the most detail even though it was stacked using by far the fewest frames.
• The second and third image was stacked from more frames but are both inferior in quality to the first one.

So how does this help in creating good quality stacked pictures?

• When stacking using a higher quality AVI, a larger percentage frames can be used to further add picture signal to the stacked picture.
• When stacking using a lower quality AVI, a smaller percentage frames should be used to prevent the lower quality pictures from adding their 'messes' into the stacked picture.
• These lower and higher percentages obviously differ from AVI to AVI.

Adding MANY lower quality AVI frames will NEVER result in a higher quality result. Each additionally added lower quality frame only messes up the summary results of the other frames a little bit more. Lower quality frames cannot 'generate' missing picture quality. Therefore, up to a point, the lower in quality an AVI is, the less frames you use, the better.

The best number of frames to use from a low quality AVI is zero !

From left to right the first 3 pictures were created from AVIs that were captured with 20, 30 and 40 percent gain respectively.

The first 3 stacked pictures clearly show that (moderately) higher gain results in getting higher quality pictures. Up until this test, I always captured AVIs with the least gain possible. I thought higher gain meant more dark frame-type noise - overwhelming the quality of a picture. I was wrong.

So from now onward I will capture my AVIs with more gain (where needed) without hesitation.

Obviously, several gain percentage comparison tests will be done during July 2003. Results will be available on this website.

From left to right the frame rates were: 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 frames per second.

Cleary higher frame rates result in lower quality stacked pictures.

From now on I will only capture AVIs using 5 frames per second.

While testing various webcam camera settings I might use 15 fps - to get as many different AVIs captured in the shortest possible time.