Starguide - A Practical Guide to Astro-Photography

PixInsight - Comet Processing

 Option d) Creating a Comet Time-Lapse Video Clip Using the Blink Process and ffmpeg

updated: 2026-08-02

Purpose

This PixInsight based procedure can be used to assemble a series of pictures into a one small video clip.

Basis for a successful video clip creation are:

• There should be no interruption or pause between the individual frames, or at least the pause between the individual images should always be of the same length
• avoid dithering and automatic autofocus corrections during the capture phase
• avoid Auto Meridian Flips (if possible) because this requires a couple of minutes for 180° equipment rotation and also new plate solving to center the frames to the same picture area as before
• Unfortunately I missed to deactivate dithering and additionally a Meridian Flip occurred after 26 exposures, but this was unavoidable.

The procedure is based on a set of exposures take on Feb. 8, 2023 of the C/2022 E3 comet. Of the original 100 frames captured, 2 frames (#79 and #80) had to be discarded due to a short guiding problem (reason was probably "a star lost" error due to variations of the sight conditions). The resulting video clip is available on  Starlust - Photos  

The post-processing was done in following steps:

• Use PixInsight - Blink Process to select the good frames
• Use Bulk Image Rotation to rotate wrong orientated frames (e.g. due to an meridian flip during the exposure phase)
• Use Debayer Function the pictures (if using an OSC or color CMOS camera)
• Use PixInsight - Blink Process to enhance the picture quality and to generate a video file using the external ffmpeg function
• and finally improving the video quality and reducing the file volume using an external tool like Movavi

.

Activation

See the full description in the chapter Creating Time-Lapse Videos

Input

Original light frames from subfolder "Light"

Output

An  AVI or MP4 video  file in subfolder with "Video/selected/rotated/debayer"

Previous Step

• Picture Shooting

Next Steps

• Learning, documentation and publishing