Color mode

FireCapture 2.6.08

When using the old FC 2.6 branch, you're set. FC does everything for you. When a color cam is detected, and the debayering option is set in FC, the plugin receives debayered frames and switches automatically to color mode.

FireCapture 2.7.xx

With introduction of the new 2.7 branch, the FC debayering policy changed significantly. Without really knowing what goes on under the hood in FC, the basic effect seems to be that the plugin interface doesn't receive debayered data anymore. Anyway, now debayering has to be performed in the plugin itself. In consequence, you have to tell the plugin how to do it.



When opening the 'Options-> System options' dialog, 3 additional parameters are present now in a section named 'Color'. The first two are self-explanatory. For selecting the correct Bayer pattern, one may look into FCs debayering option dialog, or, alternatively, just experiment with the settings until the colors look right.
Debayering execution
This option only effects the live stacking. Generally, there are two basic choices:
a) debayer frames before stacking
b) debayer the resulting stack.
The default setting is frame debayering. Evidently, debayering each frame needs more processing action, but hase some benefits. To some extend, debayering is interpolation. As side effect, noise is reduced, too. Also, the overall resolution of the resulting stack is slightly higher compared to the other approach with postponed debayering. But interpolation works the less well, the higher the noise, resp. the pixel intensity differences are. In case of high noise (high gain setting) and/or generally reduced data quality (bad seeing), fine pixel grid artifacts may pop up during sharpening a stack of debayered frames, especially with strong sharpening. In these cases, it is more appropriate to use the second method, stack debayering.
One should keep in mind, that the Bayer matrix on the camera chip produces 4 color component values for a 2x2 pixel square (2 G, 1 R, 1 B). For a full resolution, 2x2x3 = 12 color compoment values are needed. So although the debayering algorithms aim at retaining most of the full pixel resolution of the camera chip, in practice the result cannot reach the full resolution of a mono camera recordings with the same chip size and RGB filters.

Both debayering mode and debayering execution parameter setting has a high impact on internal process flow, so changing these options closes down the actual running live stacking session.

Keep in mind that the plugin does not know anything about the attached camera. It is your responsibility to active/deactivate debayering when needed. E.g. take care to avoid accidentally debayering a mono cam stream.