The 4.2 beta is nearing its first release. Supporting a release the size of 4.1 makes the beta slow going as support it drains time away from new feature work. In any case, here is where it is now:
HFR Trigger for Auto Focus
Still on the fence about this trigger and the beta for this feature will not just be about functional validation, but also a validation of usefulness. We’ll see how this goes… Here’s what SGPro 4.2 has now.
The trigger settings:
The top-level “on / off” setting… worded “Auto focus as Image History degrades”. There are more settings to be found for this trigger by clicking on the gear icon.
Why is there a little warning icon next to this trigger? When you hover the mouse over it, it will show a tooltip warning with something like…
This trigger may result in unnecessary focus runs. Even in perfect focus, the HFR metric for your light frames will degrade naturally when the target is on the West. SGPro is not able to differentiate this normal degradation from actual poor focus and it is possible to trigger auto focus more often than needed. As such, if you will be running auto focus on the West over a significant drop in altitude, you may want to consider allowing this trigger to be active on the East only (click the setting icon to the right).
Here is the trigger settings:
You can also enable or disable the trigger from here. Hopefully self explanatory-ish. Choose a degradation threshold as a percent of your “in-focus” marker (reference), then choose how to average those numbers in order to avoid focus runs triggered by outliers. Finally, you can choose to use one of 4 metric combinations as input to the trigger:
- HFR and Star Count
- HFR or Star Count
- HFR Only
- Star Count Only
All of these may not make it to the release. Some of this is experimentation.
Finally, the 2 options at the bottom:
- Disable trigger when target is in the West. As explained above.
- Trigger focus when baseline reference is missing. In order for this trigger to function, there must be a reference frame. Any auto focus run from any any trigger can produce this baseline reference so it may come from a different trigger. In the case where no other trigger has caused auto focus, this trigger will run auto focus in order to establish the baseline.
Note: Every Event has (needs) its own baseline reference
Drag and Drop Reordering for Targets and Events
Nothing really to explain here. Click a button to expose “grabber” icons for the target and event rows, then drag and drop where you want them. A quick video for events (bump up the resolution in the video if it’s blurry). Targets is the same… just with targets instead.
Event Image Session History
This feature will allow you to visualize the quality of images for a specific event and will be charted at the bottom of the existing Event Options window. This will not be saved as part of the sequence. This feature is mostly tied to the HFR Focus Trigger (above) and will allow you to see where the current focus baseline reference is and will allow you to clear / reset at the event level if you’d like to re-establish the baseline.
Below, you can see both where and what the focus baseline reference is:
Probably Other Little Things
That I can’t recall this moment, but If I do, I will come back here to this post and add them.