Basic Procedure for Using LiMovie
Open LiMovie
At top left: "file/AVI file open" and navigate to your file and click on it
Advance it +1sec in order to see your video frame. The first few frames seem to be black, typically..
Far right; change VTI from default "KIWI" to "IOTA" if you're using an IOTA-VTI, so it'll read your time stamps properly
In the PSF box, uncheck the 'tracking' and 'photometry' boxes; Brad Timerson finds that PSF tracking does a poorer job unless the star is saturated.
You should now see blue rectangles nicely enclosing your numerals.
If your sky is very dark and stars hard to see, then at right, in the 'Reverse Gamma' box click in the 'field' box to get it off of the 'off' position, and then enter a number bigger than the default "1". "2" might be good, or 2.5. It's not critical.... It'll just be for properly positioning the apertures.
In "Form of BKG Area" click on 'standard' for concentric circles (inner=star, outer and outermost are the donut defining the background 'sky'). If you have a lunar occn or if there's a nearby star contaminating your target, then click 'avoid sunlit face' and then click on 'orientation' to mouse around the half donut to avoid the contaminating light source.
This will now give you a 3-ring aperture in blue and red colore and default positioned in the upper left corner. Center this on your target star by right-click / 'set position only', carefully - it'll not do an auto-light center like PyMovie can do. It'll center it on your mouse position
Now carefully center your mouse onto the center of the blob that is your tracking star and right-click and select 'object star add' to add a new aperture. It should be naming it aperture "B" in the lower right corner. If you want a sky aperture, you can repeat this. It'll be object C.
Question for you: Is your target star only going to partially dip and remain visible throughout, or will it disappear?
Case: Target Virtually disappears
Click 'link' in the 'linked tracking' box at middle. This tells LiMovie you want to use this new aperture as a tracking star and will force the target aperture to follow its movements.
In the lower right, re-click on aperture "A" (the target star) to look at your target star and make sure it is set to 'off' in the 'star tracking' box at bottom.
However, I've noticed that if your target is bright, and you leave the aperture on 'drift', it seems to track the target star independently until it disappears and then it immediately slaves to following motion from the tracking star, rather than go wildly looking for the now missing target, which I sometimes see. So perhaps the best advice is to click 'linked tracking' and also leave the target on 'drift' rather than 'off'and only revert to turning 'star tracking' to 'off' if necessary.
Case: Target Only partial dips in brightness and remains well visible
If your target star is only going to partially drop and you think the resulting light will still be visible to LiMovie, then leave the 'star tracking' box on 'drift'. It should now monitor the tracking star and the target star independently re-centering on each frame.
If your video was done with 1/60s setting, so that each field has an independent photometric measurement, and if you also set your camera on "1x" setting, so that you will have field-level time resolution on output, then you may want to use 'field mode'. To set it in field mode, then click at lower right on the 'field measure' box.
Last, check to make sure the donuts are entirely enclosing all star light. Not as important for the tracking star, and in fact the advice from Brad Timerson was to keep the circle tight on the tracking star, to get better tracking (?)
Now, in the 'reverse gamma' box, return it to the 'off' position so photometry is done with gamma=1 for proper photometry.
A final check; click on the "A" and aperture and make sure the parameters have not changed from what you want. LiMovie seems to sometimes return them to default values as you move between apertures during setup. So always click on each of "A", "B" and "C" to make sure they are as you want them. If you have to change them back to what you want, then again cycle through and to the point you needn't change anything.
Now you're ready to analyze. Click 'Start'. Now, if you don't like what's happening, you can 'Stop', 'Data remove', and use the minus time boxes to go backwards to the point you want. You'll probably have to then re-center your apertures. Easy to do, just right-click on them and 'set position only', carefully; it'll recenter the donuts on your mouse, it will not auto-light-center position the aperture like PyMovie will do with 'snap to' apertures.
click 'Stop' when you've got enough data and don't want to risk having your apertures run onto data from another occultation accidentally downloaded into your .avi file originally.
Then click 'graph' at botom, left of the "A" "B" "C" to see your light curves. Now you'll see many of the options change to be relevant to the light curve graph. You can zoom in by clicking in the 'width' box on the 'part' button, and use the slider to the left to position it on your event. You can also reduce the default size=3 on the dots for each point, with the 'radius' box.
If all looks good, then click 'save to CSV file'