Comments on: Shooting tethered with the Canon EOS 1Ds MkIII

By: rapdigital

rapdigital — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:41:32 +0000

I’ve been testing this setup for a few weeks and have found this.
1: Dont use MacDrive to save to a Mac formatted drive/// I find that with many fashion shooters that push the envelop with shooting speeds, MacDrive just cant cope and files appear to go missing or get corrupt. They dont get lost but MD takes some time to catch up. And no matter how many times you say its fine Clients get scared. My workflow is to shoot to windows external drive and backup through-out the day to Mac drives. Using MacDrive.
2: Dont shoot to the desktop. Everyone knows this….Right!!
3: Try keep shot under 100 frames per folder. I guess its to do with the OS indexing that goes on but it just seems to be that files come in faster. What I’m currently doing is create a bunch of shot folders at the start of the day and at the conclusion of each setup drag them fom the tether folder to one of these shot folders. This is more the case when using captureOne not sure if LR is affected in the same way.

Cheers

Rick

By: dafoxman

dafoxman — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:30:23 +0000

Could some of the speed difference be from the possibility that the EOS Utility might be running in Rosetta.
I would like to know how you got the EOS Utility to launch on the Intel Duo with OSX 10.5 and run your camera? It won’t recognize my 5D. I think I read this right? You tethered to an iMac Intel Duo with 10.5 and the EOS Utility worked? Do they ship software on the Camera disk that isn’t on the website as an update?

By: andris

andris — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:48:24 +0000

Hello, I’m trying to work out a tethered shooting workflow for the 1Ds MKIII that can keep up with a fairly rapid lifestyle shooter. I’m on a Windows XP system, 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 duo system with 3 GB of ram.

I’ve followed the steps Martin Evening outlines on his blog (Canon EOS utility in conjunction with Lighroom auto import) here http://lightroom-news.com/2008/02/07/shooting-tethered-with-the-canon-eos-1ds-mkiii/ and everything is working _almost_ smoothly.

When I fire off a single frame with the camera, it takes about 5 seconds for the Canon EOS utility to copy the file to the hard drive and for lightroom to see and move the file from the watched folder to the destination folder. This seems reasonable.

However, when I start shooting at a normal pace (approximately 1 frame a second) it seems like Lightroom stops watching the watched folder until I stop shooting for an extended period of time.

I would have thought Lightroom checked the folder at a standard interval, every 5 seconds or so. However, if I snap, say 40 frames at the rate of 1 a second, Lightroom doesn’t realize there are new images in the watched folder until I stop shooting and let the camera’s buffer empty out.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? Does anyone know if there is a registry hack to force lightroom to check the watched folder more frequently? I’m seeing this same behavior in LR 1.3 and LR 2.0 beta.

Thanks for the help,

Andris

By: brud

brud — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:48:04 +0000

Is there a way to get lightroom to focus on the last image that has been auto imported? I am also looking at version 2 which is great with multiple monitors. thumbnails come in but the full size image it still the last one clicked upon.

By: Martin Evening

Martin Evening — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:52:33 +0000

Good question. If you connect a camera to EOS Utility it creates a connection to that specific camera and I expect that you would have to switch off the first camera and switch on the second in order to create a new connection. So it should be possible, but I don’t have two MkIIIs to test this with. Now interestingly (on the Mac at least) the latest EOS utility only recognises my MKIII and does not work with the EOS 1Ds MkII. This lack of backward compatibility would seem to be a design flaw. On the other hand, connecting the MkII camera via Firewire will launch the older version of EOS Utility that is still on the computer. So it may in fact allow one to run these two cameras side by side. It’s not particularly elegant to have to have two lots of Utility software installed in order to work with two cameras, but I guess it would in a way make this type of workflow easier to accomplish.

Martin

By: lexcell

lexcell — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:59:28 +0000

Thanks for the great info. I refer folks to this site often.
I do have a question…Can you shoot tethered with two cameras attached to one computer?

By: Martin Evening

Martin Evening — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:38:04 +0000

Jann,

The principle reason for the bottleneck is the process of bringing files from the camera to the computer via Canon EOS Utility in Mac OS X. Either the EOS utility or the Apple OS is the reason to blame here and I can’t say for sure which. importing to Bridge should therefore be no different to importing to Lightroom, since it seems that once the files have downloaded, the initial previews appear quickly in Lightroom.

I did download the latest EOS Utility update and it took 45 seconds to download over 100 MB data via a MacBook running OSX. Therefore the data transfer rate with the latest utility update is about 2.25 MB per second on an Intel MacBook via USB 2.0 (compared to the 8.8 MB per second I was seeing above).

By: Jann Lipka

Jann Lipka — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:00:05 +0000

About Lightroom tethered shooting –
Right now I’m using similar workflow but with Bridge .

Contrary to your suggestion I would set up EOS utility to open file with Bridge and that way
I get quite fast response in Bridge switching to the last incoming file
( I know some people would hate this behavior, but your “none ” is an option for those )

I guess this one would be difficult with LR because of the import process …

Thanks for the honest report about Imac 23 issues – I was really close to buy it but maybe I’ll wait a while – I hate its gloss screen and
Out blown highlights sounds dangerous …

I think it is strange that we hear all the time how fantastic bright some TFT screens are as a marketing point , when in fact we wouldn’t stare into a 500 W lamp for a longer time …

BTW it looks like there is a new 14 february 2.3 update on EOS utility for mac … maybe it gives faster transfers ..

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-9258-9282

By: Martin Evening

Martin Evening — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:23:33 +0000

Before the new metal 24″ iMac I owned a 21″ white, G5 iMac and the screen while not perfect, could easily be calibrated and relied upon for making basic image adjustments. The new 24″ screens are I believe, not just bigger and with a glossy screen. There is something else that is not quite the same, such as the high brightness at the minimum brightness setting. The main problem is that one cannot judge highlight tones. Everything from around 230,230,230 white in Photoshop appears as white on the screen and you can’t really see what you are doing.

When you go to the apple store showroom the screens look lovely showing the standard desktop pictures. But the older screens (in my opinion) did a better job of revealing the highlights. Colors would look a lot richer and more natural in the highlights. The same difference can be seem when dragging the picture from the new monitor to the old 23″ LCD.

I don’t doubt that Apple would be willing to replace the gear. They have a good reputation for customer service. But unfortunately right now, I can’t afford the time this would take.

By: Greg W

Greg W — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:09:54 +0000

I hear that one about time=money, for certain. I had not heard that about the metal iMacs, that’s bad. I use one of the first gen 24″ iMacs (White enclosure, 2.16 Core2Duo) at the day job and the screen is simply fabulous. As the specs of the screens for the two models (viewing angle, brightness, contrast etc) are almost exactly the same and the ones that I have seen at the local Apple store look very nice (except for the gloss) I assumed they would be of similar quality.

Still, I would be as squeaky a wheel as I could be in your position. I have owned a lot of Apple gear and have had to, very politely, hold firm about a problem a few times and Apple has always made it right. Not without some inconvenience to me, to be sure, but made it right never the less.