Bolt Blog

 Well the World Wide Developer's Conference has come and gone and there is a lot to be excited about.  However there is  some disappointing news, disappointing to those who dared to hope.  Even though we knew that Adobe Photoshop CS4 is not and would not be running in native 64-bit on a Mac (the way it does in Vista)  anytime in the near future I found myself secretly hoping for a miracle.  

  I envisioned Steve Jobs in good health coming to the stage to tell stories of the two powers secretly meeting in some remote Silicon Valley location between  Cupertino, and San Jose to make CS4 magically reverse compatible with Snow Leopard.  There was no such announcement by any such person.  

 So as Adobe has claimed all along, we will continue to wait for CS5. 

Lock it while it's Hot.

After much debate, tons of research and a little dumb luck we have finally answered the question, "Can you lock the exposure on the 5D MarkII while shooting video?"

The answer - Yes you can!

And it's actually fairly simple.

Get your shot framed up and your exposure set....Press the SET button to start recording...Once the camera is recording press the AE Lock button...And there you go. 

 

This article will focus on the issue that Leopard 10.5.6 has with USB tethered shooting. Likely, some of you have experienced some disappointment with attempting to tether a USB camera to a Leopard 10.5.6 machine, needles to say I have. Recently I had a tech assignment that would have been perfect for Capture One 4.6, which will only run in a Leopard environment. Prior the job I did some testing on a Tiger 10.4.11 platform running Capture One 3.7.9, and on a Leopard 10.5.6 platform running C1 4.6.
         For the testing I tethered the Mark 3 via USB to each platform, and held the shutter button down until the camera's buffer was full, then after letting the buffer clear, I would again fire the Mark 3 until its buffer was again  full. My goal was to see how each software and OS would preform while using the overlay utility over the course of 200 captures.
          I was initially very impressed with the performance of C1 4.6. The images were coming in faster than on the 3.7.9 version and the images looked much sharper on the 30" monitor. However when my test folder reached its 67th capture 6 frames were lost, they were not transmitted to the capture folder and they did not remain in the cameras buffer. I fired the camera again and all seemed well, the frames were coming in beautifully, until I reached frame 137. At this point C1 4.6 locked up, the camera locked up, and Leopard 10.5.6 also froze. For 10 min I was unable to get the camera or the computer to respond, I was at last able to force quit C1 4.6 and then restart the Leopard tower. I suspected that C1 4.6 was the source of the problem so for my next test on the Leopard 10.5.6 tower I used the Canon EOS utility to bring the images in. Again I noticed improved speed over the Tiger box, and did not lose a frame, but when I hit capture 139 everything again locked up.
          I came to discover that the only way around the issue with 10.5.6 was to launch the OS's activity monitor and force quit Apple's  Image Capture Utility as soon as the camera had brought in 100 images. This is a rather unacceptable solution for high volume shooting in a one tower scenario. In my online research to find a patch or update to solve this problem I discovered that this is called a "USB memory leak". Users are having connection problems not only with USB cameras but also with other non Apple USB Devices, from hard drives, to keyboards, to external DVD burners. The common hope for a solution seems to be the Snow Leopard update which could be released by June, or some time next year.
          At the C1 4.6 seminar given by Doug Sperling at Bolt Space, Doug said that this issue is unique to 10.5.6, he said that running the older Mac OS 10.5.5 eliminates the USB leak issue. However it also reduces USB speed. I will be testing this out in the next few weeks and will post the results. I invite you all to post any other workarounds or thoughts on this issue.

As many have, we have started looking at cool ways to blend the medium of still and video. However I haven't seen very many people doing anything quite as extreme as what the guys at the University of Washington are working on. Ken Burns effect users BEWARE! I think it is safe to say when these guys finish school and start doing this for a living, or better yet start selling software, they are going to make a big pile of money.

 

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.  

A few Canon 5D MarkII Video tricks we have learned.

 

The main one is related to being able to lock down an f/stop. We have been using older style nikon lenses that have the f/stop ring, using a nikon to canon ring adapter ($25).  You can get fancy and pull the ball bearing out of the f/stop ring - which allows smooth f/stop ramping.  This is really the only safe way to lock in a desired f/stop that we have found.