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Apr
03
USB Tethered Shooting and Leopard 10.5.6
Published in Untagged by Joshua |
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.
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.