Tethered shooting problems in Lightroom

[charlesward]

As a commercial photographer, I mostly shoot tethered (Canon 1ds mk111) into Lightroom. For anyone that uses this camera, they will know that the mini USB is positioned on the side of the camera and can be easily broken. I've experimented with wireless, but found the setup incredibly complicated, unreliable and far too slow to shoot raw.

I have therefore persevered with my 5 metre USB cable, being very careful not to place too much strain on the mini USB jack and always use the Canon supplied locking colour, which does help to hold it in place. Let's hope that the new Mk4 (whenever it turns up) will return to using a more substantial connection.

My reason for this post is to address a far more annoying problem, that has been causing me endless moments of embarrassment, usually when I am shooting tethered at a fashion shoot and I have a number of Art directors and eagerly watching the screen for the next image to appear. The problem that I have referred to is that suddenly my tethered connection will fail and I then have to go through an elaborate sequence of trying to stop/start tethered, rebooting Lightroom and the Mac, until it suddenly starts working again. Why does it do this?

After months of frustration, my young assistant suddenly spotted the reason for this tethered 'freeze'.....
it happens when we change lenses. I've tested this on my two camera bodies, on the studio Mac and on the laptop and it's true! So now we have found the reason that the tethered connection fails, we need to find out why this is happening and find a solution. Can anyone help?

[Philippe]

Perhaps, switching off the camera before changing lenses might help?

[JRSmit]

For wireless i use a Wireless USB device kit, total cost including rechargeable AA-batteries about 90 euro and a bit of soldering.
It does a 25MB raw (Nikon D700) in 10 seconds on a Windows computer with an average performing usb-port (the AMD motherboard chipsets are known for their not so fast usb performance). It is very reliable. The only caveat: the drivers are only for Windows OS both 32 and 64bit.

Will check if changing lenses will cause same problem, be it i use nikon d700.

[Scott Hargis]

I was about to post the same issue today.  I've been shooting tethered into Lightroom flawlessly ever since the release of 3.0 - changing lenses, accidentally pulling the USB cable out, turning the camera on/off --- none of this has ever presented a problem.....UNTIL YESTERDAY.

Over the course of a 5-hour shoot, I probably lost a full hour trying to re-establish a connection after repeated failures. Changing lenses (even when leaving the camera "on"), and enabling/disabling mirror lockup both caused connection failures. Lightroom behaves as if nothing was wrong, except no images are being imported. The camera can still be used, and images get written to the CF card, but there's no connectivity to the laptop.

The only thing that's changed is that I installed the 3.4.1 upgrade, and this is the first shoot I've done since then. So I suspect the upgrade as the source of the bug, because, as I said, LR has been utterly flawless in the past.

If there are no fixes, then I'm going to want to go back to the previous version of LR, since this upgrade seems pretty minor overall anyway. Is that even possible?

Any thoughts on this issue would be greatly appreciated!

[John R Smith]

Scott

You can go back to version 3.3, which is available for download from Adobe -

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=113&platform=Windows

This does sound like something odd with 3.4.1 (possibly). But Charles has had the problem for much longer, which seems to point the other way.

John

[Scott Hargis]

Thanks, John -- downloading now.

So, no one else has experienced this? Can anyone report that they are tethering normally with 3.4.1? FWIW, I'm shooting with a 5DmII, to a MacBook Pro.

[MBehrens]

I just got a new 7d and was trying to shoot tethered, just for some shots in my office for lens micro-adjustment, and had problems. Seemed I could use the software shutter all I wanted but the camera shutter would stop transferring images after only a couple of images. I would try to turn off the camera and it would tell me that images were still being saved, and give me the count. I'd finally unplug the USB cable and it would turn off.

Down graded to 3.3 and everything was back to normal - whew! Was afraid it was a bad 7d copy.

My experience is there are definite issues with 3.4.1 tethered shooting.

Windows 7 Pro 64bit
Intel Core i7
Canon 7d Firmware 1.2.5

[Scott Hargis]

Glad to know I'm not the only one experiencing this with 3.4.1!
Tomorrow I'm going to run some tests, and I'll poke around on the Adobe LR forums and see if it's been noted there. For now, 3.3 seems like the way to go.

[Scott Hargis]

Well -- I installed LR 3.3 and everything is back to normal, tethering-wise. I can change lenses, go into and out of mirror lockup mode, cycle the camera on/off, even yank the cable out and then plug it back into a live camera ---- nothing seems to phase LR's tether connection. Just the way I like it!

I did a quick search on the Adobe Lightroom forums for this issue, and an even quicker Google search under the terms "Lightroom 3.4.1 tether problem" and got nothing....I certainly hope they deal with this soon -- I'd hate to miss out on a significant update, but tethering problems are definitely a deal-breaker for me....

[phila]

Not having any lens changing related problems with my 1Ds MkIII and MBA using LR 3.4.0.

What I am having problems with (if I can hijack this thread a bit) is a recurring problem where the camera "locks up" with the red LED lit and mirror up after approx 2-3GB of images taken. Turning the camera on/off doesn't fix it, removing the battery doesn't fix it. What does work is removing the CF card and saving the images to the laptop only for the rest of the shoot. The next day all is fine again. Changing to a different CF card makes no difference. This problem has been happening for 12 months and was still there after changing my 15"MBP for the MBA.

Using (currently) 10.6.7.

Any thoughts?

[eugeneb]

I have started having the same problem tethering in Lightroom. Never had any problem before. I am shooting a Nikon D300 and using a MacBook Pro. I am using Lightroom Ver. 3.2. It will start working fine but then just stop transferring any images, you then have to go out of tethering and then back in to it again for it to start transferring. Sometimes you have to quit Lightroom and go back in for it to start working again. I am not changing lenses. I have tried 3 different cables so it's not a bad cable. It seems the longer you wait between shots the more often it happens almost like it has a timer to stop transferring files.

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Eugene,

Miami,  FL

[Wolfman]

I am not saying this is the problem, but try re-setting the auto power to off if you have it set to a certain time limit...... maybe it is shutting off during the longer times between shots.

[degrub]

Is the USB port being shut off in power save mode ? just an idea.

[sty]

I found the same problem doing some studio work, it was always triggered when I changed lenses when the camera was on. Every time.

I think I got it to do that a few times when the camera was off too, but the solution is quick too. Unplug and plug your usb cable back in, works every time.

I do keep eye on the tethered capture dialog and plug the cable back only after it says 'no camera'.

[eugeneb]

Thanks for the reply, I have tried unplugging and plugging the USB cable. But it never use to do this. It's a big problem to need doing this over and over during a shoot. There has to be a solution, my camera doesn't power off.

[T.Kaercher]

got the same problem, Camera and LR freeze, even if i change something in the camera menu.
there was no problem with LR 3.3 and OS 10.6.7

http://blog.kaercher-fotografie.de

[eugeneb]

Finally solved the problem by upgrading to the newest ver. It works like before. It was a software problem in LR3

Thanks,

To all,

Eugene

[neil snape]

This is an ongoing thing for me with the 5D, 5DII.

One of the things that may be suspect is the length of the USB cable, state, quality.

I was having so many problems recently that I switched the usb extension and it worked perfectly since. It's possible that the models etc walk on the cables thus are fragile. Why it blocks on writes, I don't know. Is it in the Camera or cable or software?

I always have to go through hoops to get it to work , sometimes as far as reboot the MacBook Pro. Since I have to reboot it may also be the computer, USB port hooks, software etc.

Since I have tried after hangs with Canon EOS UTILITY and it still cannot connect , that would say it is hardware. Yet where, between the Canon body, the cable, or computer?