Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: Paul Wright on April 08, 2017, 04:12:10 am

Title: Canon EOS Utility-3 time sync fail
Post by: Paul Wright on April 08, 2017, 04:12:10 am
On a lot of jobs I work with three bodies, and keeping the camera's internal clocks syncronised is extremely important. Canon internal clocks seem to drift fairly quickly, so the time-sync thing happens every couple of weeks. For years I've hooked up to EOS Utility-2, followed the steps and synced bodies to Mac time. EOS Utility-3 has a slightly different process, but the result should be the same. There is the offer to sync with Mac time, but it just doesn't happen. The 5D MkIV is not recognised by EOS Utility-2, so time syncing bodies has become a tedious, imprecise manual process. FWIW I'm on OSX Sierra.

Am I alone with this glitch? Is there a stand-alone app available to achieve time-sync?

-pw
Title: Re: Canon EOS Utility-3 time sync fail
Post by: Damon Lynch on April 08, 2017, 04:44:30 pm
gPhoto2 has had the feature to set the camera's date and time for a decade or so. gPhoto2 works on a Mac. How well it does, I can't say, because I've never owned  a Mac.

On Linux it works like a charm. For example one fellow (https://mpetroff.net/2015/08/automatic-camera-clock-synchronization-under-linux/) set up his Linux system to automatically set the time on the camera whenever he plugs it in.

I'd be surprised if no one has done something similar on the the Mac.  I have no idea if OS X exposes to the end user the steps that occur when a camera is plugged in, allowing you to create your own rules like Linux, but if not you can always script it and launch the script yourself. That's easy with Python, for example. In fact Python has a binding to libghoto2, so anything you can do with gPhoto2 (which is a lot), you can do from Python.
Title: Re: Canon EOS Utility-3 time sync fail
Post by: Paul Wright on April 20, 2017, 12:19:52 am
Out of curiosity I installed EOS Utilty-3 on a PC. Problem solved. It looks like the issue is Mac based only. Glad I run with both platforms!

-pw