5D Mk II Tethering...?

Same question here. Tethered with A3 and Canon 5D MkII. Does it work?

Unfortunately, the 5D Mark II is not on the supported cameras for Aperture tethered shooting:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1085

Pretty much no Canons released in the past 2 years support it. Canon removed support for the standard tethering protocol that Aperture uses to access the cameras. Only the older (30d and previous, 1D* Mark II and previous) support the protocol that Aperture uses.

You can still use a hot folder and automator actions, but you'll need to push the button on the camera yourself.

William - thanks for posting this link. In reading the Ap3 User Manual (Page 167) the link supplied is to the list of those cameras supported with RAW conversion. Waiting for this for several years with my Olympus bodies, and thinking this was an enhancement in v3, I eagerly thrashed on it for several agonizing hours...given the date on the correct link you supplied, this is clearly a mistake in the manual. Thanks again..wish it worked, but at least now I can move on and continue using the Oly software solution (lame but works).

cheers,
david

It's rather annoying and it is a Canon thing at this point from sources I've talked to.

Any way, the hot folder solution is no good either. Lethargic, unreliable and simply cumbersome.

Very annoying indeed. Having said that I think C1 Pro can do it so I'm not certain on the hangup on Apple's side. Maybe I just don't know how all this works from a software engineering point 🙂

Incidentally what i have learnt is that Canon want you to use DPP and Eos utility. What they don't realize is how slow and unreliable and lacks everything Aperture can do in almost EVERY way.

We can only hope Canon get's over them selves and just let third parties implement this protocol. They need not worry we are still paying thousands for their equipment, no ?

Message was edited by: Falcon01

Yes, C1 Pro can tether. They've apparently coded to Canon's newer, proprietary protocol. So it's possible, it's just that Apple would have to write one tethering stack for Canon, one for Nikon, one for Hasselblad, and one for pretty much every camera vendor, instead of writing to a standard that all the camera vendors support.

I don't know how much work it is to write and maintain 5-10 different tethering stacks, but it looks like that's the route Apple would have to go in the future if this were a priority.

For C1, well, that's one of their core strengths and ways they're used so it's obviously high on their priority list.

William Lloyd wrote:
Yes, C1 Pro can tether. They've apparently coded to Canon's newer, proprietary protocol. So it's possible, it's just that Apple would have to write one tethering stack for Canon, one for Nikon, one for Hasselblad, and one for pretty much every camera vendor, instead of writing to a standard that all the camera vendors support.

I don't know how much work it is to write and maintain 5-10 different tethering stacks, but it looks like that's the route Apple would have to go in the future if this were a priority.

For C1, well, that's one of their core strengths and ways they're used so it's obviously high on their priority list.

And a $500 price tag!
That's unfortunate with not having some standard, but I really hope Apple will step up and do it even though it's not so much their not playing nice but the camera manufacturer.

I went to a seminar on Aperture 2 put on by Apple and bought in to the whole Apple/Aperture concept. I bought a 27" quad core I-Mac, and a Mac Book Pro. Both machine special ordered with high speed drives, extra ram, the fastest video cards available, and 2 copies of Aperture, one for each machine to stream line picture transfers. Total cost almost $7000.00 to change over from PC to Apple. I go and try and tether my Canon 1Ds MkIII and no go. I spent a day trying to figure out what I was doing wrong only to find out, Aperture does not support the Canon 1Ds MkIII. So now I use the Canon utility to tether, then save the pictures to a flash drive, only to load them into the 27"I-Mac. If the person told me this when I was buying all of this, I could have saved almost $3000.00 on the Mac-Book Pro and just bought some $500 laptop and used the Canon utility. Funny how you only learn this after you buy their stuff. I wonder if Apple would like to refund all this money and take back their custom built Mac-Book Pro.

In any other industry, you'd be sued till you were dead...not in the work of computers.

Canon is also to blame with all their secrecy. Apple markets Aperture as a "pro" application, just don't connect a pro camera to it.

Apple-Be more forthcoming to your cutomers and you'll get credit for being honest

Canon-You'd be a lot more popular if you'd work with high end photo editing software companies like Apple. All would benefit. Now all you'll get from us is, "watch out Canon equipment isn't compatible with third party supplier".

Wake up you guys, there should be no problem these days connecting to each other. Sony tried conering the market years ago, only to laughed at, and turned away.

vonrohr1968 wrote:
So now I use the Canon utility to tether, then save the pictures to a flash drive, only to load them into the 27"I-Mac.

I'm missing something here. Why don't you save from the Canon software into a folder, then import directly into Aperture? Why the need for a flash drive?

Apple not supporting the newer Canon protocol is a big pain, but it sounds like you're trying to make your life harder than it need be.

Ian

I hope I'm not making my life harder. I shoot tethered to my Mac Book Pro using my Canon 1Ds MkIII. I do this to check lighting and to get a finer end result. This should end up with me taking less shots to gain the same end result. Less shots to me, equals less work. I have Aperture loaded on the Mac Book Pro but I can't use it tethered. My original thought was to use Aperture to shoot tethered, and to transfer the live shoot photography into my I-Mac 27" via a flash drive, but use the album transfer system to keep the live shoot very organized so post sorting the photographs would not be necessary.

As it turns out, Aperture does not support my camera, so I have to use the Canon utility..which works very well. I still have to get my pictures off of my Mac Book Pro to my I-Mac. Sending a large number of large size file wireless is slow, or so I'm told. Therefore, I use the USB-2 flash drive to take the pictures off the Mac Book Pro, and transfer them onto the I-Mac. The unfortunate part is, there is no real need to use Aperture on the Mac Book Pro because all my post editing will be on the I-Mac.

I hope this not the hard or long way. If it is, please let me know how to do this easier or faster. I'm all about trying to save time and effort with maintaining, or, improving the end result if possible.

Thanks for taking the time to write

Cheers

Dan

Apple could support it if they really wanted to. A friend of mine is a CS major and in their lab they wrote the code to fully control a Canon 7D, apparently there is a SDK from Canon you can by that has the info you need to do it. But they would have to do it for every maker and maybe model. I think given that smaller software companies have done it, Apple should does not really have an excuse for not giving it the time.
The EOS utility is such a pain to use, the interface is horrible. And the last time I tried the hot folder method, it took way too long between capture to import to be useful.

Well I'm a bit confused by the whole setup.

True, you cannot tether your camera directly to Aperture. But what you can do is have Canon Utility dump the RAW files in a folder. Then you can use an Automator action that comes with Aperture to automatically import those photos straight into Aperture. So it's an automated process, and the result is pretty close to the same as directly tethering. You can use Aperture on the laptop to do a first-pass edit, and then export entire projects from the laptop and import them to the iMac.

Richard Seldomridge wrote:
Apple could support it if they really wanted to. A friend of mine is a CS major and in their lab they wrote the code to fully control a Canon 7D, apparently there is a SDK from Canon you can by that has the info you need to do it. But they would have to do it for every maker and maybe model. I think given that smaller software companies have done it, Apple should does not really have an excuse for not giving it the time.
The EOS utility is such a pain to use, the interface is horrible. And the last time I tried the hot folder method, it took way too long between capture to import to be useful.

I would love your friends lab to do that for me 😉

Any way, we also have to be realistic (me too) in regards to what Apple can and should do.
Like I said above, that's why CaptureOne Pro is $500 give/take.

They do put resources into each camera connectivity, but Apple could too, the question is at what cost in engineering for each brand/model of the newer cameras, especially Canon.

I suppose that's why Lightroom doesn't even have that ability without using third party software or scripts.

Well, I have to be patient otherwise I have the Rebel XT which works.

AP3 is great except when you want to tether-shoot - then it's RUBBISH!!!
I could shoot tethered from my Canon 1DS to AP2 - now I can't: why?

According to the new Lightroom 3 beta release, it can tether the 5Dii. So what's Apple's excuse? Is there some power trippy thing going on here with Aperture's camera model adoption? They really need to get on the ball. Stick an intern on it.

I emailed Canon support about the tethering issue, pretty much blaming them for being incompatible. They said it's not their problem. I thought they were being assholish about it, but maybe not. I think Apple needs to get a few hundred feature requests with a basic "what the f?" tone.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/aperture.html

robogobo wrote:
According to the new Lightroom 3 beta release, it can tether the 5Dii. So what's Apple's excuse? Is there some power trippy thing going on here with Aperture's camera model adoption? They really need to get on the ball. Stick an intern on it.

I emailed Canon support about the tethering issue, pretty much blaming them for being incompatible. They said it's not their problem. I thought they were being assholish about it, but maybe not. I think Apple needs to get a few hundred feature requests with a basic "what the f?" tone.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/aperture.html

I too initially contacted Canon and after a few rounds of questioning and also my way of picking brains, I can tell you camera vendors i.e. Canon/Nikon do NOT give Adobe or Apple etc their source of their RAW image files.

So it's up to Apple/Adobe/C1 and others to engineer such features.
It is possible since just about all BUT Apple have done this. Like you, I'm not sure what the hold up is BUT it seems to me they truly need to add this feature as I refuse to go to LR yet they(LR) have a vital feature I need in my work and that is 5DMKII tether support.

For a moment I felt Apple is trying too much to entice iPhoto users (by the cheezy icons on the tool bar) to make AP3 look "like home" for iPhoto users, but I wish they would do two things that will focus more on a grown up Pro App.

1) Tether for top end Canons -
2) Revamp the lame icon designs in the interface (tool-bar) and make it look more like Safari/Mail just more elegant and not like a cartoon sketch.

Otherwise they do have some great features and adjustment abilities. Other than my two points, I love AP3 and it's workflow.