MAC OS-X 10.5.7 good news for tethered shooters

If you use an Apple MAC and have OS-X 10.5 then most likely you've been running 10.5.6 lately, but now 10.5.7 is now available to download and if you didn't get it already do so...

In MAC OS 10.5.6 Apple seemingly broke the tethered shooting functions making it very tough for users to shoot with cameras connected to the laptop. Typical symptoms include freezing of the whole computer, lock up of DPP or EOS Utility or similar. Usually it happens after around 15 minutes of continuous tethering, sometimes after 20 or more images have been transferred. MAC OS-X 10.5.7 seems to fix this, though there's no mention of fixes to USB on the update release notes.

To try it out we hooked up an EOS-1D Mark III and left it in live view mode for over 30 minutes it was still all alive and working and we could then pick the camera up and shoot a couple of hundred frames straight in to the MAC; just like you could do with MAC OS-X 10.5.5.

One thing that 10.5.7 brings is support for RAW images from EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 50D and PowerShot G10 according to the release note information.

-blabpictures-

Editing EOS 5D Mark II videos - the simple way

So, there's been lots of talk about the EOS 5D Mark II and the video capability. But no-one is really talking about editing what they shoot. So here's the simple take on it. We'll deal with some of the more complex methods in future posts.

Upfront - an apology as this is a Mac based 'tutorial'. (I'm not sure about calling this a tutorial as it's so simple and quick, it feels a bit of a cheat!)

Anyway, I digress.
Start by copying the images and movies from the memory card on to the computer. You can do this anyway you want, but I'd suggest a card reader. It's quicker (and that's enough for me) but it also doesn't use battery power and doesn't cause any driver issues.

With the files on the computer, import them to iPhoto. You can either put all the photos and videos in there or you can just put the videos in there. I create an album just for putting the videos in, but you may have other thoughts on this.

With the files imported into iPhoto, the wonders of Mac make them available in the media browser in all the other 'i' apps. In this case, you want iMovie.

Open iMovie, navigate to the media tab and look for photos in your iPhoto library. Find the album you put the movies in and viola, they're ready to be used in your new movie file.

Simply drag each clip you want to the timeline and arrange, trim, transition etc as needed. Getting clips into a computer and using them really is that simple!

-blabpictures-