Canon 1Ds Mark 3 - Remote shooting very slow

Hi,

I've been using the new Canon 1ds mk 3 tethered via its USB cable, and have found that it is very slow at

transferring the images. The laptop is a Macbook Pro, and I'm shooting into the Canon remote shooting

software. The macbook has 2 gigs of ram and I believe a 2.2 GHz processor.

So what is the speed limiter here? Is it the USB cable, the computer, or the camera's processors? Does

anyone know why canon switched from firewire to USB 2.0, and is this slowing things down?

Thanks for any help.

Define "very slow". 1/2 second? 15 seconds?

USB 2.0, if implemented properly, is fast enough to transfer about 3 frames/sec of 16 megabyte 1Ds III raw files. The bottleneck is either the implementation on the camera or the laptop. USB is not as tempramental about its cables as Faarwaar, so unless you're playing with 15 foot cables, the cable probably isn't the problem.

As far as why Canon switched to USB, that should be obvious: availability and reliability. USB is standard on 100% of laptops and desktops, and I'd bet faarwaar is standard on less than 5%. And faarwaar isn't just touchy about cables, it's also unpredictable about which devices work well with which controllers. It certainly causes us nothing but grief on our Nikon Coolscan, and we never actually got it working for tethered shooting on the Fuji.

I'v never had (knock wood) trouble with FireWire on any Macs or with peripherals --hard drives, scanners, printers and cameras I've worked with. I wonder which control, Fw card etc Joseph has used in his PCs if that is his platform of choice.

I suspect the problem is likely Canon's software. I've worked with a tethered 1Ds Mark 2 using FW400 and the lag was about 1/2 - 2 second per frame.

USB 2.0 is rarely properly implemented and despite its roughly equivalent specs has always been far slower than FW 400. As to why Canon switched: That's a good question but the simple answer as Joseph correctly points out is USB 2.0s ubiquity.

Ellis, really good USB 2.0 implementations are rare, especially on a platform with a vested interest in promoting a competing standard.

As for my own experiences, the Nikon 8000 has had trouble with adapters from Adaptec and Siig, as well as the onboard Faarwaar on both the studio's Gigabyte motherboard PC and my personal Asus motherboard PC. It likes the adapter that Nikon supplied with it originally. This is a common complaint with the Nikon, which is why the original adapters, when separated from a Nikon scanner, go for about 4x the price of any other adapter on the bay.

Our Canon XL-2, on the other hand, likes to talk to the Gigabyte onboard Faarwaar, but will not talk to the Siig board at all. It will talk to the Toshiba laptop.

The Microtek scanner likes the Siig, though.

You definitely stand a better chance of getting faarwaar to work with Macs, though. (Although Epson printers can be tricky).

I did some more testing and found that when hooked up to a super fast Mac G5, the images

transfer in about 6 seconds. The laptop has a 1.67 GHz intel processor, and 2 gigs of ram.

With the laptop, it takes about 15-22 seconds for each image to transfer. Which makes this

setup all but useless for a location portrait shoot. The hard drive has plenty of free space, so

thats not the problem. Is this computer really just too slow? We only shoot in raw, and this

is our only laptop.

We're using the usb cable which came with the camera.

Joseph,

Macs have been coming with good USB 2.0 ports for quite some time. Mine are pretty speedy. And what possible logical reason would Apple have to make a user experience more difficult? Tryign to force people t o use Firewire would just be dumb. There's lot of things that can be said about Steve Jobs but "dumb" isn't one of them.

By your own admission your problem with your scanner seems to have been user induced although let's face it, Nikon should have been more standard in how they dealt with a Firewire signal.

Josh, yeah I think your computer is too slow for what yo uwant to do. Is it a single or a Core 2 Duo Intel processor version? I'm running a late 2006 2.16 GHZ Core 2 Duo iMac with 3Gb RAM.

Joseph,

Since you are PC biased you might enjoy this link:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/14/microsoft.xp.ap/index.html

I've done some more testing and concluded that the Mac USB ports are probably the issue. Maybe there USB 1, or just cheap USB 2? Heres the data from my tests...

MacBook Pro Power PC 1.67 GHz, 2GB RAM

Phase One P30 >>> C1Pro = 9 seconds

Canon 1Ds Mk3 >>> Canon Software = 14 seconds

Canon 1Ds >>> C1Pro = 7 seconds

G5 Tower w/ 4 GHz of processors and 5 GB RAM

Phase One P30 >>> C1Pro = 5 seconds

Canon 1Ds Mk3 >>> Canon Software = 5.5 seconds

Canon 1Ds >>> C1Pro = 5 seconds

So switching computers improved speed significantly with all cameras, but the largest improvement by far came with the Canon 1Ds Mk3, which is the only camera using USB rather than firewire. This tells me that USB major speed limiter.

Are there any options for putting USB 2.0 into this laptop? Can another connector on the laptop be converted to USB 2.0, such as a firewire port, ethernet, or the PC card slot? Would the PC card slot be faster than USB?

I hope we don't need to buy a new laptop to get USB 2, that would be ridiculous.

Alright, now I've done some more extensive testing and I'm really stumped. I ruled out the usb issue by transferring files through from an external hard drive through the usb 2 ports, then through a card adapter that converts the pc slot to two usb 2 ports. Both performed at the same, very fast speed.

Then I suspected that the problem was that the laptop used a mac processor, while the desktop computer used an intel. (Sorry for the confusion, I accidentally called it a G5 tower, while it's really an intel-based mac with 4 intel processors). But a mac processor desktop system that is very fast like the intel, performed at similar speeds. So the OS doesn't seem to be a factor.

I'll try to attach an excel document with all of my test data. Any thoughts on whether performance will improve when Capture One Pro supports tethered shooting to the 1Ds Mk. 3? I wonder if that update will solve the problem, when it become available.

It may also just be Canon saved a few bucks on their highest most prestigious top end model, and saddled it with a second

rate (in the real world) performing connection. When I saw the (IMHO) backwards step from Firewire to USB on a camera

going from 16.7 to 21+ Megapixels I hoped for the best- but I'm not shocked the tether over USB is painfully slow.

PhaseOne transfers 22MP files and up with their digital backs- I don't see them moving to USB anytime soon.