Laptop tethered capture

[andris]

I'm really curious to hear about the practical experience of other people in this area.

Wheeling around a digital cart with full size capture tower, internal RAID, and 20" monitor works great in a studio and at relatively flat locations where power is readily available.  What about other less ideal locations like beaches and golf courses?  Obviously a laptop would be perfect for these situations, but can it keep up with high volume tethered capture?  I don't have a high performance laptop to test on, and I'm hesitant to drop a lot of cash without being able to test first.  I'd love to hear from those of you running this kind of setup.  When posting, please list machine specs and give some idea of the volume and rate at which you shoot.

Thanks!

Andris

ps  If I did end up picking up a laptop for tethered capture, I'd probably augment it with one of these (http://www.instand.com/cr5/superstand_detail.html) or something similar.  Seems like a convenient solution.

[Bruce Van Inwegen]

Hey Andris,

This was put together for less than $20.00 petty cash.  The Bogen floor and light stands were already a part of standard equipment inventory. The table, 'puter, dark cloth, second 17" LCD monitor, hardware, cables, tablet, and backup drive all fit into a case that fits under an airline seat.

[andris]

Nice stand, Bruce.

How's the performance of the laptop when you're shooting tethered?

Great to finally see some action in these tethered forums...there must be other people out there doing the tethered thing!

Andris

[Bruce Van Inwegen]

It’s functional but since the advent of CS3 it can be a bit testy at times, although I’m more inclined to think that it’s a Bridge issue rather than a hardware issue.

There are a couple of large differences between what I do and what you do, so a comparison might not be too valuable.  I rarely shoot people when tethered, and the volume of files I turn out is exponentially lower than what you have described.  Also, virtually no development of raw files is done outside the studio, except for grunt work that isn’t associated with the visual component of the image. (backup and metadata related only)

The nature of the work I choose to do, the policies I set, and clients I cultivate, pretty much allow me to control the speed of my life, so the fastest and most powerful location rig isn’t as necessary for me as it would be for you. 

[andris]

Despite the differences in what we do, thanks for the feedback.  Always helps to see another perspective.

Andris

[ronandownes]

How about a 7 inch battery powered DVD player?

Do you need so much resolution to preview.
Ronan

[jakobox]

I used to shoot with a 5D. Raw files to an older macbook with 3gigs of ram tethered to Capture One 3.7. One thing I shoot is dancers, which is often a lot of rapid shooting, and the system almost never hiccupped, and was plenty fast.

I'm now shooting with a 5Dmarkii, and things are a little more complicated. I upgraded to a Macbook Pro 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 6 gigs of ram, and I still haven't found a good way to keep up with my shooting. the markii necesitates Captures One version 4, which I haven't found to be too stable. I've been using EOS utility and Lightroom, which is stable, but can be quite slow in building previews when we're looking to review images.

hope that helps.

[peterkrogh]

Jake,
For this kind of shoot, I use the video out and review on a TV.  It's much faster.
Peter

[ronandownes]

I find the HDMI video out of D300 straight to plasma TV too slow.

Ronan

[BobSmith]

I've been using EOS utility and Lightroom, which is stable, but can be quite slow in building previews when we're looking to review images.

For this purpose I find shooting into Bridge faster.  I shoot with the original 5D with EOS Utility in a MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM.  I love Lightroom for other issues but for studio tethered shooting with Canon the EOS Utility/Bridge solution seems most efficient.  It's at least a second or two faster per image.  I used Capture One Pro originally (version 3.something).  Also very fast and stable for tethered shooting but I dislike just about every other aspect of it's workflow.  After EOS Utility went through a few updates it was just as stable and put the images directly into the rest of an Adobe managed workflow.  Be sure to add the script that causes Bridge to select the most recently added image as the active one.  Setup a screen layout with a large preview image.  Set EOS Utility to call Bridge when a new image is downloaded.

Bob Smith