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C1 tethering D800e .

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Okay been shooting in studio for two days straight and both days I have had some issues tethering. First I'm having a hard time setting up a new session and getting communication going between MBP and body. This is not a cord issue. I actually found a USB 3 20 ft cable they other day and even my extension cable same issue. Love to hear a foolproof way of exactly getting connection. I found today hitting the info button on the cam actually induced communication after a bunch of try's.

Second issue even bigger at 543 images I lost connection yesterday and today bam same thing it happened at 413. After many try's no way in hell could I get it to communicate. Yes rebooted and every trick I knew. Solved it by starting a completely new session and starting fresh. Also my mouse went south and kept losing Bluetooth connection. Very strange behavior here and its bugging me. Just wondering if I am hitting some type of limit wall on raws.

Three , yea not out of the woods yet here. Shooting along at 2 different times I lost connection for about 5 frames or so. Turned camera off than back on and started working again but I lost those 5 images to nowhere , not computer not CF card. Now batteries where starting to run low about 20 percent left I would say.

Question if I have a question here is what behavior patterns are you seeing tethered. Now this is far from the rock steady performance that I had with my Phase back which never missed a frame.

Camera related at one point my whole AF system died and would not focus until I rebooted camera. Frankly starting to get concerned. At one point I was down 10 minutes with model on seamless waiting. Little disappointed here.
 

petetsai

Member
Wish I could help you Guy, but I do my tethering on a Windows machine. I've never been happy with the implementation of how Nikon's tethering mode is one way or the other. I don't trust my files only going through the cable and it is electronically possible for the Nikon body to write to the card and then push out the image to the USB.

I have my windows tethering solution doing just that, its tethered but the files are copied locally to any cards in the body, then they are read out via USB and written into a specific folder I use. I do this with a customized version of the DYI photobits script. You might want to check the soforbild software for the Mac or any other homebrew tethering software. It is functionally possible to have the USB tether in a way where it just looks at the files on the card and if a new one pops in it can copy it down. I'd only ever shoot with a client this way as losing images is unacceptable.

Good Luck Guy!

PS - I do this all wirelessly too as to eliminate any cable incidents....
 

ShooterSteve

New member
Sorry Guy, I hate it when that happens. Giant pain. I've been there but always found a workarounds on the job by changing camera brands or backup laptops with older OS on them. I'm going to shoot all day today - hope I don't run into the same issue! I'll let you know how it goes. I'm running OS 10.8.2 and the latest C1 V7...
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Doug sent me a email and it could very well be length of cable being to long. Ill pick up a 10 footer and see how that works out.
 

dougpeterson

Workshop Member
Doug sent me a email and it could very well be length of cable being to long. Ill pick up a 10 footer and see how that works out.
International specification for USB3 is 10ft.

That does NOT mean that longer cables won't work, especially when using high quality cables with active/powered repeaters/extensions. In general I suggest unibrain, usbfirewire.com, tethertools, and granite digital cables. In no situation should you EVER buy a cable without considering it's brand/quality/origin; a poor cable will give you nightmeres - it's not binary wherein a cable works or it doesn't. Rather a bad cable will cause intermittent failures, drops, and other annoyances seemingly at random (or worse, seemingly only when you really need it to work without hassle).

It just means that if it works at 10ft, and doesn't work with a longer cable, that the cable length is the first, second, and third thing to look at.

Also not all USB ports on a Mac work equally well. As a rule of thumb the ports on the back of a Mac Pro (rather than the front) and the ports closest to the power supply on an iMac or MacBook Pro are the ports to try first.

Also, the damn port on the Nikon isn't exactly military spec, especially if you're shooting tethered frequently and plugging in/out of the port often. So if a certain combination is working great for an extended period and suddenly starts flaking out on a frequent basis then try another body (if available) or other troubleshooting to see if the port on the Nikon is starting to go.

Guy: Are you missing the rock solid, built-as-a-top-engineering-priority, deep-throated, all metal firewire port with double-shielded high-quality (though expensive) firewire cables that are spec'd officially for 15 ft and, with a good cable, almost always work at 30ft back when you had your Phase One digital backs? :)
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
International specification for USB3 is 10ft.

That does NOT mean that longer cables won't work, especially when using high quality cables with active/powered repeaters/extensions. In general I suggest unibrain, usbfirewire.com, tethertools, and granite digital cables. In no situation should you EVER buy a cable without considering it's brand/quality/origin; a poor cable will give you nightmeres - it's not binary wherein a cable works or it doesn't. Rather a bad cable will cause intermittent failures, drops, and other annoyances seemingly at random (or worse, seemingly only when you really need it to work without hassle).

It just means that if it works at 10ft, and doesn't work with a longer cable, that the cable length is the first, second, and third thing to look at.

Also not all USB ports on a Mac work equally well. As a rule of thumb the ports on the back of a Mac Pro (rather than the front) and the ports closest to the power supply on an iMac or MacBook Pro are the ports to try first.

Also, the damn port on the Nikon isn't exactly military spec, especially if you're shooting tethered frequently and plugging in/out of the port often. So if a certain combination is working great for an extended period and suddenly starts flaking out on a frequent basis then try another body (if available) or other troubleshooting to see if the port on the Nikon is starting to go.

Guy: Are you missing the rock solid, built-as-a-top-engineering-priority, deep-throated, all metal firewire port with double-shielded high-quality (though expensive) firewire cables that are spec'd officially for 15 ft and, with a good cable, almost always work at 30ft back when you had your Phase One digital backs? :)
Actually, (from the spec) the max cable length is 5.3 meters for 20 gauge wire and a maximum resistance of 3.58 ohms per 100 meters.
the spec contains a table of wire gauges and maximum length based on allowable voltage drop for the differential signal.

further in section 5.5.7
"5.5.7 Cable Assembly Length
This specification does not specify cable assembly lengths. A USB 3.0 cable assembly can be of
any length, as long as it meets all the requirements defined in this specification. The cable
assembly loss budget defined in Section 5.6.1.3.1 and the cable voltage drop budget defined in
Section 11.4.2 will limit the cable assembly length."
-bob
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
I have used several lengths of the Siig branded usb 3.0 extender cable with good results.
There is a caveat though, and that is the short cable that nikon provides that includes its little plastic strain relief should be used if possible, that should be further restrained to the camera body with something like a tether-tools strain relief and then that passible cable connected directly to the siig active repeater.
I tried the tether-tools repeater cable and found it to not function reliably across two samples.
Doug's suggestion is the best however, shoot using firewire and a Phase Back. Much more better and no AF lockup, at least it is hard to tell LOL
-bob
 

RVB

Member
Doug's suggestion is the best however, shoot using firewire and a Phase Back. Much more better and no AF lockup, at least it is hard to tell LOL
-bob

:ROTFL:
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
International specification for USB3 is 10ft.

That does NOT mean that longer cables won't work, especially when using high quality cables with active/powered repeaters/extensions. In general I suggest unibrain, usbfirewire.com, tethertools, and granite digital cables. In no situation should you EVER buy a cable without considering it's brand/quality/origin; a poor cable will give you nightmeres - it's not binary wherein a cable works or it doesn't. Rather a bad cable will cause intermittent failures, drops, and other annoyances seemingly at random (or worse, seemingly only when you really need it to work without hassle).

It just means that if it works at 10ft, and doesn't work with a longer cable, that the cable length is the first, second, and third thing to look at.

Also not all USB ports on a Mac work equally well. As a rule of thumb the ports on the back of a Mac Pro (rather than the front) and the ports closest to the power supply on an iMac or MacBook Pro are the ports to try first.

Also, the damn port on the Nikon isn't exactly military spec, especially if you're shooting tethered frequently and plugging in/out of the port often. So if a certain combination is working great for an extended period and suddenly starts flaking out on a frequent basis then try another body (if available) or other troubleshooting to see if the port on the Nikon is starting to go.

Guy: Are you missing the rock solid, built-as-a-top-engineering-priority, deep-throated, all metal firewire port with double-shielded high-quality (though expensive) firewire cables that are spec'd officially for 15 ft and, with a good cable, almost always work at 30ft back when you had your Phase One digital backs? :)
My Phase backs and i mean 5 of them where literally flawless and yes I used a 30 footer that both you and CI sell. BTW they previewed faster than the Nikon as well.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
I have used several lengths of the Siig branded usb 3.0 extender cable with good results.
There is a caveat though, and that is the short cable that nikon provides that includes its little plastic strain relief should be used if possible, that should be further restrained to the camera body with something like a tether-tools strain relief and then that passible cable connected directly to the siig active repeater.
I tried the tether-tools repeater cable and found it to not function reliably across two samples.
Doug's suggestion is the best however, shoot using firewire and a Phase Back. Much more better and no AF lockup, at least it is hard to tell LOL
-bob
Okay you got 40k for me to borrow for the next 20 years. ROTFLMAO

Seriously no question my Phase back was flawless at tethered. This Nikon is a downgrade no question in my mind on tethered.

I ordered the Vantec and going to order the SIIG as well with repeaters. I like having several of these things around. I really dont need to be longer than 20 feet in total but having the repeater in there regardless of length sounds like the answer. I pulled a lot of hair out this week. Not only that I was pretty pissed off and that takes a lot for me to get to that point.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
I have used several lengths of the Siig branded usb 3.0 extender cable with good results.
There is a caveat though, and that is the short cable that nikon provides that includes its little plastic strain relief should be used if possible, that should be further restrained to the camera body with something like a tether-tools strain relief and then that passible cable connected directly to the siig active repeater.
I tried the tether-tools repeater cable and found it to not function reliably across two samples.
Doug's suggestion is the best however, shoot using firewire and a Phase Back. Much more better and no AF lockup, at least it is hard to tell LOL
-bob
I did not have any issues fortunately with cables pulling out or being very lose in either port. One does get lucky once in awhile. LOL

I also use gaffers tape sometimes as well
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
That does look nice as well. I orderd both the Vantec and the SIIG. This way i have two in the bag at all times.
 
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