Is anyone using the EOS Utility for LiveView monitoring/recording? I know on the 5DMkII, this was useless. But this seems to function quite well on the 7D.

Video looks fluid on the computer screen. Record button on the software works. Record button on the camera works as well. Camera and software are happy regardless of which one starts/stops the video.

I'm not sure if this is full res or not, but it looks WAY better than HDMI out to the Marshall. I didn't find a way to easily get 1:1 mapping or a 100% size, so just visually resized the screen to eliminate most jaggy edges and it looked decent. I realize this isn't a portable solution, but I can see a use in a controlled environment. After each take you can easily download and review the .mov file, without having to take out the CF card, etc.

Anyone try extended shoots this way? Is the software decently stable? It didn't crash once on me, whereas on the 5D, it was really buggy.

-steev

This is actually really interesting as I could take a laptop out and give it to the director and still have use of the LCD screen.

I may just have to try this.

Good idea.

B

Wow. This IS interesting indeed if I could use my MBP with the brand new 7D for this in controlled environments! (...like corporate interview type stuff). Thanks for sharing.

EDIT: Just been playing around with this - brilliantly useful!!!! :-) My 15 inch 2008 MBP is a now, as I type, functioning as a good monitor tethered to the 7D with the supplied USB lead...I wonder how long a USB I can get? I can get the preview screen to about 10 inches diagonally on the MBP - should help a ton with focussing etc.

How long is the delay? Half a second or so?

Delay is probably a fraction less than that...certainly no more....it's just about noticeable (if you look for it) but for the sorts of needs I envisage it won't be an issue at all for me (whereas potentially out of focus shots would be!).

Not sure if the dwell on the delay is related to the speed of the laptop/graphics card etc. (but for the record I tried it on my standard issue mid 2008 Apple MBP, 2.5Ghz Core Duo, 4GB RAM etc.)

I used the EOS utility monitor scree it with my Macbook Pro today. I don't think it's as good at focusing as a HDMI monitor but it will do in a pinch. The cool thing is that you can remotely control the D7 and turn the video recording on and off. However I couldn't get the autofocus button to work while the video record was on (using the EOS utility focus button). The autofocus back button works while recording video with the switch on the camera. If you stop the video, then the EOS software autofocus back button (I guess that's what you'd call it) works. However, I haven't delved much into the EOS utility completely so there could be some setting I missed.

As an aside, other than this utility, has anybody gotten wired any remote controller to start and stop video recording? I just got a Satech 1 of TR-A Timer Remote Control and though kind of cheap, it works well as a shutter release and half-press as well as nice intervalometer for stills. But even in video mode the shutter release button just acts as a stills shutter release, no video record on/off.

I used it successfully on a recent corporate video shoot: TSIA ?Brand Launch? on Vimeo.

It worked flawlessly for a full day of shooting. Lag is minimal, color is pretty good. I was director/DP, so I was using the camera LCD, so I can't comment too much on focus pulling with it, but it was great as a client/producer monitor. As a side benefit, our producer was able to grab images from the screen and build a little storyboard as we went along on the day.

A related question: is anyone using the wireless transmitter yet? It would be pretty awesome to send a video feed to an iPhone!

--Mark Lyon

Password for that vimeo vid?

Sorry about that--only embedding is turned off for that one, per client request. There isn't a password, though, so you can view it by clicking through to vimeo.

Boo. So I put the Remote View program on my laptop and since it is an older MacBook Pro the delay is very long. Not sure if there is a way to decrease this. On my 8-core Mac Pro it works great, but I was hoping to use my laptop as a portable client/director monitor so that I can still use the LCD on the camera (since I just found out that gets shut off if I use an HDMI monitor). Oh well.

Is this a Mac only program? If not, where do I find it?

Thanks

There's a PC version on the software CD that comes with the camera. It's called EOS Utility.

Oh duh, I should have looked. Thanks.

This seems like such a great solution to on set monitoring.

Unfortunatily I can't get my set-up to work as well as it seems yours have. My EOS Utility monitor is very stuttery.

I am running on a Sony Vaio laptop with an intel core 2 duo T9550, 6GB RAM, with an ATI Radeon HD 3650 video card. My LCD screnn size is 1920 x 1080.

It does seem that the more programs I have running the worse the EOS Utility Image becomes.

Any thoughts?

Sorry I can't be more helpful, but I'm guessing it's a Mac vs. PC issue. For what it's worth, I'm running an old MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 3GB of 667 MHz DDE2 RAM.

When I run the EOS utility with Live View on it makes the fans in my MBP (2.4 Core 2 Duo) go nuts. Very loud and makes it unusable on a shoot.

Anyone else see this?

Nope - Not in my case (slight spec up from you MBP).

Right when I fire up the Live View my CPU usage for the EOS Utility shoots up to about 130%. Kill live view and it goes away. Not sure what's happening.

I use it for monitoring and it's great, however I'm getting less than 24 fps but it's good enough for focusing and composition etc.

Just wanted to pop in here and say i tried using live view to monitor the shots, and it killed my battery on my laptop-- no more than fifteen minutes i'd say. now i wasn't really checking the battery so i could have probably closed a few other programs, and the battery life isn't that fantastic to begin with.... but i'd still recommend, if you're going to use your computer to monitor with liveview, you do it from somewhere you can plug your computer in.


as far as the fans go, for macs there's a program called smcfancontrol that lets you manually designate the fan speed. if it gets too loud for you you can just tell the fans to slow down a bit. it'll make your laptop hotter obviously but not to the point of harming anything.

I have used it but not for client monitoring. When I showed it, they still wanted to use my 7 inch HDMI screen. We were in a small room so that might be the reason.

I like the EOS Utility. because I can judge color and exposure better on the laptop as it is used for editing as well and I trust it.

The Utility is great for copy work or slide copying or just when the camera is on a tripod.