P: Tethering

This is an historic screw up by adobe to let this ride and never accept responsibility for fraudulent advertising. Adobegate indeed. Is there anyone with the integrity at Adobe who will admit we have a problem and actually own up it and FIX THE SONOF... well you get my drift.

Bob Carmichael
3rd Place APA 2011 Photography winner, sports
7 Silver Telly Award 2010
5 Time nominee World Master Cup Color Awards
Academy Award nominated
Emmy Award winning and yes I know something about photography

Just downloaded and tried 3.5 as opposed to the Beta. Now runs at half the speed downloading from the D3 to the MacBook which means it's virtually useless for portrait work and although it didn't crash, after ten frames it was obviously still a massive step in reverse from the time when it all worked. Reluctantly downloading a trial version of Aperture to see if that's any better........sad days indeed.

Lightroom 3.5 Tethered. (Nikon/Mac) I keep getting the "transferring files from camera" message. A lot. It's like Lightroom can't figure out that it's a bad file and won't stop trying. I'd rather it just give me the "damaged file" message and move on. Seems like a step backwards from 3.4 which may have been a little more stable tethered.

Is there a way to force it to give up on whatever's obviously not going to transfer?

Scott still on sofortbild and hesitant check out LR# after being burnt by the failures. That the above "employee" finds this a hostile thread is really interesting. I'd like to see Adobe employee apologizing to my clients cause their software is faulty and NO ONE seems to want to admit it. Bizarre.
Let me know when the coast is clear I have a LOT of images in LR as well.

Best
Bob Carmichael

Ben,
I would agree that the changes have improved things. A single failure in three separate tethered sessions is certainly better than what was occurring earlier. Hopefully the fact that Scott and I are experiencing similar failures during similar shooting situations will be helpful, in spite of the elusive nature of the problem. If you have any suggestions to aid in your troubleshooting I would be glad to try them.

Hi Scott,

Yes, we made further changes to tether between the 3.5 release candidate, and the final release of 3.5. Needless to say, given the extremely erratic nature of the problems (not to mention the hostile tone on this thread), I was hesitant to post here again saying that we'd "fixed" it. But yes, I can confirm that additional changes were made, which we hoped would improve things.

-Ben

When the LR 3.5 final release update was made available a couple of weeks ago, I was skeptical that Adobe had solved the Nikon tethering issue with 10.6.8 (see my posting above 14 days ago where I say as much; unfortunately, nobody from Adobe has ever replied to my post to confirm/deny that the final update was any different from the release candidate).

As a test -- prior to actually shooting with models/clients on-set -- I tethered my D3x to LR 3.5 and kept it connected for nearly a full day while doing office administration (7+ hours). Sometimes I shot in bursts; sometimes I left it alone for 10, 15, 20, 30, 60 minutes and then shot a few frames. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my D3x disconnected and wouldn't transfer files only a single time (and I think I attribute that to my MBP going into "Sleep Mode" after a prolonged period of sitting idle), but the other 200+ photos I snapped over the course of the day were all captured without any incident.

This gave me enough confidence to try tethering LR 3.5 on a proper location fashion shoot, which I did earlier this week. My shoot was 4 hours long and I shot per my normal pattern: bursts of shooting 10, 15, 20 shots and then stopping to review them with my assistant or client or talent and then restarting again. During this time my MBP ran on a mixture of AC power and battery power and I never turned-off my D3x and I never closed or restarted LR 3.5 or my MBP. The result: I had a single instance of LR 3.5 disconnecting and not transferring my files.

When I stopped and restarted tethering, the files came into LR, so I was no worse for wear. Admittedly, this was a hassle. And admittedly, it was a little embarrassing in front of my client, but it wasn't a show-stopper by any means.

Overall, my most recent test and actual shoot results have given enough confidence in LR 3.5 to try it again on my next shoot this week end. I am interested to see what happens, but I do have Sofortbild on standby if I start to experience similar issues as I did with LR 3.4.1 and 3.5RC.

Ben (or other Adobe employees monitoring this thread), I would really love to have confirmation if you made further changes to the tethering function on the final release of LR 3.5 vs. the release candidate.

I certainly can't make that statement. I have experienced two tethered sessions of 2-3 hours without any problems since my last update to this discussion. However, my most recent session a couple of days ago failed after about 4 hours and 400 or so photos into the session. This time around I wasn't able to restore tethered capture by simply stopping and starting tethered shooting from the menu, as I have been able to do in the past. I had to shut down LR, unplug the camera, replug the camera and restart LR a couple of times before tethered operations resumed successfully. All in front of the client and a roomful of observers, btw. Once it restarted there were no subsequent failures for the remainder of the session--about 2 hours and 250-300 additional photos.

To summarize, 3.5 has NOT largely fixed this issue on a Mac!

So, mirror-lock-up on a 1DsIII and filling the buffer on a D3 can cause problems on 3.5, but otherwise 3.5 has largely fixed this issue on Mac?

Here's my 10 cents worth - I too tried the Sofortbild solution but found it hopelessly slow - the same speed as the Nikon Camera Control solution I used prior to LR3. LR3 Tethered was the only thing that allowed me to shoot RAW at a sensible rate and since the the 3.5 upgrade I've only had trouble if I try and shoot too quickly so that the buffer on the D3 gets more than half full and even then it's not always a problem. My current workaround is to keep one eye on the buffer indicator in the viewfinder while I shoot to alert me to any seize ups - not ideal but the weird thing about this problem is that so many people are having different symptoms.........