Hello! Finally I am getting around working on this project I have always wanted to turn into a reality!
Currently I own 3 Sony a5000 and they all connect and control very well with the Capture Grid 4 trial, all functions are working and synchronizing them, however I can’t seem to disable downloading of photos.
I want the cameras to keep the photos in their own SD cards, and download only on demand.
I go to File > Options > Camera Storage and change to “Card”
however photos continue to be downloaded to the computer. On the “Camera Controls” tab, “Storage” is locked to “Disk” and greyed out (does not allow me to change to other options).
can anyone shine some light into what is going on?
Thank you very much in advance for the attention and advice
Unfortunately for most Sony cameras, its not possible to change where the camera saves the photo.
When tethering, the a5000 does not support saving the photo to the memory card; so instead the tethering software has to download each photo that is taken.
On some of the newer Sony cameras (a7R4, a6400), you can tell the camera to save photos to the memory card. Its only possible to set this option from the camera’s own menu settings, not from tethering software. And also, during this mode, the tethering software does not get notifiied of any of those photos, so its not possible to download them after the shoot!
I assumed the call of reaching out for the photo from the camera card would be on CaptureGrid side and not actually the camera, since I thought the default behavior would always be save to card.
The most important feature of CaptureGrid I was searching for was synchronizing the settings between the multiple cameras as saving to computer is always much limited by the USB speed
So there is absolutely no way to make the camera save the photo to the card instead and have capturegrid ignore it? Or to somehow make capture grid only control the camera settings and ignore the card of the cameras? Because having to transfer the photos every time they are taken greatly increased downtime and is heavily limited by the USB speed and write speed of the device being used, my intention is to create a fast and portable setup (I was considering using a raspberry pi or similar device just to control camera settings), where I would later just individually download the photos from each card and sync them myself.
Thank you once again in advance
For the Sony a5000, no this is not possible.
During tethering, the camera does not support saving images to card. Instead, whenever a new photo is taken, the camera saves it to internal memory buffer, and then sends notification to tethering app that it must download the image. If tethering does not download the image, the camera will eventually get stuck pending, as its memory buffer will fill up.
As I said before, some more recent Sony cameras such as the a6400 do support saving to memory card during tethering. And of course, all Canon and Nikon cameras support this too.
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I really appreciate the explanation Francis, it does make sense.
So theoretically to take advantage of the best speeds from cameras to server/computer one would look towards having a computer with the fastest write speeds available to disk (ideally an SSD) and usb 3.0 right?
I will have to search for the best Single board computer for a portable setup, maybe a rasperry pi 4 or an Odroid and see how that goes
If the camera is USB2, then that will be the bottleneck (even if connected to USB3 port on computer).
But yes, if you have many cameras into one computer, its good to use an SSD disk. And also, try to balance the USB connections into the computer, so they are not all using the same USB host controller. If possible, install some extra PCIe USB host controllers into the computer and still the connections across them.
The app does provide some feedback on the USB download performance, so this is useful to check when testing. In the “Cameras” table, there is a column for “USB Rate”; this is the mbytes/second for the last download that happened on that camera.
Also this info gets printed to the log. For example:
[20:06:36.772 Camera Info: 3] 4337807] USB download rate: 0.51 mbytes in 18.76 ms (27.35 mbytes/sec)
[20:06:36.780 Camera Info: 3] photo saved in 7.56 ms to: C:\Users\francis\Pictures\CaptureGRID 4\SSP_4337807_1.JPG
The first line reports the USB download speed, and the second line reports how long it too take save the photo to computer disk.
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That is awesome advice Francis, thank you!
Also, do you have any recommendations into improving performance of the software + reduce energy consumption?
For example, I don’t know if removing image preview (which is unnecessary in my case) would help? Simply download the files and display the file info but no need to actually generate a preview for the files.
For the image previews, the photos are only decoded if they are made visible in the “Capture” tab.
So if you never switch to that tab, the app will never try to decode/view them, that will save some CPU usage. You can just stay on the “Photos” tab, and check the new photos as they get added to the table.
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