I have been having problems with tethering my Canon 1ds mk3 to my macs since January 09. Before that it worked using ES utility albeit slowly. After Christmas Mac OS X was upgraded to 10.5.6. During my first shoot in the new year the tethered downloads kept freezing and the only way to get things going again has been to unplug the camera and reboot the computer. The transfers however were very quick - until they froze. I made sure I had the latest EOS utility and camera firmware but the problem persisted. Now after reading lots of forum posts and trying their suggestions it seem that both Canon and Nikon cameras suffer from this problem since the OS 10.5.6 upgrade. My Olympus camera however tethers just fine and apparently windows users do not have the problem.
What to do? These are the solutions I have read.
1 - Use windows computer.
2 - install bootcamp and use the windows version of EOS utility on your Mac.
3 - revert to Mac OS 0.5.5 and hope that 10.5.7 arrives soon
4 - when it freezes to avoid rebooting the computer. Un plug the camera USB lead. If you have clicked "save to card" in EOS Utility preferences the buffered images not yet transfered will save to card so you can copy them later. Open activity monitor in Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor. Find Image Capture and press quit process top right. Then quit or force quit EOS Utility. Plug in and turn on the camera and restart EOS Utility and it will work for another 100 to 150 frames then freeze again. I have tested number 4 nd it does work and save rebooting the computer.
The others have been vouched for by others and I may well get there too or just between shots have my assistant routinely quit Image Capture and EOS Utility until the fix turns up. So far it has ben 3 months.
I am not happy about this, but I am happy to finally have an idea where the problem is. Those who seem to understand these things say it is a bug in Image Capture.
Hope this helps - I have been going nuts on this one.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I went through something pretty much identical to what you describe back in mid 10.4 days with my first tethered Canon... a 5D. The culprit was updated USB drivers in one of Apple's system updates. Somewhere in the bowels of Apple's site (in the developer's area I think) there was a page that had downloads of USB drivers for several previous systems. Simply rolling back the USB driver to an earlier version rather than the whole OS fixed (mostly) the issues. I'm guessing you might be on firewire (I've never shot a 1DsIII) rather than USB, but the issue and solution might be similar.
My 5D has been dead reliable and fast with tethering since EOS Utility updates and early Leopard upgrades. However I know that's not true of every Canon body. Hang in there...
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