For a video project it came up that recording with my own Canon T3i might be a better idea then having to rely on the schools equipment to be both available and working correctly. For most cases this would be fine and in the past a proved to be necessary to use your own equipment, even if available, there is often a problem with the equipment I have taken out, but that may just be my personal bad luck.
This specific project called for my group to do a time lapse with half an hour of footage. However, my SD card can only record 15min of footage and being a student I can’t afford a bigger card at the moment. Thus, I assumed I could simply tether my camera to my computer and record an almost infinite amount of video. I know I can do this with photos quiet easily, that is, using your computer to take images with your camera and storing them directly to you camera:
The native EOS Utility from Canon allows this. However, this software does not work in OS X Lion, but the Mac native Image Capture does. There are also many third party option, primarily I would recommend Adobe’s Lightroom. These are all great options that are fairly easy to use, maybe not Lightroom, but only EOS Utility can allow video tethering with a Liveview and as I have said it will not work on OS X Lion. Being a Apple fanboy I have Lion, of course, as it came installed on my new MacBook Pro, but that’s another post. Thus, I hit a dead end on tethering video without reverting to Snow Leopard and destroying all other workflow, since this is not an option I was kind of stumped.
After much research and manual reading it seems I must use my Windows 7 bootcamp disk to tether video successfully to my Mac from a DSLR. I know Final Cut does support Liveview cameras, but not DSLR it seems.
Update #1: After requesting some input from a friend, Peter Sirisko, I was able to make a work around Canon’s non-Lion compatible EOS utility. By using DSLR Remote Pro For Mac in trial mode I was able to Liveview my camera. Then using Screenflow I was able to captue the Liveview from my camera. While this work around sounds rather complicated it is free, if you have a free capture software instead of screenflow – I would recommend Capture Me.
Update #2: It seems Canon has updated their EOS utility now, I have yet to test it but I would try that before my work around in update #1.