Digitalopia

Nik Software have today released the Viveze Plug-in for Aperture 2.1. The plug-in was one of the original plug-ins listed by Apple as being in development upon the release of the Aperture Edit Plug-In SDK.

I will be interested in looking further at the features of the plug-in, and to be honest, the descriptions do not really tell me how the plug-in differentiates itself from the features already available in Aperture.

A 15 day trial is available to allow you to try out the plug-in and it is available for purchase direct from the Nik Software Web site at $249.95. Yes, this is another Aperture plug-in that is more expensive than Aperture itself, as the Tiffen Dfx Digital Filter plug-in costs $299.95.

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I am often asked about the best types of storage a digital photographer should use, especially if they should use RAID storage. In this series of articles, I hope to explain some uses for each of the most popular RAID types, especially in the context of digital photography.

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is the use of 2 or more disks to achieve greater reliability, greater performance or greater capacity.

In this article, I will be describing RAID level 1, or Mirroring. Looking at the above definition, RAID level 1 provides greater reliability, but neither greater performance or capacity. I have previously covered RAID 0 Striping in a previous article.

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It seems that since Apple released Aperture 2, there have been ongoing debates on photography forums regarding Aperture’s tethered shooting support of the newer camera models from Nikon and Canon.

As a Nikon user, I was oblivious to the debate when I first wrote about the new tethering features in Aperture. However, after hearing about the lack of support for many Canon models, I decided to do a brief exercise looking at their support. What amazed me was the lack of support of not just the most recent Canon models such as the 1Ds III, but also models that were released over 2 years ago like the 30D.

I started to dig a bit deeper and found 2 sides to the story. I have not yet received a formal statement from either Apple or Canon (see below), but I thought I would share both sides of the arguments. Most comments are from various forums, and obviously give bias, so should be taken lightly.

What Evidence Supports Apple

The issue lies with Canon… I’ve heard different reasoning for this (Canon putting some proprietary blocks in the way or Canon’s SDK having some bugs that still need to be corrected). Hopefully, it’s the SDK issue or a firmware issue that can be updated or corrected.

The next comment was made from an Apple spokesman at a trade event.

… each camera needs to be reverse engineered for tethering because Canon is not willing to let go of the coding.

The Macworld review of Aperture 2 states the following.

Tethered shooting in Aperture works using a standard called Picture Transport Protocol (PTP), and as such, it requires supported cameras.

What Evidence Supports Canon

This comment was received from Canon’s customer support.

… while the transfer protocols for the camera and the image files are available to the software designers.

The Bibble software seems to support most, if not all of the Canon models. I guess the question here is that if Bibble can, why cannot Apple ?

The Follow Up

This is obviously not a closed case, so I have subsequently written to both Apple and Canon asking if they would be able to supply a comment that I can share with my readers. Fingers crossed they will respond.

For a more comprehensive list of supported cameras, take a look at this site. As you can see, Canon is very poorly supported by Aperture.

I am often asked about the best types of storage a digital photographer should use, especially if they should use RAID storage. In this series of articles, I hope to explain some uses for each of the most popular RAID types, especially in the context of digital photography.

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is the use of 2 or more disks to achieve greater reliability, greater performance or greater capacity.

In this article, I will be describing RAID level 0, or Striping. Looking at the above definition, RAID level 0 provides greater performance and to a lesser extent greater capacity.

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If you read my previous article on Aperture Tethered Shooting Tutorial, then you will know how much I enjoy using the new tethering features of Aperture 2.

However, one thing that I get asked often is how well supported are the newer camera models. In this article I will look at the support for the latest Nikon and Canon camera models, namely the Nikon D300 and D3, and the Canon 450D (Rebel XSi), 40D and 1DsIII.

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