Kuuvik Capture 6.1 Available Now

We’ve released a minor update to Kuuvik Capture earlier this week. It brings Canon EOS R7 support and mostly OS compatibility updates.

On the Mac the app follows the system-wide renaming of Preferences to Settings in macOS 13. Plus, you can now set the app’s appearance (that is, light or dark) independent of your Mac’s system setting.

The new Appearance setting in the Mac version

On iPadOS 16 this release restores the ability to use the actual device name during pairing.

In the new operating system Apple finally fixed the severe issues that plagued multi-touch in iPadOS 15, so we’ve updated our touch detection code to take advantage of the corrected behavior.

The iPadOS bug where the OS may fail to properly close the app before updating it, and subsequently, not knowing which one to run, greets users with a pitch black screen, affects Kuuvik Capture as well. The fix is quite easy: force quit and restart the app (both copies) to wipe corrupted state information. See our knowledge base article for detailed instructions.

The update is free for existing users, and is available on the respective App Store.

Ultralight Tethering with Kuuvik Capture

With the release of Kuuvik Capture for iPad, a decade-old dream started to unfold: enjoying all the benefits of tethered shooting out in the field without the burden of carrying around a notebook.

Once the very first beta of the app was ready, a quest for the optimal iPad size and a lightweight mounting solution had begun. It took several weeks of research to arrive at a solution that I’m using for the last year.

My Cambo Actus digital view camera with the Canon EOS R5 acting as the recording medium controlled by Kuuvik Capture running on an iPad Air 4. The image shows one of the app’s unique features: multi-point simultaneous live view.

The iPad had to have a USB-C port and large enough screen while keeping the weight down. Quite early during the development we’ve realized that the sweet spot is the ~11″ size. At the end I chose the Air 4 as it weighs a little less than the Pro, costs less, and for a dedicated tethering controller the Pro doesn’t provide anything worthwhile over it.

Storage-wise 64GB is plenty for me, especially since I don’t have to shoot a myriad of images to compensate for possible errors. With Kuuvik Capture I only keep the perfect ones. 64GB also turned out to be more than enough for a 5-hour Perseid shooting session, where I shot a ton of long exposure images.

Mounting the iPad was a headache, though. Generally I’m not happy with buying stuff made by Chinese copycats, but it turned out that nobody else makes any competent iPad holder… So I ended up getting a Sunwayfoto PC-01 tablet bracket.

Attaching the iPad bracket to the tripod was an easier job to accomplish with products from reputable European and US manufacturers: my choices being the Manfrotto 386B-1 nano clamp and RRS’ BC-18 micro ball head.

You can see the completed mounting solution below.

The lightweight mounting solution.

The torque the whole iPad assembly exerts on the ball head’s screw is significant, and could easily loosen it from the Manfrotto clamp. So a drop of Vibra-Tite Blue 121 or Loctite Blue 242 removable threadlocker is highly recommended to avoid issues down the road.

You don’t want your iPad to land on a sharp rock after all…

Another possible source of inconvenient moments is the nano clamp itself. If you don’t tighten it enough. Or if it breaks… iPad meets a sharp rock situation again.

To mitigate this risk, I’m using a simple security tether between the tripod and the iPad bracket.

Security tether.

It is just a Think Tank Red Whip and a small carabiner.

Speaking of tethers, I have to talk about the cables that connect the iPad with my cameras. In plural, since I’m using a 5DS R and a R5 for tethered shooting, both having different USB connectors.

We learned through the years of supporting camera connectivity apps that you should avoid cheap Chinese junk cables and adapters. They are unreliable and most of the time do not work at all. We maintain a list of certified cables and adapters, and can’t stress enough the importance of high quality cabling.

With the R5 I’m using the cable that was included in the box, and with the 5DS R Cable Matter’s 1m long USB-C to Micro B 3.1 cable is my preferred choice.

Why not Wi-Fi? Well, Canon’s Wi-Fi connectivity implementation is a pain to use and is significantly slower than USB. Not to mention that I prefer not to be surrounded by Wi-Fi smog while enjoying nature.

The whole mount packs relatively flat, which I can slip into an outer pocket of my backpack or shooting vest. Even the iPad fits easily into a side pocket of my old Domke vest.

iPad holder and mount packed flat.

How light it is?

The holder and the mount (as shown above) plus the security tether weighs 357 grams. Add 458g for the iPad Air 4 and 83g for the two cables. 898g in total. Not bad for a pro-level tethering solution.

You may have noticed, but I’d like to mention it explicitly: with Kuuvik Capture you don’t need additional boxes, batteries, etc. Just the iPad and a USB cable. Or the camera’s built-in Wi-Fi in case wireless floats your boat.

I’m really happy with this solution, which perfectly augments the app’s ease of use.

Honestly, I feel like I’m cheating when shooting with this rig. It’s so easy to accomplish previously complex tasks, such as obtaining perfect focus with high-megapixel cameras or exposure evaluation. Not to mention the sheer joy of seeing just-captured images on a large screen.

  ☕ ☕ ☕

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Privacy Issue With Canon Copyright Info Setting

I work with Canon cameras a lot as a developer, and sometimes discover nasty things in their firmware. Most of the time these are just annoyances that delay or block some feature’s availability, but what I recently found may have a serious impact on every Canon EOS camera user’s privacy.

To demonstrate the issue I’ll use my ShutterCount app, which among many other things, can display camera data in question.

The Problem

You are a photographer who cares about intellectual property rights and thus properly set up copyright info in the camera. This consists of four fields: owner name, artist name, copyright and (on newer pro cameras) IPTC info.

Now, you are also privacy-conscious, and delete these before selling a camera to a used equipment dealer. You use the camera’s Delete copyright information menu item, thinking that it will remove everything. Unfortunately this isn’t the case. Besides not touching owner and IPTC fields at all, it only replaces the very first character of the author name and copyright fields with a zero, leaving your previously set copyright information in the camera.

ShutterCount‘s new Raw Copyright Information feature reveals deleted data.

Moreover, setting a shorter-than-previous author or copyright using the camera’s menu will just overwrite the newly entered characters, leaving part of the previous longer text unmodified.

Red characters mark the leftover, black characters are legitimate, currently active text. Zero memory values are displayed as spaces for better legibility.

Leftover after setting shorter text in-camera.

The remote control interface is also affected. Using EOS Utility (and possibly many other remote control apps) will fill the remainder of these fields with arbitrary memory contents of the camera. Actually this is what triggered my research into the issue: I saw part of my address from the IPTC info in the author field.

The garbage EOS Utility leaves. Note parts of the previous values!

As far as I know, this behavior is exhibited by every single Canon EOS digital camera model announced since 2007.

Consequences

Your identity may be exposed to anyone who buys your camera through a used equipment dealer. I don’t know about you, but the idea that some camera-illiterate idiot will bug me after buying my old camera through a shop makes me uncomfortable.

Or worse, your long-sold camera may be found on a crime scene, and CSI finds the copyright info that accuses you being connected with the crime. Creepy, isn’t it?

Yeah, private information leaks are creepy. But this bug is double-edged sword, and may be terribly useful every once in a while.

Suppose your camera was stolen, and the thief deleted your copyright with the aforementioned menu command. Law enforcement will be able to reveal that it actually belongs to you.

Used equipment dealers may also benefit from it, being able to double-check the camera’s owner.

Mitigation

There’s a zero-cost method, which takes some time, but there’s also an automated method, which costs a few bucks.

The zero-cost method is to first delete both the owner and and IPTC info with EOS Utility, then go into the camera’s menu and completely fill the author and copyright fields with spaces, or X characters (or anything you would like), and save them. Then use the Delete copyright information menu item.

If you prefer the automated method, ShutterCount‘s Wipe Personal Data command will securely wipe all ownership and copyright information from the camera. This feature is available in the Pro version, or after you purchased the Plus Plack in the regular version.

I’d like to mention that the Copyright Information Template in both my ShutterCount and Kuuvik Capture apps will set the author and copyright fields properly, removing any previous leftover.

Ultimately I hope Canon will step up and address this issue by properly zero-padding the author and copyright fields, regardless of whether they were set in-camera, or remotely.

Exploiting It for Good Purposes

As you know by now, ShutterCount can reveal the extraneous information contained in the author and copyright fields, and can be used by anyone who has a reason to peek into that. It displays the dialog box what you see on the screen shot above.

I’m sure used camera shops and law enforcement agencies will find this feature rather useful. And hope that camera shop personnel will go through their used assets now, wiping personal data from every single one of them as a courtesy to previous owners.

The mentioned features are available in ShutterCount 4.7 or later. The Raw Copyright Information and Wipe Personal Data commands are on the Camera menu on macOS and under Camera Settings on the More tab on iOS.

Notes on CFexpress

I’m gearing up for the arrival of the Canon EOS-1D X Mark III, and the first thing to consider was memory cards. My goal was to find the fastest card with the smallest size. At the moment 64GB is my preferred cards size with CF/CFast/SD, but since 64GB CFexpress cards are much slower than 128GB, I went ahead and bought a 128GB SanDisk Extreme Pro. Since a camera is a good month away, I did some preliminary testing with computer transfers.

USB 3.1 Gen 2 is Not Fast Enough

When it comes to USB, manufacturers always advertise physical link speeds, which is rather misleading to the customer. For example USB 3.0 and 3.1 Gen 1 is advertised being 5Gb/s, but the usable data link speed is just 4Gb/s (or 500MB/s) since it uses a 8-bit to 10-bit encoding to have a desired balance of 0 and 1 bits on the wire. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is a bit better with 128 to 132 encoding, so the data link speed is 1.21GB/s (and NOT 1.25).

Every single CFexpress card is advertised to have at least “up to” 1.5GB/s read speed. So if you want to utilize the highest possible download speed of a CFexpress card, you need something faster than USB 3.1 Gen 2. The sole option at the time of writing is Thunderbolt 3.

To continue the never-ending stream of marketing lies, Thunderbolt 3 is usually advertised as a 40Gb/s line. Thunderbolt carries up to 4 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, plus video. So the maximum data link speed is 3.94GB/s (and NOT 5GB/s), period. This may be even lower if you connect your reader to a Thunderbolt 3 port whose controller is shared with your monitor(s), or depending on the actual controller chip to port mapping. But if you don’t connect a high resolution monitor to the same controller as the reader, you are guaranteed to have 2 PCI Express lanes, which is 1.97GB/s. CFexpress also uses 2 PCIe 3.0 lanes, so this is a perfect match. Bingo, go for a Thunderbolt 3 reader!

While quite a few companies are selling their (as we learned by now) inadequately slow USB readers, there’s only one Thunderbolt 3 device. The big and heavy AFT Blackjet TX-1CXQ. It is much larger and heavier than my ProGrade Digital CF & SD reader, not to mention the minuscule Wise WA-CR05 CFast reader I use (both of these are USB 3.1 Gen 2 readers, which is mandatory to utilize a full bandwidth of a CFast card). So I bought the Blackjet.

“Up To”…

On paper the 128GB SanDisk sports up to 1.7GB/s read and 1.2GB/s write speeds. Of course you have to deduct bandwidth consumed by file system and block device access protocol overhead, so you’ll get smaller numbers in real world scenarios.

I did measure average read speed around 1.45-1.47GB/s, which is acceptable compared to the advertised 1.7GB/s. Oh yes, you’ll need a rather fast PCIe SSD in your computer to be able to download these cards at full speed. Plus macOS 10.13 or later is required to work with CFexpress cards.

Write speed is a completely different story, however. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test measured speeds fluctuating between 800 and 1100MB/s, and it suddenly dropped to 430MB/s.

Head scratching, and consulting with both AFT and SanDisk (AFT’s support is first class, but I’m still waiting for SanDisk to reply)… Switching benchmark software to AJA System Test Lite… And presto, the truth started to reveal itself.

The following is a write graph generated by AJA System Test. Just ignore “frame numbers”, as since it was a 4GB write test, vertical blue lines indicate gigabyte boundaries.

So the card is quite speedy with 1.1-1.2GB/s average for the first gigabyte, then drops to 430MB/s. This might be thermal throttling, but since it always happens after the first gigabyte, it might well be due to the internal architecture of the card. I don’t know, and still waiting for SanDisk to comment. This is the first time I saw such a thing with a memory card.

If you let the card sit idle and cool down a bit, you’ll again get 1.1-1.2GB/s for the first gigabyte. But if you keep pushing data, it will stay at 430MB/s. For short bursts, say 256MB or so, with a little time between them, write speed stays around 1.1-1.2GB/s.

But how much write speed do you actually need? The CFast cards I’m using in the 1D X Mark II have 400-410MB/s average write speed, and I can shoot RAW continuously until the card is full. CFast and CFexpress card prices are almost identical (although the 128GB CFexpress SanDisk is significantly cheaper than the CFast). So for less money, I get 3x faster download speed, with a little bit faster worst case and almost 3x faster best case write speed.

I’m going to use the 1D X Mark III almost exclusively for stills. 1GB is about 40 images = 2 seconds at 20fps before throttling kicks in (not counting the camera’s buffer). It may fare very well, but video guys might need to look elsewhere. Larger cards, more suited for RAW video footage, might also behave differently.

What About Other Brands?

Finding a trusted memory card vendor isn’t an easy task. During the last 18 years I grown to trust SanDisk (used lots of CF cards from them and still are my favorite SD card vendor), and Lexar for CF and CFast before they went Chinese with unknown quality. I don’t buy anything from Sony given how they ignore customer security (think firmware updates requiring root permissions). I have zero experience with Delkin, ProGrade or Wise cards, and a little bit reluctant to begin experimenting with expensive cards.

So it’s basically SanDisk only at the moment. Canon is also pushing SanDisk, so I suspect that these products were tested together and will provide the promised performance. The above results did cast a little shadow on this, but only time and further in-camera testing will tell. I’ll let you know.

  ☕ ☕ ☕

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