Kuuvik Capture‘s philosophy is to provide features that genuinely help people’s actual work – instead of cramming every single camera setting into the app. All the while keeping the user interface clean, logical and easy to work with.
Boy, this could be a challenge sometimes… Just like with live view auto-restart I’m going to talk about today.
Photographers requesting this feature were coming from the areas of product and scientific work. Two of them capturing images through a microscope, actually. The idea was pretty simple: if you take an image with live view on, automatically restart it so that the next image can be checked and captured as fast as possible.
We were working on this since last summer. It is a premier example how much work may be required to implement seemingly simple things – I usually laugh out loud when someone tells me that “it’s just a couple of hours”. We ran into a bunch of camera firmware peculiarities and issues, and had to rewrite the code handling downloads and live view activation substantially. But finally here it is!
Live view auto-restart is off by default, and can be activated from one of two places. The first is the Capture pane of the app’s Settings dialog. Both on the Mac and on iPad.
The live view auto-restart setting in the Mac version
As you can see, there’s a wide variety of wait time choices ranging from immediate to 16 seconds. Note that “immediately” actually means “as fast as the camera can do it”: on some DSLRs (like the EOS 5Ds R) it’s a second or so.
The second place differs by platform. On the Mac, its under the Camera > Auto-Restart Live View menu. On iPad it’s on the Live View Options panel.
Auto-restart on the Live View Options panel in the iPad version
The live view button on the toolbar gained a new state to indicate that the auto-restart is armed and waiting: it turns blue. Of course it happens only if you set a wait time of 2 seconds or longer.
Auto-restart armed and waiting
If you touch the app in any way (press a key; click or tap with the mouse, trackpad, or on the screen; initiate a capture from the camera; etc) auto-restart will be aborted as we don’t know what you are up to.
I’d like to reiterate that live view auto-restart will work only if you initiated a capture from live view. It will not start live view if you captured an image with live view off.
And that’s it. Enjoy!
