Hi, am currently looking at stepping into an APTUS 22 LEAF back and am trying to decide which laptop to use with it. I hear the new MBP's and MAcBooks have firewire bus problems due to iSight now wired to the motherboard reducing voltage in firewire conections causing laptops to be unable to power LEAF BACKS below say 30-50% depending on the laptop. In some cases the green light stays on but only black files are sent to the laptop.
I hear phase one has a work around via a firewire adaptor cable to enavle the PHASE 1 back to be powered by external battewry and not draw off laptop
Does Leaf offer same? if not does anyone know whether MACBOOK or MACBOOKPRO has better re bus voltage or are they both the same
OR heck just a solution to backs draining laptops would be good, aside from wet cell batteries with inverters or spare laptop batteries.
Looking forward to hearing from you

You can tether the A-22 very easily using V-8 and a G4 powerbook. About a frame a second without much slow down for many multiple frames and the G4 powerbooks have good firewire power.

As far as the intel books, I have the latest and it will tether the A-22 to LC10 and emulated in Rosetta in V-8 but I see a noticeable slowdown at around 9 frames.

The A-22 is fairly power hungry so some macs will run an aptus tethered without a lot of issue and some required a powered firewire bus.

The latest Phase and with my P-30 seems to work fine with the intel books and the G4 books without firewire issues, though is power to the back is a problem Phase allows you to use the back's battery to power the back while tethered, though I haven't had to do that.

Best thing is to test it yourself with you chosen machine.

JR

I have a MBP , current version, and an Aptus 65 on a Hassy H1.
I have used it on a coouple of shoots now, no problem at all once all the software is installed and setup.

With any MAc setup one can only have the back and NO other Firewiredevices attached.

The Powerbook needs to be pluugged into it's AC adaptor though I have tried it without and it seemed to work..
I have attached a FW external hard disk to my G5 and cabled the back into the FW port on the HD and it worked fine as its a powered port.

The key is enough power.

The MBP I have works great and the images come up pretty fast, maybe 4-5 seconds after cpature, not bad at all.

This is interesting. I am new to this forum and considering a Leaf or Sinar back. I use a Macbook and wondering if I will have problem. My system is Hasselblad V. Your help and suggestion is appreciate.

Shara Haddad

Have you been able to find a way to shoot to your powerbook and have the images saved to an external harddrive? This is something I'd like to get worked out.
Shooting tethered to a G4 Powerbook using V8 works. In my experience V10 just doesn't have the speed I need when shooting tethered. That's why I was interested in maybe moving to a Macbook Pro. With Update 3 it should run smoothly and not in rosetta - the same with V8.4.6.

Can anyone confirm this? I'll be trying this out soon enough, but would appreciate any hands on experience with the newer Macs.

I use an Aptus17 with a MBP 15 with both 8.4.6 as well as 10 update 3. Tethered I normally use 8.4.6, basically because that is what I am used to.

I have never experienced a single problem with power but I have heard from several persons they did experience power problems with the MBP17 (which uses the same battery but is somewhat more powerhungry) !

LC10 update 3 is very stable currently! I specifically want to mention this after all the flak Leaf got about its crappy unstable software. However the most aggravating part is LC10 performance with high ISO. It still is incredibly slow and this gets worse when going higher ISO.

The way I work is, shooting products tethered with 8.4.6 and processing them in batch with ACR. Shooting people on location will be untethered, processing mostly in LC10. High ISO (200 and higher) always in LC10. This way I have my files waiting for me the morning after a days of work. I normally have in between 400 and 1000 takes on a day. When you do more, you will have a problem.

I still have just enough storage space so never had the need to shoot directly to an external disk. I have no doubt this will go flawlessly, if you want I can test it for you. I have to clear out my MBP after every shoot (.mos files go into my RAID5 NAS).

Thanks for the feedback. I'll be testing things also, but firsthand experience is always helpful.

Have you noticed any speed increase/decrease while shooting, compared to tethered to a G4?
I mean like when shooting people and after 20 frames of continuous shooting. Does it bog down or can you shoot contiously forever.

Batching has always been a pain with Leaf software so as long as it doesn't get worse I know what to expect. I hope that's the case and it's comparable to using a G4.

If you have the chance to set up a shoot and have your files saved to a harddrive, that's attached to yout macbook, I'd be very interested to hear how you set it up and how it worked out.

Thanks, Kipling

I have never experienced any slowdown shooting tethered however this doesn't mean that there isn't. My shooting tethered involves putting down the product (in my case accessories like, shoes, bags, belts, etc..) making a take, taking the product of the table and going for the next. This way it is unlikely you will ever run into any slowdown.

I cannot compare with a G4 since I am a Windows/PC man since 1992 and have only been using a MBP since July last year. In my experience/opinion the thing is the ultimate piece of hardware. It runs both XP as well as MacOS, it is fast, stable and has a usable screen as well.

Untethered shooting not a problem at all, fast 8Gb card and I am up & running.

I will be doing more shoes (it is shoes season) on thursday & friday, I will take my USB S-ATA drive with me to see how that goes.

Okay, I'm talking more about people sessions, 500 to a 1000 frames a session, pretty continuous shooting, about a frame every 1.5 seconds.

On the G4 powerbook with V8 this is doable. Setting things up is pretty easy. My only beef is skin - I like the results in V10 better. If I could shoot with V10 as fast and stable as with V8 on a G4 I'd make the switch.

Guess I'll have to rent a Macbook Pro...or has James tested this???

Thanks, Kipling