lag time with helicon remote

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MichaelMcginnis
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Joined: 07.02.2019 04:32

lag time with helicon remote

Post by MichaelMcginnis »

We are shooting jewelry photos with Helicon remote and then stacking the images in Helicon Focus using a Canon Rebel T6. I love the software. But, the lag time between shots is about 5 seconds, and sometimes there are 10-20 photos per piece. I am trying to speed up the process. What is the bottle neck that causes the lag time between shots? Is it the software, the camera, or the lense? Is there anything that I can do to shorten the 5 second time between shots?
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Stas Yatsenko
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Joined: 06.05.2009 14:05
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Re: lag time with helicon remote

Post by Stas Yatsenko »

5 seconds sounds about right, very little can be done at this point to shorten this delay. 4 seconds may be feasible, but that's it. There's no single big delay, it's a chain of a large number of small delays that add up together. That's how remote control works, it's just not optimized for speed. You could say that the reason is the design of the camera body firmware.
You can experiment with the pause between focusing steps (Helicon Remote settings -> Canon -> Pause between focusing steps). If your lens is USM you can make it shorter than the default 200 ms, 100-150 ms should be fine. But beware that once the value is too low, the lens starts "missing" steps, and it's hard to see with your eye at first (when the shortage is small) but the quality of the focus rendering result may suffer.

Also make sure that you're using the least sufficient number of shots per stack by using "Auto" mode and calibrating the DOF calculator as described here: https://www.heliconsoft.com/HeliconRemoteHelp/english/HeliconRemote.html#HR_CORECTION_FACTOR
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