Controlling 2 EOS 1DS MarkII cameras from one PC

[brewsterkahle]

Does your software allow control of the shutter and download pictures from 2 cameras (of the same type)?

EOS capture does not allow this on the PC, and it is a problem for us. Any help would be appreciated.

-brewster
[email protected]

[Chris Breeze]

Unfortunately it isn't possible to control two EOS cameras from one PC. You can control more than one PowerShot camera from a PC provided each camera is a different model. This appears to be a limitation of the Canon drivers.
Canon had an interesting setup for the 300D/Digital Rebel press launch. They had 30 300D/Digital Rebel cameras mounted on a large ring and fired them simultaneously to produce Matrix style images. The results were very impressive but they needed one computer per camera.

[brewsterkahle]

Thank you for the reply.

Has alternative drivers been written that dont have this limitation?
Does breezesys have any plans to write drivers?

-brewster

[Chris Breeze]

Canon claim that it is a limitation in the way Windows drivers work, but I'm not sure I'm convinced by this because you can control multiple PowerShot cameras provided they are different models.
I don't have any plans to write alternative drivers as this would take a lot of effort and would be very expensive.

[DavidK]

Chris,

Brewster's post was interesting because I may have a similar situation a few months down the road. I don't have two EOS cameras to experiment with, so I can't try this at the moment.

Say you are running DSLR RemotePro and have auto-reconnect enabled. Will switching one EOS off and then powering the other on cause DSLR RemotePro to connect to the EOS that just was powered on?

If this does work, then the camera switching can be accomplished with an electrical switch and external power. Of course, there would be several seconds of downtime while the camera powered up and connected.

External power is supplied through Canon's DR-400 DC coupler.

David

[Chris Breeze]

That should work provided no other apps try to connect to the camera automatically when it is turned on.