[Beamer]

I normally use DSLR Remote Pro for tethered shooting doing large "photo booths" using whatever nice backgrounds are available on-site, with an attendant managing the chaos and manually activating the shutter. I have never used photo booth mode in the software (I don't do prints on-site, jpgs are just part of my package), but now I am doing an event at a location where there is no useful background (it was bound to happen sooner or later!) so I am giving green screen shooting a try. Unfortunately, green screen shooting is not available without using photo booth mode (feature request!), so yesterday I took my first jump into PB mode to make sure everything was working.

I was rather sad and stressed to find that print spooler issues are causing multiple failures, even though I am not even using a printer. All I want is for the software to save the green screened (background replaced) image for my use. As I found out the hard way, the save checkbox in the green screen dialog only takes effect if some form of output is enabled in the PB options. By the way, this seems very counter-intuitive (feature request!). The problem is, even when set to JPEG Only, the software tries to do something with the print spooler and I get an error every time about not being able to print, and ultimately no files are saved.

On a similar note, if I go to Printer Setup, I get a message asking me to install at least one printer even though I already have one installed. I click Yes on that dialog and then get an error: "Windows can't open Add Printer. The local print spooler service is not running. Please restart the spooler or restart the machine."

I then tried everything on my crappy backup machine and it worked flawlessly. I am rather bummed that my expensive primary machine now has to sit on the sidelines and can't even function as a backup.

Both machines have Win 7 Pro 64-bit running v 2.2.2.1 of the software.

I am really in a jam and would appreciate if anyone had any ideas to help. Let me know if you need any more details about anything. Thanks!

[neilneilb]

I would try the steps listed here first http://www.windowsanswers.net/articles/fix-printer-manual This should fix most spooler problems.

In photobooth mode the program uses your current default printer settings for the page size regardless of whether you are printing or not. Is the printer you have installed set as the default? If you have your default printer set to print 8.5 x 11 that will be the output saved to your computer. If that doesn't help I would simply install a print driver for a updr 150 and set it as the default printer and see if it works. The printer does not have to be connected or online it only has to be set as default when saving only. You can specifiy the output page size such as 4x6, 5x7 in the default printer settings.

[Beamer]

I am only interested in the photos that get saved in the "greenscreen" folder. These are not getting saved because somehow in the software the printer error is aborting the whole save process even though the greenscreen folder pics do not have anything to do with the print process. For example, they do not have any captions, etc. They are just the pic straight out of the camera but with the green replaced with my background image.

Thank you for the tip about how to get rid of the white borders on the print images. I was wondering about that too, although I don't think I'll be using that feature for now.

My issue remains that the software cannot communicate with the print spooler for some weird reason, and this is causing problems beyond just printing. I should have mentioned in my previous post that I do not have printing problems from any other program. I have also restarted a number of times, and also verified in "Services" that the print spooler service is running. I know this is a weird problem...

[Beamer]

After fighting with everything for quite a while, I'm glad to say I eventually fixed the problem. It ended up being my bleeping anti virus software (Comodo). Comodo is a strong program, but perhaps a little too strong sometimes... It decided that DSLR Remote Pro was untrusted and was running it partially sandboxed, which was blocking access to the print spooler and the registry. I suppose I should have thought of the AV software sooner, but I guess I never would have expected printer problems to be caused by it, especially when everything else could print fine. After I added the software to the trusted list, everything went just fine. I'm kinda peeved that Comodo never popped up a warning about sandboxing the program like it is supposed to. Grrr...

With that aside, it's time to move on to the next thing on my list: finding some suitable Halloween background images! Gonna check out iStockPhoto and see what I dig up.