Paul Williamson
January 30th, 2005, 06:12 AM
I'm operating DSLR Remote Pro with a couple of remote control gizmos in addition to the regular keyboard and mouse. The wired solution is a Griffin PowerMate (http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/powermate/) USB remote knob. The wireless solution is a Keyspan Presentation Remote (http://www.keyspan.com/products/usb/presentationremote/). In both cases, the primary function is of course to release the shutter by sending an F8 keystroke to the program. So far so good.
The second most frequent operation I need is scrolling through the various exposures from this session. I can implement that by sending left arrow and right arrow keystrokes to the program. The problem is that this function in DSLR Remote Pro is a little bit slow, and there is no immediate feedback when the arrow keystroke is accepted. This is especially a problem with the PowerMate, which has no tactile feedback when turning the knob. It's not really a problem with the regular mouse, since you get visual feedback of the on-screen button "depressing", or with the actual keyboard keystroke. But when you aren't sure you turned the knob far enough but not too far, the short wait for the screen to update seems like forever.
The ideal fix would be to make the function actually be instantaneous.
Failing that, some kind of instantaneous feedback would really help. The obvious thing would be to update the status line at the bottom of the screen with a transient or message while loading the new image. That wouldn't be great, since the status line is pretty small and the user might not be that close to the screen. A better solution would be to flash a big left or right arrow on top of the image until the new one can be loaded. That would be noticable even to other people in the room, who might be reviewing the image and not otherwise notice that somebody is fiddling with the remote.
One could imagine even fancier versions of the feature, of course. It could display the target image number in big print on top of the arrow. It could even pop to a index-of-thumbnails mode and highlight the target image. What I want is some variation on that theme that would let me easily choose ANY ONE of the previous images without having to guess or wait for each image to pop up.
Please consider some such feature as this for the wishlist. Thanks!
After that, my next request will be for a keystroke to drop the current image out of the rotation (without permanently deleting it). That way the customer and I could quickly weed out the trash and concentrate on the best images so far.
Maybe what I really want is tight and clever integration of DSLR Remote Pro with BreezeBrowser Pro, which already has features like that. Or maybe that would be too complicated to use during a shooting session.
Anyway, thanks for listening!
The second most frequent operation I need is scrolling through the various exposures from this session. I can implement that by sending left arrow and right arrow keystrokes to the program. The problem is that this function in DSLR Remote Pro is a little bit slow, and there is no immediate feedback when the arrow keystroke is accepted. This is especially a problem with the PowerMate, which has no tactile feedback when turning the knob. It's not really a problem with the regular mouse, since you get visual feedback of the on-screen button "depressing", or with the actual keyboard keystroke. But when you aren't sure you turned the knob far enough but not too far, the short wait for the screen to update seems like forever.
The ideal fix would be to make the function actually be instantaneous.
Failing that, some kind of instantaneous feedback would really help. The obvious thing would be to update the status line at the bottom of the screen with a transient
One could imagine even fancier versions of the feature, of course. It could display the target image number in big print on top of the arrow. It could even pop to a index-of-thumbnails mode and highlight the target image. What I want is some variation on that theme that would let me easily choose ANY ONE of the previous images without having to guess or wait for each image to pop up.
Please consider some such feature as this for the wishlist. Thanks!
After that, my next request will be for a keystroke to drop the current image out of the rotation (without permanently deleting it). That way the customer and I could quickly weed out the trash and concentrate on the best images so far.
Maybe what I really want is tight and clever integration of DSLR Remote Pro with BreezeBrowser Pro, which already has features like that. Or maybe that would be too complicated to use during a shooting session.
Anyway, thanks for listening!