Tethering guide

The tethered shooting checklist

Most lost frames are avoidable. Run this before the shoot, then keep one eye on the things that fail mid shoot, and a flaky tether stops being a disaster.

Before the shoot

• Good, short cable, strain relieved. A quality cable in a tether block beats a long cheap one every time.
• Power sorted. Use a DC coupler or powered setup so charging never steals tether signal.
• Quit every other camera app. EOS Utility, Imaging Edge, the Fujifilm app, fully closed, not in the background.
• Fresh, formatted card. Stops the Mac stealing the camera when it scans the card.
• Session on the internal drive. Never the network or a slow external.
• Auto power off relaxed. Stop the camera sleeping and dropping the link.
• Wireless: pin a clean, non DFS channel on 5 or 6 GHz, TX power full, camera on its own band.
• Disk has room for the whole shoot, with margin.

During the shoot

This is where shots actually get lost, because the rig was fine at setup and quietly failed an hour in. Watch for:

• The tether dropping without you noticing, you keep shooting, the frames are not landing.
• Signal sliding on a wireless tether as you or the talent move.
• A setting drifting off your locked shutter, aperture or ISO after a bump or a menu poke.
• The disk filling on a long, high volume shoot.

You cannot watch all four while you are actually shooting. That is the gap.

Let something watch it for you

Capture Companion sits in your Mac menu bar and watches all four during the shoot, so you do not have to. The instant the tether drops it fires an alarm you cannot miss, it warns you on a fast signal drop before the link breaks, it flags setting drift, and it watches the disk. One glance says the whole rig is healthy, and the second it is not, you know.

Get Capture Companion at launch →

Mac, macOS 13+. Requires Capture One 16+. Coming soon, join the launch list on the home page.