# Anybody shooting with an R5 tethered in C1?



## HarrisonB (Mar 8, 2021)

I'm starting to do more freelance studio work and want to shoot tethered in Capture One. I did a test shoot the other day and the transfer from camera to C1 was excruciatingly slow, taking seconds per image to render which added up very quickly for bursts of images. I'm shooting on an R5 going through a CalDigit TS3 Plus into my PC laptop (I'd have to look into specs).

As far as I can tell with the USB/Thunderbolt 3 ports and cords I'm using, I should be transferring at 5Gb/s so I'm not sure what the bottleneck is or if there isn't one and this is normal. I couldn't find any information about people's experience using the R5 tethered so I figured I would ask here.

At my job we shoot on Nikon D5's and I'll step away, shoot 20 or so photos quickly and have them at least mostly loaded by the time I get back to my computer. The D5 is a 20 Mp camera vs 45 on the R5 so I get it being faster but I did switch the R5 to APS-C mode which did make it render faster but it still felt much slower than at work.

I have a lot more testing to do on my own but if anybody has any input I would really appreciate it!


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## zim (Mar 8, 2021)

Is 5gb/s correct as best transfer speed? If so sounds like the best that can be done for 20 full raws would be 3mins and that is excluding C1 processing. How long is it taking?


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## HarrisonB (Mar 8, 2021)

zim said:


> Is 5gb/s correct as best transfer speed? If so sounds like the best that can be done for 20 full raws would be 3mins and that is excluding C1 processing. How long is it taking?


Thanks for the response! I believe that 5Gb/s is correct. I use a Tether Tools USB-C to USB-C cord with 5Gb/s speed and that's what the CalDigit is rated the same so that should be accurate. It looks like the R5 uncompressed raw files are 50-60 MB though and 5Gb converts to 625 MB so I'm not sure I understand your math unless there's something that I'm not understanding about those conversions?

I'll do some testing after work today to get a time


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## zim (Mar 8, 2021)

HarrisonB said:


> Thanks for the response! I believe that 5Gb/s is correct. I use a Tether Tools USB-C to USB-C cord with 5Gb/s speed and that's what the CalDigit is rated the same so that should be accurate. It looks like the R5 uncompressed raw files are 50-60 MB though and 5Gb converts to 625 MB so I'm not sure I understand your math unless there's something that I'm not understanding about those conversions?
> 
> I'll do some testing after work today to get a time


Oops cos my daftness made me mix up sensor size with file size... Good grief where's the face palm emoji


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## st jack photography (Mar 9, 2021)

What I am wondering is this: does PC speed and write method have anything to do with this? I feel it does. I shoot with a powered tethered line (TetherTools with powered adapter) and it goes straight to my massive desktop PC with dual SSD, dual video cards, 32GB RAM, i7-7000+ overclocked, and if I compare that to my laptop, an 8Gb RAM with magnetic storage, the speeds are much different. I could be wrong, but I feel PC specs are an influence since my super-PC does the transfers almost instantaneously, less than a second per image.
There is also a difference between a simple file transfer and then a transfer and render, I believe. If I transfer to my SSD for storage, that goes much faster than if I transfer and queue up a batch via C1 or Helicon (Helicon is what I often shoot tethered with, since I do mostly commercial/product work, but if I do portraits I often use C1.) It could be that the speed is for a simple transfer, not the speed for loading with a program, since the program will use the PC RAM and processor to render.
It could be that there is something I am missing, so I admit I could be wrong. My untested guess would be the bottleneck is RAM and processor speed of the PC to render and sort, as opposed to a straight transfer. This theory should be testable, I believe.


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## HarrisonB (Mar 9, 2021)

st jack photography said:


> What I am wondering is this: does PC speed and write method have anything to do with this? I feel it does. I shoot with a powered tethered line (TetherTools with powered adapter) and it goes straight to my massive desktop PC with dual SSD, dual video cards, 32GB RAM, i7-7000+ overclocked, and if I compare that to my laptop, an 8Gb RAM with magnetic storage, the speeds are much different. I could be wrong, but I feel PC specs are an influence since my super-PC does the transfers almost instantaneously, less than a second per image.
> There is also a difference between a simple file transfer and then a transfer and render, I believe. If I transfer to my SSD for storage, that goes much faster than if I transfer and queue up a batch via C1 or Helicon (Helicon is what I often shoot tethered with, since I do mostly commercial/product work, but if I do portraits I often use C1.) It could be that the speed is for a simple transfer, not the speed for loading with a program, since the program will use the PC RAM and processor to render.
> It could be that there is something I am missing, so I admit I could be wrong. My untested guess would be the bottleneck is RAM and processor speed of the PC to render and sort, as opposed to a straight transfer. This theory should be testable, I believe.


Thank you for this rundown, that all makes sense to me and I'm certain that PC specs play a major role.

I've spent all morning combing through forums and was able to determine that my C1 was basically not using my GPU at all and relying on my CPU for everything. I was able to follow a couple of guides to activate my GPU (namely this post about troubleshooting potential issues with Open CL) and that seems to have done the trick. When I shoot a burst of photos there's an initial pause but then the images take less than a second each to load in. I don't even see the rendering happen, it's done so quickly. 

I was able to test on an iMac as well where it just worked perfectly well without me having to do anything which at least let me know that it wasn't the camera which was my key worry.

Thank you again for your time responding!


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