Foolography Community

Hi

I just received my Unleashed yesterday and managed to try it out today.
But I can't seem to make it work.

The app version is 3.0.3, and the Unleashed firmware is up to date.
My camera is a Sony A7M3.

Every time I try to take a picture my camera freezes, as in I still see on the display/viewfinder everything that I should see, but the camera does not react to any further input. I can't even switch the camera off; it just stays on. Additional info: the "Write" LED of the camera stays red during this whole time.
The only way to recover after this is to remove the battery. When I check the SD card after this, there is no image there. This makes the whole thing completely unusable, which is quite disappointing. --> Seems like that is a known bug, not sure why even bother sending Unleashed out when an older model is selected, especially without any warning in the App or something like that.

Also, I don't see a preview image in the app, which I thought would be possible Am I wrong?

Has anyone a suggestion for what I can try? This seems like a bug that should have been noticed during testing.

Kind regards
InfiniteSys

This should be fixed in today's firmware update A3.0.1 B3.0.1

Hi

thanks for the fast response, your update fixed the bug (or at least worked around it) :)

But I still have some issues.
1. I thought that I can see a preview of the photo I am about to take, that doesn't seem to be the case. Also it is not possible to check taken photos on my phone. The app says that is not possible for my camera, which is kind of sad.
2. Timelapse / Intervalometer does not seem to be working correctly. I set following settings:
- 20sec each picture
- Interval 25sec
- 5 Shots
After it is done (it finishes after the timer of the intervalometer) I only have 3 pictures on my SD card. My guess is, that due to the reset of USB (workaround for the camera freeze) it takes to long before the camera is ready to accept the next input command. I will try it later on with a longer interval to check my guess and will update this post.

Hopefully you will be able to fix that, as I mainly bought this as an Intervalometer (deep sky / astro photography) and to add GPS tags. Need to check later in lightroom if pictures now have the GPS tags.

Update: As I guessed the problem is the reset of the USB. When you set the interval to something substantially longer than the exposure time, it is possible to use Timelapse / Intervalometer. Still not really a good solution. But better than nothing. I also tried continous shooting because of the issue with USB reset, and that works fine, which surprised me.

Kind regards

The A7R3 has the same problem.

For test purposes i started a normal timelapse with 5 sec interval and a shutterspeed around 1/50. From 10 pictures only 6 were taken because restarting the connection took to long.

OK, so today we worked some more on the issue, and have found a much more feasible solution to get around this problem. We will try to make it so the Unleashed will automatically select these settings, or at least warn you and give you instructions how to do this. But until then you can already set them manually! 🥳

The problem: When shooting with Sony via USB, the camera stores the photos in its buffer and on the SD card. The problem is, that the camera expects the USB host (normally a PC, in this case, the Unleashed) to download the Photos stored in its buffer. When there are photos left in the buffer, the camera will not allow you to turn it off, and you'll see an icon in the top left corner of your camera screen with an SD card, some moving bars next to it and a number (the number of shots in the buffer).
The Unleashed downloads a thumbnail of each image - A) for Image review in the app and B) for the LRT calculations in Holy Grail Timelapses. Then it deletes the image from the Buffer. The problem is that Sony does not have a proper delete function, but we found a solution for that. The remaining problem is there is a Bug in Sony's firmware, which causes a crash when we try to delete a Raw image in the buffer. But without deleting it, the buffer will get fuller and fuller, and we can't access the jpgs following that first raw either. In other words, when shooting Raw or Raw+JPEG, older Sony users were screwed. The workaround we implemented was to reset the USB connection if no shot was taken within the last 3 seconds, but this workaround could take up to 9 seconds! Not very useful for Timelapses!

Now the new solution: We found a setting that allows you to choose to only transmit a JPG to the "PC" via Usb when shooting Raw+JPG, which means the Raw will not stay in the buffer, and we won't have to delete it and the camera won't crash when we try.

Use these settings (from a Sony A7R3)
Set your Image File Format to:
- Raw+JPG
Then go to Setup4 -> PC Remote Settings, and set:
- Still Img. Save Dest. = PC+Camera
- RAW+J PC Save Img = JPEG Only

Now you won't have the USB reset workaround that will severely limit your interval choices. You'll have to live with the extra jpgs, but I think that's a small price to pay. You can also set your jpg quality and size really small to save space - the Unleashed won't mind.

Have a great weekend!