As a working DIT based in New York, I get the occasional call when gear starts acting up. And it always seems to happen not during prep, or while testing, but on the shoot. Of course.
This time, it was a photographer running into a strange issue with a brand-new Canon R5 Mark II. You’d expect a fresh camera from Canon, or any of the major Japanese manufacturers, to roll out stable and bulletproof. And often they do. But sometimes there’s a hiccup. And when it happens, it’s not necessarily isolated to one thing. It could be one of many things: the firmware, Capture One, macOS, or some odd handshake between all three.
The Problem: It Works… Until It Doesn’t
The issue was simple but critical: the R5 Mark II would connect perfectly and shoot to Capture One – for a while. Then, with no warning, it would disconnect. No crash, no error message, just… silence. Unplugging, replugging, restarting – no change. Swapping cables, batteries, swapping the camera body – still nothing. Dead tether.
The photographer had already been troubleshooting, but the issue kept resurfacing. Eventually, it became disruptive enough that the photographer had started putting upcoming shoots on hold. Can’t really blame him – losing tether mid-shoot isn’t just an inconvenience; it can kill the momentum and compromise the entire day, especially when clients are used to seeing and signing off on images live.
What’s Left to Try?
When you’ve already swapped the usual suspects – cable, camera, laptop, batteries – you have to go deeper. Is it a firmware bug? SDK problem? Phase One’s support for the new Canon? A power handshake between the body and the laptop? Some obscure system setting?
So we stripped it all down and went barebones:
- Disabled Wi-Fi and extras on the camera.
- Shot straight to card for control testing.
- Cleaned out system preferences on the Mac.
- Tightened up the whole tether workflow.
We didn’t want to fix fancy – just stable. That’s the only thing that matters.
And while we kept the firmware stock for now, the logic was simple: if it doesn’t work as-is, what’s there to lose by updating? I usually run conservative setups – older OS versions, previous Capture One builds – because I value stability over shiny new features. But sometimes, especially with brand-new hardware, you have to break your own rules.
Then and Now: Why Redundancy Still Matters
This situation reminded me of the old days, back when I used to work on-set with two digital backs, three H-series bodies (H1, H2, H4), and a full lens lineup. It wasn’t overkill. It was insurance.
If you have been around long enough, you know what happens when the worst-case scenario becomes real. A camera gets dropped. A body goes down mid-shot. And when you’ve got 25 people on set, agency and client flown in, talent on the clock, cost of location – that day is burning money fast.
Let’s say a shoot day costs $300,000. Ten hours on the clock? That’s $30,000 an hour. If a camera fails and you don’t have a spare – or even worse, if someone has to start chasing down a rental – you’re bleeding money fast. Even best case, you’re looking at a minimum 1–2 hour delay with COI paperwork, messenger logistics, and gear handoff. That’s $60,000 of dead air. Not on my watch.
So even now, when two backup cameras aren’t $40K each, I still keep that mindset. Two of everything. Monitors, cables, drives – all ready. In this Canon case, even though it was the photographer’s gear, I had my setup waiting, ready to hot-swap if anything glitched. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that.
A Quiet Fix
On the first day after I was brought one, we saw the issue once – briefly. But we were able to resolve the issue instantly by restarting the computer and replacing the battery. Since then, we’ve done multiple shoots with no hiccups.
What actually fixed it? Hard to say. Could have been the system preferences cleanup. Could have been eliminating tether stress with better cable management. Could have been a power issue between the Canon, the laptop, and the bus-powered connection. My best guess is it was exactly that, a power draw inconsistency causing the tether to silently disconnect.
But the real trick – what I always do – is observe. Quietly. I watched the photographer work, just to see if there was any workflow behavior that could have been triggering the bug. Nothing major, the basics were solid. A few tether-securement things I would’ve tightened up, but overall, the photographer was on it. And I applied my own workflow discipline in the background to make sure we weren’t introducing more variables.
Final Thoughts
All in all, this was just one of those phone calls that turns into a multi-day diagnosis working on-set with the photographer. It was a small issue, technically speaking, but with sharp teeth. The kind of bug that can ruin a client’s confidence, slow the day to a crawl, and quietly chip away at your reputation. Not because it’s your fault, but because it happened on your watch.
That’s why I show up with redundancies. That’s why I pay attention. And that’s why I like doing this job. It’s a puzzle. It’s satisfying to figure out. And when you get it working again, quietly, smoothly, no drama – it just feels good to see the smiles again.
Just a little story from the set cart. I get these calls from time to time. And I always pick up. (if I’m not working on-set)
