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I've got R5 craw files. If anyone needs them, let me know

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

The GP-E2 on the 7D lacks some of the features it has on the other supported models.

One of the more head-scratching ones is it doesn't let you sync your camera clock to the GPS time... but it clearly shows you the time from the GPS on the info screen and it records the GPS time in the EXIF of every shot.

It also doesn't let you use the compass on the GP-E2, which I suspect is also an arbitrary limitation (but this one I'm assuming they imposed because you're not likely to have the compass mounted on a flash bracket or in the hot shoe on a 7D so the compass might not be very reliable)

The lack of tagging videos with GPS data is less of an issue to me - but also seems like a very arbitrary restriction.

... but at the very least - I imagine it would be simple to just enable a "sync camera clock to GPS time" button. I'm at the very least interested in knowing if there is any sort of technical reason Canon wouldn't have enabled that feature on the 7D but did on the rest of the GP-E2 supported cameras.

Is the bulb ramping for timelapse feature enabled in this alpha? (I think it was blocked waiting for some of the same property setting stuff that the HDR features needed, wasn't it?)

The remote shooting function in eos utility in a way emulates button presses and command dials. I wonder if anyone has looked at the commands transmited through usb and what in-camera code they execute?

IIRC, It doesn't emulate all command dials - you have to be in the "Bulb" setting to do bulb exposure stuff with the EOS utility, don't you? (It can't just send a "bulb mode" command to simulate changing the dial over)

So for those EMF chips like the one linked there, do you just replace the mount part on the lens with the one sold there?

So for my Samyang 8mm I'd just have to screw that on in place of what's there, right?

building an Arduino-based device that does PTP and has a GPS chip in it would be pretty easy - but the cost for a good GPS receiver + arduino etc would probably not make it super enticing unless you already had the parts from another project

I'm interested in automatically geotagging, but less interested in spending $250 for a GPS unit with a USB connection. Does the GP-E2 do USB host or does the camera?

If the camera is the USB host, making something that would emulate the GP-E2 and send GPS info to the camera would be pretty easy - I have more than a few older android phones with good GPS receivers in them and functioning USB ports that I could use...

Or perhaps building an arduino-based alternative to the GP-E2 would be another idea.

Anyone know where in the firmware it shows the protocol used to talk to the GP-E2? 

Having been on the receiving end of more than a few overzealous user-feature rants... I apologize in advance if this sounds like a kid on santa's lap... but having ML be able to help with Panos would be an awesome feature.

Combining this with the ghost image would be a killer feature (my old sony point-and-shoot had something sort of like this for panorama help)

Does the 8mm assume fisheye?

Here are a few pain points when doing panoramas that I've found, and if there were any way to automate them in camera that'd be awesome.

1. Picking a good dynamic range for the scene. (The way I do this now is I point at the brightest spot in the scene and meter it and make sure I'm not clipping highlights, then point at the darkest point in the scene and meter to make sure I'm not clipping shadows there - and then I make sure to pick exposure bracketing in a way that both extremes are covered with 3 shots)

2. Waiting for things to stabilize before shooting. (I use a panosaurus, and it has a bit of wobble in it after I rotate it - so I use a cable release now to make sure to trigger it at the right time)

3. Determining the point of least paralax for a lens and verifying it. (The way I do it now is to set my camera on the pano head and have something in the foreground with something else in the background. I'll shoot it in the middle of the frame and then turn the pano head until it's on the edge of the frame and then zoom in to 10x to see if they are the same. I have to jump back and forth between the two images until I get it just right...)

4. Remembering how many shots to take and at what angles for a given lens. (this part you seem to have nailed, although for some lenses there are times you want to switch it up. for the 8mm for instance you can do it in basically two rows - but you either angle up slightly or down slightly first depending upon where you want to have the least stitches. For the 10-22 at 10mm you will really need to shoot multiple rows but you can do it so you have more overlap on the equator in some situations...)

5. Focusing the lens on the hyperfocal distance based on the aperture.

6. Remembering the image that starts / stops a given pano (I sometimes shoot a shot of my hand before shooting one... if I'm doing a bunch of them in short sequence of each other.)

7. Making sure that I'm not in the wrong mode before shooting a pano.

I think many of these pain points can be helped out with software - now that the 7D port seems to be under way, I can try to help lend a hand with some of this coding. (C isn't my normal programming language, but with a bit of brushing up I can do ok in it)

I know some of them are limits on hardware (for instance, auto-focusing the lens on the hyperfocal distance can't really be done for lenses that don't report back the focus distance accurately)

Getting something that auto-lines up the previous image would not only help shoot the panos, it'd be very helpful in adjusting the lens to find the proper least parallax point.

Some of those pain points above could be really simple to adjust (for instance, making the panos have a unique naming sequence when shooting them... or putting them in their own directory)

One thing that would be REALLY interesting to see is if we could output a starting file for PtGui (or Hugin) that describes roughly where each image was taken and put it in the same directory as those images. I know starting with that in PtGui with the images would then make having it find control points and lining things up be very fast. It'd also help with dealing with things like the sky etc which are sometimes a pain to handle. (Not sure how much arbitrary file IO is doable or reasonable in ML)