In a tethered shooting setup, you connect a camera to your Mac using a USB or FireWire cable. As you shoot with the camera, your images are automatically transferred to your computer via the connecting cable. You need special software to run this kind of rig, which many camera vendors include on their higher-end cameras. Often, the software lets you control the camera directly from the computer, allowing you to create time-lapse sequences and more. Using a special application included on the DVD for this book, you can configure the remote-capture software that runs the tethered rig so that images it captures are automatically imported into Aperture. To do this, you need to be able to specify a custom folder to hold the transferred images. The Create Aperture Hot Folder application included with the DVD watches that folder and automatically tells Aperture to import each new image that appears in it. Note that, in theory, the scheme you'll learn here will work with any remote-capture program that can save images in a specific folder. However, some remote-capture programs export extra, custom files that Aperture doesn't recognize. The Create Aperture Hot Folder application tries to filter out these custom files. At the time of this writing, the application has been successfully tested with all popular Nikon and Canon SLRs. It might also work if you're using a different type of camera. There's no risk in trying it out with an unsupported camera, so go ahead and follow along with the directions presented here.
Aperture will continue to import any images placed in your Remote Capture folder until you quit the Create Aperture Hot Folder application. To quit it, just select it in the Dock and then choose File > Quit. You can also drag images into the Remote Capture folder, and they will automatically be imported into Aperture. |