Helicon Soft Forum

I'm testing Remote and it functions fine when using the program to find the near and far points, but when I begin the shooting sequence it seems to stop moving the focus before it gets to the far focus point. In other words, I get the first 10 incremental steps and then the remaining 20 are on the same point. In an earlier test it did all the steps from near to far, but seemed to go beyond the far point. Bottom line is that it is not working properly and I'm getting close to a deadline on a job. Need help!

This looks like a mechanical problem. We noticed similar behaviour with one of the lens. Try to set bigger focusing steps in the Preferences, that should help.

Have the same problem with my Nikon D3, 60mm Nikkor Micro AF lens. Tried setting bigger focusing steps in preferences and it did not help.

I would appreciate if you help us to locate the reason for this problem. It would be better if you test with the latest beta version:

Windows version: http://www.heliconsoft.com/downloads/He ... 5_beta.exe

Mac version: http://www.heliconsoft.com/downloads/He ... e2.3.1.dmg

It is possible that this is mechanical problem: lens is able to do one big step but fails if it is told to do several tiny steps. To check if this the reason, please try to go forth with ">" buttons and back with "<<<" button. ">>>" step contains 25 ">" steps. So make 50 ">" steps and two "<<<" steps. You should get in the starting position.

I tested the latest version of the Remote beta (on my desktop - it would not run on my Laptop (running Mac OSX 10.6.8, an 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 1 GB, 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM) with my Nikon D3 and 60 mm. Nikkor Micro lens. The new Remote works better than the old program, but still stops advancing the focus after about 5 or so steps when using the "Start Shooting" mode. It often actually backs up at that point, i.e., steps the focus backwards. The only way I could get Remote to be useful was to do everything manually, i.e., focus on a near point, take a picture using the "Take a Picture" button, click on the >> to advance the focus, take another picture, click the >>, and so on until the farthest focus point was reached. Even then, clicking on the >> button didn't always advance the focus. Sometimes there was just a noise, but the focus was not advanced. There is an incompatibility between Remote and my camera gear, a problem with the way Remote operates Live View mode on the camera (I tried both the hand held and tripod settings of Live View, it made no difference), or the software is just buggy. In any case, I don't have the time to fool with this any longer. I would like to buy this program, but without the Remote function, the main program is not practical for me. It is too time consuming and difficult to manually adjust the focus ring through 20 or more shots and even then, the results are not that good because I can't make adjustments in even, incremental steps.

Thanks for your feedback. We will check one more possible reason and will send you a new version to test. If you do not want to spend more time on testing I would suggest to wait for the release. Most probably the same problem will be reported by other user and we will be able to understand what is happening. Anyway, we appreciate you feedback very much.