Dance Competition Display Setup

[udell85]

I hope this hasn't been covered too often. I did a search and couldn't really find much so here it goes. I do photography for dance competitions and usually take about 60-100 shots per 3-5 min routine. After a 12-15 hour day there can be as many as 20000 photos in a day. I have a setup right now that i feel is incredibly inefficient. I display the shots organized into folders on laptops using a network of ethernet, a switch, and a buffalo hard drive. So the process happens by having someone at the table with 8-12 laptops run cards back and forth to me every 4-6 routines and upload and organize the photos by number which i already have marked. I feel like this could be drastically improved. maybe something involving a wireless network and a tethered camera? any suggestions would be great, thanks.

[BK553]

Eyefi? or the Canon Wireless File Transmitter.

[udell85]

the name of the game is speed. can those keep up? i haven't heard much about canons wireless speeds but i've read a few times the eyefi is slow.

[BK553]

The Canon WFT is fast, but way overpriced (like $600 if I remember). Eye-Fi I haven't used, but assuming you're not shooting RAW, and only medium size jpgs, it should keep up much better than manual transfers.

That's a pretty fast data rate (about 7MB/S), and there's not much that can keep up with that. Even tethered (USB to laptop), I doubt the camera and laptop can keep up. Even with JPEG, I think the camera would struggle.

I haven't tested my theory, but I think the bottleneck is the camera itself. Wireless N and USB 2.0 are more than capable of those data rates, but I don't think the camera can output that fast of data.

The only option I can really think of is the Canon wireless attachment, but I don't think that can keep up either. Skip the EyeFi, it's worthless.

Thought of one other option, though I haven't done it personally. You could actually wear a PC, like a netbook, small notebook, or netbox (made by Foxconn), and tether to the camera via USB. Again, not sure it could keep up, but worth experimenting with.

*Tethering can be done with either Canon's software or Lightroom