I’ve been using my old trusty Canon 550D (aka Rebel T2i) to successfully stream via Ecamm Live for a while, though I have struggled with a few peculiarities. So, I’ve spent a little time this morning trying to get to the bottom of it….
As you may know, even though it’s fairly old, the Canon 550D plays quite nicely with Ecamm over basic the basic USB connection (there may be some benefits of HDMI, if so, please let me know). You can’t need any special drivers or Canon software to get this working – just plug it into USB.
However, I struggled to get manual control over the exposure etc when connected to Ecamm. And this is what I’ve just got to the bottom of this morning….
First Things First
Unless you are recording for a while, recording from the battery should be fine. However, I use a dummy USB batter extension, just to be safe.
You probably also want to take out any SD card as well.
The firmware on my Canon is 1.0.8.
In the Camera settings (when in Movie mode), you want to set the exposure to manual.
Exposing Correctly
Ecamm doesn’t really seem bothered which mode you have dialled in on the camera body. However, if you want to control exposure, you must dial in Movie mode (and you need to have manual exposure enabled in the camera’s settings).
When you’re in Movie mode, you can now control shutter & aperture pretty easily using the main wheel alone (shutter), and ‘Av+/-‘ plus the wheel for aperture (Note: trying those actions outside of Movie mode doesn’t work – you need to be in Movie mode).
ISO oddity
Watch out for this one, you can change the ISO (use the ISO button + wheel) but, on my Camera screen at least, the displayed ISO value does not change on the screen (even though it has changed on the camera, you can see the image lighting changes in live preview as you scroll through ISO).
You can confirm this by going off the Movie mode, and then coming back on to it – you’ll then see your updated ISO. Weird eh?
Also, if you want to get your meter going, you need to half depress the shutter button, as usual:
I can’t comment on audio and the Canon as I don’t use that, I have an USB mic.