Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I'm shooting with a Canon 5D Mark III, three Einsteins equipped with the PowerMC2 radios and I'm having an intermittent sync problem. About 50% of the time I clearly see the shutter at the edge of my frames! I'm shooting at 1/160. If I use my Pocketwizard PLUS transmitter it never happens! Anybody have this problem? Solutions? Thanks in advance.

I shoot the mini and mc2 with a 7D and have found if you are in one of the control TL channels you need to make sure you press the shutter halfway to allow them to talk the shoot the frame. If using the standard channels it doesn't seem to be an issue.

I have nearly the same setup...

5Dm3, three Einsteins, MiniTT1 on camera and 1 PowerMC2 on an Einstein (that then optically triggers the others).

Shooting yesterday, I discovered that I had banding at the bottom of the frame no matter what my shutter speed... from 1/200 all the way down to 1/15 (I didn't test lower)!!! In other words, it was worthless. I was not using ControlTL.

So, today I ran a test...

Using only Standard Transmit Channel 3,

I updated the MiniTT1 to adjust the Basic Trigger setting only in Misc for C1 and C2.

C1, Basic Trigger was UNchecked.
C2, Basic Trigger was checked.

In C1, I get banding at all shutter speeds (95% of the time, not always).
In C2, no banding up to 1/160. Banding begins at 1/200

Flipping it over to ControlTL Channel 11 for C1 (and still Basic Trigger for C2)
I get no banding at 1/200 or below, and it won't allow me to set a shutter above 1/200. Well, it thinks so, but you'll see that it flashes to 200 briefly when you roll upwards. The camera says you are at 1/500 or whatever, but you're not... the shutter is firing at 1/200 no matter what.

To get ControlTL to work properly, I had to refocus (I use the back button focus, not a halfway press) to let the E640 know about changes to the Aperture. But not when I made changes to the FEC, unless I changed the Aperture, didn't refocus AND changed the FEC.

This is probably normal operating behavior.

I think the moral here, is, if you're NOT going to be in a ControlTL channel, you need to turn ON Basic Trigger mode and you can expect a sync speed at 1/160.

Using Control TL seems to work as advertised. Sync speed at 1/200 and they do talk properly given that the focus button is what gets them to talk.

Other than that, until PW comes out with a firmware update, HSS is not available. (I have no idea if it is even a possibility using an Einstein.)

Jeremy