Hasta La Gadget!

This clunky little workaround will let you shoot video with the Nikon D700. In fact, it will work for any camera which can pump a live video stream into a computer. It has nothing to do with the rather nice, and rather higher definition hack we covered earlier today, but it will let you at least play with the great lenses and shallow depth of field afforded by DSLR videography.

This hack uses three ingredients. First, a camera with a live view function, which lets you see a real-time stream on the camera’s screen. Every single compact camera does this, and more and more DSLRs provide the feature. Second, a way to get the feed from the camera to the computer. I used a trial version of Nikon’s Camera Control 2, a truly awful piece of non-intuitive software that just manages to get the job done. Third is a way to capture the video displayed on the screen. For this I used iShowU HD Pro, a screencasting application for the Mac.

First, connect the camera via USB cable and fire up Nikon Capture (or software of choice). At bottom right you see the button marked "Lv", or Live View. Click this and the camera will start sending a low quality video feed to the computer (you can click to make the picture bigger):

Next, fire up your video capture application, in this case iShowU. If you can, set it to capture only the part of the screen you actually want, otherwise you’ll have to take the video file into an editor to crop it later:

Once done, hit return and start the recording. Anything you now do with the camera is being recorded. Here’s the result. It’s pretty poor, and because I’m using the trial version there’s an overlay watermark from iShowU. But you get the idea.

The quality is severely limited by the refresh rate of the incoming video feed, although the D700 has an HDMI out port, so this could be used to get a much better stream. What is interesting is that you can see just how useless live view is even for still capture — the focusing takes forever in any mode.

As an exercise, this is fun, but ultimately the quality is too poor for anything — on a Mac it would be better to just use the iSight camera to shoot. Still, if you have the camera, the trial software is free so go and try it out.

Product page [iShowU]

Product page [Nikon Capture]