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Lesson Info

GPS Demo

All righty, here's a new one. Some people have been interested in the GPS settings on this camera. So this is where it'll record where you were when you shot a video. And so, we shot a video about using this out in the field. And in post production, so let's go ahead and take a look at the video, and after that we'll get in and look at some of the details on how you set this up. Let's talk about the GPS unit in the camera. So this is new to the 5D series of cameras. Has a GPS unit, which is communicating with satellites all up around up over there. To give us the location where we are, when we're shooting these photos. Now in order to use this, you're obviously gonna have to turn your camera on in the GPS mode. So we're going to go into the set up menu, and this is on page four under GPS settings. And we have GPS, we have it disabled, and if you want to save battery power that's obviously a good place to put it. There is mode one, and mode two. Mode one is where it is turned on and t...

he camera will send out a GPS signal, or it'll receive it and record it even when the camera is turned off. So it's gonna cause a little bit more battery drain. If you want a little bit more efficiency, you can choose mode two. I want to record everything right now, cause I want to show where we're shooting, and these photos that we shoot along with it. So this is, I'm gonna leave it in mode one right now. Now there's a number of other settings that you can go in here, choosing how quickly, or how frequently it communicates with the satellites. But the one I want to turn on right now, is the GPS Logger, and what this is, is it's gonna be able to give us, basically, a little string that shows us everywhere we were with the camera. Now you might not always want that. So in those cases, turn it off, but I want to do it right now just to show you how it works. So I'm going to make sure that the GPS Logger is enabled on this camera. And so, what we're gonna do is, we're gonna shoot a few pictures here. And we're gonna walk along the beach, take some more photos, and then we're going to see what that looks like later on. When we download all these images and look at this information on the software on our computer. All right we're back in the studio. So we're going to take a look at the mapping function the GPS options on the camera. So I've already taken a bunch of photos and I've downloaded them to the computer. And now I'm going to use the Cannon software, which is called Map Utilities. So let me go ahead and launch this. And it doesn't know about any photos right now, so I need to go tell it where the photos are. So, I'm gonna go down here to the bottom left corner, click on the little folder icon. And on my desktop I have a folder that I was shooting with today. And that was in my 5D and these are just basic photos. I'm gonna select the first image, and then I'm gonna scroll down to the bottom and select the shift-click and select the last image, so that all of these are selected. So, these are the images that we're gonna be looking at in this program. Then I'll go ahead and hit open, and it brings us up a map, as well as all of our images along the left. And so I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in here. And you can see exactly where we were, at Golden Gardens Park, and so what we can do, at this point, if we want, is we are going to come over to the satellite and hit the satellite. And so now we've brought over our satellite image and so we can see exactly where we were when we shot each of these photos. And so, we can zoom down here to the cluster of pins and all of those pins are places we have taken photos. And so, we can click on a pin and we can see the photos that we shot there, and you can clearly see this one out in the grassy field here. Not exactly where I was when I shot the photo. I was much closer to this other pin, right in here. And all of these are a little bit off. They're not 100% precise. I would say in distance wise, they might be 25 meters off, maybe 100 feet or so. Now if we come over here and we click on the photos themselves. You'll see it'll just instantly take us to where that pin is in the map. And so this is just the Cannon Map Utility Program. So, I'm gonna open up Lightroom. I've also incorporated my photos into a Lightroom catalog and Lightroom has a similar feature in here. Let me go full screen on this, so you can see what's going on. And so in here, let's bring the map back a little bit, so you can see what's going on. So you can see where the park where we are, and it'll give you a number like 41 images right here. And it'll bring up one of the small windows and there'll be a little arrow off to the side, where you can go through the different images. I was shooting a little series there and here's a bunch of the other photos from our shoot, and so you can select on any image and go there. I'm just gonna zoom in to some ones we took over here by the duck pond, and you can see once again little numbers and you can click on those, they highlight down in the filmstrip down at the bottom of the screen, as well as being able to click on them and see the individual images right there. And I haven't tried this yet, but let me go ahead and take a look in the metadata over here on the right hand side, and yes, you will have GPS coordinates over there on the right hand side, showing you exactly where those photos were taken, and I say exactly with parenthesis's around those words, because we know it's not quite exact. But it's very, very close, you should be able to get back to the exact location you shot the individual photo. So a very handy feature. It's a decision you'll have to make as to whether it's worth the battery power to you. It's not a heavy use of battery power, but it is a constant drain that will slowly drain your battery a bit at a time. But it's a feature that works very well, as long as you have clear coverage with the satellites. It's a fun feature to bring you back to exactly where you shot the photo so give it a try and see how it works for you. Okay so hopefully that shows off, you know, some of the capabilities of it. Let's go ahead and continue on. I'll just kinda go through some of the functions that we can play around with in this particular setting. So diving into the GPS settings, were gonna have a sub menu, first this is the disable the mode one and mode two. And so, I think in general, you leave this turned off. Until you know you want to use it. And that can be for battery reasons. It can be for security reasons. Just not something you want to have on. Now, if you do want to have it turned on, mode one is gonna be constantly pulling data, and so it's always causing a little bit of drain. You're gonna have more information about where that camera is and so if you said, man, we want to get GPS coordinates, we want to record everything. That's where you put it at. If you said, I want to get everything, but I don't need it when the camera's turned off. You can move it to mode two, and what happens is that when you turn the camera off, or the camera goes to sleep even. Just you know, when you let it sit there, and it's not doing anything, but it's turned on. What happens is, the GPS system shuts down. Now it will kind of, wake up, and it'll grab a satellite feed every once and a while, and then it'll go back to sleep. And so it uses, it's a little bit more efficient on battery power, so if you wanted to compromise between the two that would be mode two. But how much battery does it use? I can't answer that question. From my initial testing of it. It's less than I expected. I had a friend who I shot with, who had an external unit that was going through batteries like crazy, and I don't know what the system was, but this one seems to be pretty efficient. And so I think it's definitely worth testing out and seeing how good it is. You know, I shot, I don't know we shot a 100 or 200 shots and I noticed no difference in the battery charge from what I would normally expect it in that shooting situation. And so it'll require a little bit of testing to see if it's a critical drain for your type of photography Auto time setting, you can have this pick up the time from the satellites. I suppose there's no harm to having this turned on, but I currently have it disabled just cause I don't want any communication, until I tell it to communicate. So this is going to be very important in an upcoming section, because it can follow and track you around. And the question is, how often do you want to leave your camera turned on looking for that signal? Obviously that's gonna be affecting your battery power. How often it's turning on and doing all this. But also something that wasn't really clear to me, until I got into this, is that your camera has built in memory. This is not memory you can upgrade. It's just like a computer that has built in memory. And it's just used for storing GPS coordinates. And it can only store so many GPS coordinates. And if you update every one second, it's going to fill up really quickly. And if you set it for every five minutes, you're gonna be able to store a lot more data in there. So there is a compromise every fifteen to thirty seconds, might be a decent amount of time for that. Your uses may vary. If you want to, you can see exactly where you are, if your camera is getting GPS signals. If you're in a good building with a roof structure, there's a good chance the GPS is not gonna be getting any signal at all. And if anyone likes Easter eggs, and plays video games, just take a look at these coordinates and see what that finds. That's not my home. That's not Creative Live. GPS Logger, now this, this I gotta admit is pretty cool. This is another sub menu and this is kind of a further enabling of this. And what this does is it follows you around, and this leaves a trail of where you were. And so when we did this little shoot with this camera. This is exactly where I was walking that day when I was shooting my photos. And as you can see, the areas where I was shooting lots of photos. Walking around back and forth as it was tracking me. And it will show up like as a line like this. And in order to do this, you gotta take the GPS coordinates that are being recorded by that camera, every 10 or 15 seconds or 30 seconds. And you have to download that onto your computer. So, what you need to do is you need to manually transfer the log to the card. It does not embed it into the photos, it does not come with the photos. You have to specifically, manually go in and tell that log to be transferred to one of the two memory cards. You take that log, you put it on your computer, and then you point Map Program, your Cannon Map Program at those GPS coordinates. And basically, what this tells you is that at every 15 seconds, it tells you what latitude and longitude you were at. And so, as far as an alibi in the court of law this may have some serious implications, either for good or for bad. And so be aware that that's what it is tracking. Now as far as how much are you going to fill up with that memory? And so here's a chart. If you shoot at every one second, it's gonna fill up after four days. Every 15 seconds you get 61 days worth of data. If you shoot it every 30 seconds, it's gonna collect 100 days worth of data. And there's more information about this in the instruction manual if you want to really dive in to it, and that's way I was saying, every 15 to 30 seconds and you should have plenty of data to work with, for quite some time. And then at some point, you may need to go in and delete the whole data. For instance when you sell you camera, this is one of those things that you should, probably, go in and do. Don't know what they're gonna do with information about where you were, but this is probably the type of thing you want to clean your camera up of all that little data that's hanging around. And that's the GPS Logger. And that streamline of information was not available in Lightroom. Not available in Photoshop. you had to use the Cannon Mapping Software, which comes with the camera for free. So you don't have to go out and buy it. It's supplied with you, but it's kind of it's own unique software, and it shows you pins at where you're at. And then you can go in and download the log information to get that whole spring set of logger information on it. So that is the Cannon Map Utility. Comes with the camera on the utility disk that comes with all the cameras. Probably also for free available from Cannon, but I haven't checked on that, but I would assume it's free at their site.