Had the opportunity to attend the Canon Filmmakers Live event in Atlanta starring the one and only Philip Bloom.  The event was on March 16, 2011 from 10:00am until about 6:00pm.  I left the house at 4:00am to drive there.  Atlanta is about a 5 hour drive for me from where I live in Mount Pleasant (Charleston), South Carolina.  A little over an hour into my journey the right-rear tire blew out on my car which normally would not have been too much of a problem.  I pull over on the side of the interstate in the middle of nowhere to change the tire.  I get out the jack and have the car about 2/3 of the way up when the handle on the jack breaks off.  Lovely. Just lovely.  After trying for about 30 minutes of trying to flag someone over waving at traffic passing by using only the light from my cell phone I gave in and called my roadside assistance people.  I hesitated on calling them in the beginning because I thought they would take forever to get there.  About 15 minutes after getting off the phone with them a South Carolina State Trooper pulls up behind me and lets me use his jack.  Within 4 minutes I had the old tire off, the new tire on and was back on my way.  Great way to start the day. I still managed to get there by the 10:00am.

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Just wanted to pass along something that happened to my 60D tonight as well as how to fix it.

I was shooting some pictures at a fundraiser and could not get my internal flash to pop up.  Tried everything.  In the menu, I went to Menu>First Camera Tab (the first tab on the left)>Flash Control>Built-in Flash Func. setting – it gave me a message saying something like “This option not available when external flash connected”.  The issue is I don’t own an external flash for this camera and nothing was connected.

I have, however, been using the hotshoe to hold other camera accessories, such as a Zoom H4n, a shotgun mic, a wireless Sennheiser receiver, etc.  I am wondering if we are all overloading what these hotshoes and how much they were really designed to hold???

After getting home and in bright light I figured out what the issue is and it is a “small” one.  Underneath the right rail on the cameras hotshoe there is a flexible piece of metal that pushes a tiny, and I mean TINY, little black plastic pin switch down when something is slid into the hot shoe.

SOLUTION:  Take a tiny little flat head screwdriver or pick and GENTLY lift up the flexible piece of metal a bit so it takes pressure of the tiny black pin switch.

I recently updated my operating system to Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit in order to take full advantage of the new Adobe CS5 suite.  In fact, I wasn’t even able to install portions of CS5 because my machine was running Vista 32 bit.  Unfortunately, the programs that wouldn’t install were the ones I use most – Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photo Shop.  Somehow I managed to purchase a computer, when Vista came out, that had a 64 bit processor but only a 32 bit operating system.

To fix the first problem, I upgraded my operating system to 64 bit Windows Ultimate ($189 on Tiger Direct).

Once I had everything installed I started adding my plug-ins back into my programs only to find out that my favorite one, Magic Bullet Looks, from Red Giant Software, would not install on my new 64 bit operating system.  After checking the Red Giant site I found they were offering an upgrade to make their products work in the new 64 bit environment. For more information on that, check here. So, I purchased that and installed it.

Magic Bullet Looks said it installed correctly. It shows up in my Video Effects section. But now in Premiere Pro CS5 and After Effects CS5, when I went to apply “Looks” it would crash both programs.

I am running a ATI graphics card and after much digging around on the web found that there is an issue with the latest Red Giant upgrades conflicting with the latest ATI drivers.

So, long story short, if you are having issues with this as well (and don’t won’t to waste about 6 hours on digging around for answers as I did) simply roll your drivers back a release or two and Magic Bullet Looks, as well as their other plug-ins will run smoothly.