Lightroom auto import/tethered shooting strangeness

Hello, I'm trying to work out a tethered shooting workflow for the 1Ds MKIII that can keep up with a fairly rapid lifestyle shooter. I'm on a Windows XP system, 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 duo system with 3 GB of ram. I'm seeing this same behavior in LR 1.3 and LR 2.0 beta.
I've followed the steps Martin Evening outlines on his blog (Canon EOS utility in conjunction with Lighroom auto import) here http://lightroom-news.com/2008/02/07/shooting-tethered-with-the-canon-eos-1ds-mkiii/ and everything is working _almost_ smoothly.
When I fire off a single frame with the camera, it takes about 5 seconds for the Canon EOS utility to copy the file to the hard drive and for lightroom to see and move the file from the watched folder to the destination folder. This seems reasonable.
However, when I start shooting at a normal pace (approximately 1 frame a second) it seems like Lightroom stops watching the watched folder until I stop shooting for an extended period of time.
I would have thought Lightroom checked the folder at a standard interval, every 5 seconds or so. However, if I snap, say 40 frames at the rate of 1 a second, Lightroom doesn't realize there are new images in the watched folder until I stop shooting and let the camera's buffer empty out.
Has anyone else seen this behavior? Does anyone know if there is a registry hack to force lightroom to check the watched folder more frequently? Even better would be a hook, like a command line switch, that tells LR to check the watched folder immediately. The EOS utility 'linked software' preference could be configured to call this hook, and would result in much snappier performance.
Thanks for the help,
Andris

Hi Andris,
It strikes me that you have hit the maximum buffer that the combination of the Windows OS, EOS Utility and Lightroom are capable of managing. As you will have read in the report, I was able to fine-tune the tethered import to a rate of 3 seconds per capture image. This was with an Intel iMac 2.8 GHz duo core running Windows XP with 4 GB RAM. So a little faster than your Windows machine, which would explain why my download tests were faster.
Look at it this way. There is the usual buffer of up to 12 frames on the camera in raw mode, which when combined with the 2 seconds it takes to transfer say, 25MB data from the camera to the computer via USB 2. This means that you can shoot at a rate of 1 frame per second, but will soon hit the camera buffer first in around 20 seconds or so at that rate. it takes about a further 1 second for the files to auto import into Lightroom and as you point out, Lightroom appears to do this in bursts. How to speed that up, I don't know. What I do know is that any background activity will slow down the import. On a shoot this week I was busy building an export of high res JPEGs from the catalog as I was shooting more downloads and as one would expect, this did affect the performance.
It would be nice if the tethered shooting could be made faster, but as far as I am aware, this combination is the fastest yet and certainly faster than downloading from a card. As for Capture One, I don't know yet if they have managed to get tethered shooting sorted out for the MkIII.
Martin

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