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How to use DSLR camera without a capture card

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The simple answer to the question “How to use DSLR camera without a capture card” is that you can’t. But if you are reading this blog post is because you’re really really want to do this. It could be that you just can’t afford to pay the $300 dollars for the capture dongle or it could be that you feel like this is possible without a capture card.

Whatever might be your reason for reading this post, I want to go ahead and point you to the first version of this guide.

How to setup Canon DSLR T3i as a webcam on MAC

And if you are having audio issues like I was read this post: How to add a System-Wide audio delay in OSX

Now that you have gone through all of those steps you are left with opening all of this applications one at a time and closing them each and every single time that you want to use the camera which is no big deal. It only takes a couple of seconds to do, what’s the big issue? It starts getting pretty repetitive doing this over and over again so I decided to create a little script to help me open and close the applications.

Although you could do this entire thing with bash, I decided to use apple script to use the text to speech functionality and get a little message when the application starts and stops.

Startup apple script

Shutdown apple script

Bash Script

The startup and shutdown scripts work but you will also need an additional script to control which one to run depending on the parameter that you pass in. This is why I created a small simple bash script that can take care of all of this for me.

You are almost all done, just a couple of more steps left before you can use the tool from the command line.

  1. Download the script files
  2. Move the files to your home directory
  3. Create an alias to your rc file
  4. Enjoy your new command 🙂

You now have access to the alias command.

Every time you want to start the camera just run this command.

[code lang=text]
camera start
[/code]

Every time you want to stop the camera just run this command.

[code lang=text]
camera stop
[/code]

If you want to learn more about how to program, you should check out courses I teach a couple of times a year.

That’s it. Enjoy.

Talk soon,

Rick H.