You may or may not have noticed that we’ve been talking about Cascable 7 here on our blog for a long time, and after well over year of work it’s finally here!

Cascable Studio 7 is the biggest and most ambitious update in the app’s history, and this blog post is a deep dive into all of the new features and improvements.

If you don’t want to read though a giant blog post, here’s some useful resources to get you started:

• Cascable is now known as “Cascable Studio”.

• Check out Cascable Studio’s product page here on our website.

• We have a more straightforward list of changes on the app’s version history page (it’s still a long list, though).

• You can read about upgrading to Cascable Studio 7 Pro here.

Let’s dive in!

Contents

• New Name: Cascable Studio
• Cascable comes to the Mac!
• Video Recording
• Remote Control Improvements
• Integration with Photos
• Mac: Integration with Retrobatch and Capture One
• Tethering Improvements, Including “True” Tethering
• Other Photo/Video Management Improvements
• Recipes Additions
• Upgrading to Cascable Studio 7 Pro
• Conclusion

New Name: Cascable Studio

Over the years, we (Cascable) called our main app “Cascable for iOS” to distinguish it from our other apps. Now it’s on the Mac too, that won’t work. We wanted to avoid a “Cascable by Cascable” situation, so here on our website you’ll see the app referred to as “Cascable Studio”. It’s still the same app you know and love!

Cascable Studio comes to the Mac!

We’ve brought Cascable Studio to the Mac using Apple’s “Catalyst” technology, which allows iOS apps to run natively on macOS.

However, Cascable 1.0 launched in June 2015 — over nine years ago! — and for nearly all of that time has been built only with iOS in mind. There’s no checkbox in the world that’ll automatically take nine years of iOS-only thinking and produce an app that feels great on the Mac — you’ll get an iPad app in a box at best.

We’re Mac-heads at heart, and “iPad app in a box” isn’t good enough for us. We’ve spent a lot of time over the past year polishing, tweaking, and implementing Mac-specific features to make Cascable Studio feel like the “real” native Mac app that it should be.

Cascable Studio 7 running on the Mac.

Cascable Studio 7 is just the start of the app’s Mac journey — if there’s something that feels out-of-place, or you’re missing a keyboard shortcut, or something just feels too “iOS-y” on the Mac, do get in touch and let us know — we’ve done our best for an initial release, and we’ll continue refining and improving the Mac experience over time.

Cascable Studio’s feature set is nearly the same on the Mac as it is on iOS, with the notable exception of geotagging and support for Phase One cameras.

Cascable Studio’s Mac app is included in your Cascable Studio 7 Pro purchase or upgrade — you don’t need to purchase the app on iOS and macOS separately (and the reverse is true, too — if you buy the app on the Mac, you also get it on iOS).

Video Recording

This one is a huge feature in a small number of words: Cascable Studio can now record video on Canon, Nikon, and Sony cameras that support it. On Canon and Nikon cameras, you can copy video files from the camera’s storage and manage them just like you can photos.

We’ll be working on bringing video recording to more cameras in future Cascable Studio updates.

Remote Control Improvements

There are a lot of improvements to the remote control experience in this update. Too many to cover here — you can find a full list in our version history page.

Let’s cover the biggest ones:

• Hardware-accelerated Live View: We rebuilt our live view pipeline in Metal, which means it’s now GPU accelerated. That’s not very exciting, but the efficiency improvements and battery life improvements are! Alright, maybe efficiency isn’t very exciting — but it is important.

• Live LUT Preview: You can load .cube 3D LUT files into Cascable Studio and apply them to the live view feed to get an instant preview of how your footage (or photos) will look with your favourite colour grade.

• MetalFX Upscaling: MetalFX is an upscaling technology from Apple that can improve the definition of your live view feed. You’re not suddenly going to get a pristine 4K feed, but it can help make live view a bit easier to work with, especially if your camera has a particularly low-resolution feed.

• Negative Mode: Cascable Studio’s automation tools make it a great solution for digitising negatives, and the new negative mode for live view takes that a step further by letting you preview your negatives as you’re shooting.

• Onion Skinning: Cascable Studio’s automation tools also make it a great solution for stop-motion photography. Cascable Studio 7 adds onion skinning, letting you overlay an image on top of the live view feed to help frame your next shot. You can either manually pick an overlay, or have Cascable Studio automatically use the last shot taken.

• Picture in Picture (iPhone/iPad only): One of the longstanding limitations of the iOS platform is that apps get a very limited amount of time in the background — and Cascable Studio has had to stop any running automations and disconnect from the camera after a very short period of time in the background. Well, not any more! As long as you have it running, Cascable Studio can show live view in a Picture in Picture window above other apps — meaning you can keep an eye on what your camera is doing and keep Cascable Studio running for longer periods of time. Hooray!

Cascable Studio's live view feed running in Picture in Picture.

We’ve also improved the live view grids feature, and revamped the remote control settings menus to be much better laid out.

Finally for remote control, a quick shout out to our Sony users: Shutter Robot is a lot more “sticky” once engaged. Some Sony cameras in particular would disengage Shutter Robot seemingly if you breathed on them, which could be rather annoying when you’re trying to set up a shot. No more!

Integration with Photos

We’ve added a deeper integration with the Photos app, promoting it to a “first class” storage location. That means you can copy photos to it directly from another other location, and target it for automated transfers with Storage Links.

You can optionally pick a target album for copied images, and make multiple connections to different albums.

Note: Photos doesn’t support a number of video codecs used by modern DSLR and mirrorless cameras, even though they’re largely the same as the codecs used by iOS devices. To avoid confusion, Cascable Studio only allows the ingestion of photos into, er, Photos.

Underneath this feature is a lot of architectural work for connecting with other apps, and we’re excited to bring you more app connections in the future.

Mac: Integration with Retrobatch and Capture One

On top of the Photos integration, we’ve added integration with Retrobatch — an amazing batch image processing tool — and Capture One Pro on the Mac.

Retrobatch lets you assemble image processing nodes together. For example, here’s an example Retrobatch workflow that saves two versions of each image processed — the original, and a scaled-down JPEG with a “SAMPLE USE ONLY” watermark on top.

With Cascable Studio’s integration, you can pass images to a chosen Retrobatch workflow either manually, or automatically via Storage Links. This can be an amazingly powerful tethering workflow — you can have images in cloud storage with watermarks applied seconds after you push the shutter on your camera!

Our Capture One Pro integration lets you add images directly to your Capture One catalog — again, either manually or automatically via Storage Links.

Tethering Improvements, Including “True” Tethering

The tethering workflow is an important one, and we’ve made a lot of improvements to it with Cascable Studio 7.

First, a bit of background: Back in 2015 when we first launched Cascable, iOS didn’t support USB connections to cameras, and the WiFi chips and antennae in cameras were… bad. The connections were slow and unreliable, and we took the choice to be as safe as possible — we intentionally didn’t support the “traditional” tethering mode of shooting straight to the connected device’s storage — we didn’t want an ill-timed WiFi dropout to risk data loss. Instead, we implemented “safe” tethering: having the camera save images to its own storage card(s) before copying them from there. A tiny bit slower, but a lot safer.

Honestly, we’ve had very few complaints about this approach over the years. However, we support USB connections now, and WiFi in modern cameras is typically much more reliable and faster than it used to be. And heck, some people just like to live dangerously.

With Cascable Studio 7, we now support what we call “true” tethering for Canon, Nikon, and Sony cameras (although Sony cameras already worked this way via USB since they don’t provide access to their storage cards).

The “safe” way is still there (and is still the default), but if you want you can flip the camera’s “Image Destination” setting over to “Host” or “Host + Camera” and shoot straight to Cascable Studio.

To help with this (particularly for Sony cameras), we’ve improved our Storage Links feature to work with “true” tethering. This lets you direct tethered shots straight to your preferred destination — including external storage, which is great news if your shooting ambitions outpace the free space on your device’s internal storage!

Other Photo/Video Management Improvements

The improvements to file management aren’t just for folks with those expensive orange cables — there’s improvements for everyone!

• You can now rate photos and videos directly on Canon cameras.

• You can now see a file’s “protected” status right in the image grid, and filter/sort by the same. We’ve also added an “Any positive rating” filter.

• We can hear the chorus of “finally!” from here: You can now choose to show thumbnails in their natural aspect ratio.

• Lots of workflow improvements that came as part of our Mac work, but are also present on iPhone and iPad: context menus for performing actions on images, keyboard shortcuts for various actions, and more.

• Another “finally!”: When tapping on a photo to preview it directly from a camera’s storage card, a histogram won’t be shown if Photo Review → Show Histogram is turned off in Cascable Studio’s settings.

Recipes Additions

Recipes is our powerful automation tool that lets you build exactly the sort of automation you want. We’ve added a number of blocks to it, and have improved others.

• The Comment block lets you leave notes to yourself or others in your recipes.

• Added a Set Exposure Setting block that lets you directly set an exposure setting to a desired value. If you know you want ISO 400, you can now have ISO 400 without having to remember to pre-set your camera to that setting or fiddle around with changing the setting by a number of stops.

• We’ve added some options for working with “real” time, which is useful when working with the outside world — particularly the night sky: There’s a Wait Until Time block, and we’ve added an Until Time option to the repeat block.

• Added Start Video Recording and Stop Video Recording blocks.

• We’ve fleshed out the Wait for Input block, adding the option to read the message aloud and the ability to trigger it via a HTTP API.

Upgrading to Cascable Studio 7 Pro

Phew! We told you this was a big update!

You may have noticed that we specifically mentioned a “Cascable Studio 7 Pro” upgrade above. This update is such a big one that we’ve drawn a line under it as a paid feature upgrade.

This means that a number of new features in this update — including the Mac app — require an upgrade to “Cascable Studio 7 Pro” for some existing users:

• If you’re subscribed to Cascable Studio Pro, you’re good to go — your subscription includes everything with no price change.

• If you purchased the non-subscription Cascable Pro within two years of Cascable Studio 7’s release (i.e., on or after December 5th, 2022), you get a free upgrade. This will be automatically granted, and there’s nothing for you to do.

• If you purchased the non-subscription Cascable Pro more than two years before Cascable Studio 7’s release (i.e., before December 5th, 2022), you can upgrade at the heavily discounted price of $29.99 USD + tax or your local equivalent.

Once you have Cascable Studio 7 Pro via subscription, free upgrade, or paid upgrade, you’ll get all of the new features and the Mac app.

If you choose not to upgrade, all of the existing features you had will continue to be unlocked in Cascable Studio 7 on iPhone and iPad — you just won’t get all of the new features or the Mac app.

Conclusion

We’re so happy to finally have Cascable Studio 7 in your hands — it’s our most ambitious update to date, and we’re really proud of it.

We have more great new features coming in the new year, but we’ve been working on this for nearly 18 months now and it’s time to actually get it into the hands of you all — go check it out!

Keep In Touch!

If you’d like to keep in touch with us, you can do so in a number of ways:

We’ll be posting handy tips and tricks on this blog, and you can subscribe to our RSS feed here.

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for byte-sized looks into life at Cascable.

You can subscribe to our email newsletter. It’s very low-volume, and we’ll use it to send you the occasional email about Cascable updates and new features

As you may have gathered from our recent announcement of the Cascable 7 TestFlight Program, we’re hard at work building big updates to our apps.

As part of that, we’d love to hear about what kind of photography you do, and what features are important to you in your photography workflow. If you have ten minutes to spare, we’d love for you to take our quick survey.

If you’d like to collect some rare memorabilia, you can additionally opt-in to a drawing to receive some Cascable pin badges and stickers!

You can take the survey here, and terms and conditions for the pin drawing are here. The drawing for pin badges will take place on September 2nd, 2024 - submissions received after this date will not be eligible for the drawing.

Thank you for sharing!

Keep In Touch!

If you’d like to keep in touch with us, you can do so in a number of ways:

We’ll be posting handy tips and tricks on this blog, and you can subscribe to our RSS feed here.

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for byte-sized looks into life at Cascable.

You can subscribe to our email newsletter. It’s very low-volume, and we’ll use it to send you the occasional email about Cascable updates and new features

Back in the spring, we released a limited TestFlight build of Cascable for folks shooting the eclipse.

Our work on Cascable 7 is well underway and we’re aiming (but no promises) for a release sometime this autumn. Since our eclipse TestFlight went so well, we’ve decided to open up a wider TestFlight program for Cascable 7, which is available now to paid users of Cascable 6.

Cascable 7 adds Mac support, video recording support, improvements to remote control and Recipes, and much, much more — it’s a really big update! We’re especially looking for feedback on the Mac and video recording features.

A very early build of Cascable for Mac.

Important: This is pre-release software and is likely to contain bugs. If you rely on Cascable to earn a living, this isn’t for you (although you can revert back to Cascable 6 at any time).

How To Join

This TestFlight program is available to paid users of Cascable whether you’re subscribed or have purchased the non-subscription option. To apply, sign up for an account on our freshly-opened community forum and see the Cascable 7 TestFlight Program section (which is hidden until you log in) for a full changelog, a place to give feedback, and instructions for signing up.

Keep In Touch!

If you’d like to keep in touch with us, you can do so in a number of ways:

We’ll be posting handy tips and tricks on this blog, and you can subscribe to our RSS feed here.

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for byte-sized looks into life at Cascable.

You can subscribe to our email newsletter. It’s very low-volume, and we’ll use it to send you the occasional email about Cascable updates and new features

We’ve been working on improvements to our Recipes automation tool recently, with a few features specifically asked for by folks expecting to shoot the solar eclipse that’s coming up soon. Unfortunately, these improvements are scheduled for a larger update to the app that’s now been delayed well past the eclipse.

It’d be a shame to miss such an exciting event, so we’ve put together a special build of Cascable that’s our current app with these Recipes improvements added. This build won’t be available on the App Store (these new features will be Cascable 7 though, scheduled for later in the year), and we’re instead releasing it on TestFlight.

Important: This is pre-release software and is likely to contain bugs.

Also Important: Please take note of the behaviour of the new Recipes blocks below involving time. We’re specifically looking for feedback on this. Recipes made with the new features will not open in shipping versions of Cascable 6.x (but will work in Cascable 7 once it’s released).

New Recipes Features

• Added a “Comment” block.

• Added a “Set Exposure Setting” to directly set camera settings.

• Added an “Until Time” option to the repeat block*.

• Added a “Wait Until Time” block*.

• Various improvements to the “Wait for Input” block, including optional text-to-speech and HTTP triggers.

* These blocks will wait or repeat until the next instance of the given time. That means if you have a “Wait Until 12:00” block that gets executed at 12:01, it’ll wait for 23 hours and 59 minutes. We’re looking for feedback on this behaviour.

Keep In Touch!

If you’d like to keep in touch with us, you can do so in a number of ways:

We’ll be posting handy tips and tricks on this blog, and you can subscribe to our RSS feed here.

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for byte-sized looks into life at Cascable.

You can subscribe to our email newsletter. It’s very low-volume, and we’ll use it to send you the occasional email about Cascable updates and new features

We’ve recently released updates to Cascable for iOS and Cascable Pro Webcam that improve support for newer Sony cameras, including tap-to-focus and live view zoom for models that support it. Live view zoom has been improved for Canon and Nikon cameras, too.

However, we’d like to bring attention to a change that appears small, but is actually a pretty large one: support for Sony’s additional layer of encryption for wireless connections.

The Sony α7R V, as well as the Sony α7 IV with firmware 2.0 installed and other newer Sony models support an additional layer of encryption for wireless communication. We’re really happy to announce that as of these recent updates, this encryption is fully supported by Cascable for iOS and Cascable Pro Webcam.

When enabled on the camera, you’ll be asked for a username and password the first time you connect to it with a Cascable app (your credentials will be securely saved for future connections). After this, the app will work completely as normal.

This encryption is interesting since it’s on top of any encryption provided by the WiFi network you’re using. Since some older WiFi encryption standards can be broken if you know the network’s password — or maybe you’re limited to a network without any sort of encryption at all — this additional layer Sony has added makes sure your images remain away from prying eyes, which may be important in sensitive environments.

In our testing, having Sony’s additional layer of encryption enabled has a slight performance impact. It’s not particularly noticeable, but if you want to go as fast as you possibly can (and are otherwise in a trusted environment), you can turn off the feature in your camera’s settings.

Cascable for iOS 6.6 and Cascable Pro Webcam 1.5 are free updates to existing customers.

Keep In Touch!

If you’d like to keep in touch with us, you can do so in a number of ways:

We’ll be posting handy tips and tricks on this blog, and you can subscribe to our RSS feed here.

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for byte-sized looks into life at Cascable.

You can subscribe to our email newsletter. It’s very low-volume, and we’ll use it to send you the occasional email about Cascable updates and new features.

We’re fortunate here at Cascable to be able to do a lot of photography as part of our day jobs, even though we’re not a photography company per se. “Oh, I just need to test out this bug fix!” we’ll hear as an EOS R5 heads out the door. We don’t need to set up the studio lights to write a blog post about an app update, but it sure is fun!

Unfortunately, we do have other work to do, so we can’t spend all of our time poring over weather apps, golden hour timers, and night sky apps to see when conditions would be great for a nice product photo. Even outside of work, I — your humble blog post author — would go on vacation and spend half my time trying to figure out when it was best to drag my lazy backside out of bed to take a photo of the milky way.

The idea of an app to help with this has been brewing here at Cascable for a very long time — originally it was going to be part of the Calculations feature in Cascable for iOS. However, as we worked on the idea, it was clear that this should be a standalone app — not least because it’s something that anyone should be able to use, no matter what camera they use.

Today we’re very proud to announce Photo Scout, your intelligent location assistant. The premise of Photo Scout is fairly simple: you tell it what you want, and we tell you when it’s available with homescreen widgets and push notifications — no checking and re-checking every day, letting you get on with what you need to be doing safe in the knowledge someone is keeping an eye on things for you (well, something - it’s code on servers, much as we’d love to fly out to Hawaii to keep an eye on your beach scene personally!).

It works by combining sets of requirements and a location into “scenes”. When you set up a scene, it’ll be synced to our servers, which will then keep an eye on things for you and let you know when an opportunity to capture your scene is coming up via a push notification or homescreen widget. Back in the app, you can see all of your scenes and upcoming opportunities for them over the next few days.

We’ve got some really innovative features in there — want to know when the sun is in a particular place in the sky? Frame your shot and and tap the location in the sky in AR! Want to use a drone? You can add a wind speed requirement to limit suggested times to those where it’s safe to fly.

During a weekend in Paris earlier this summer, we were able to get some really beautiful shots with Photo Scout.

Photo Scout comes with a no-strings-attached one week free trial, and existing customers of Cascable for iOS can get a discount on their first year. Give it a try!

Keep In Touch!

If you’d like to keep in touch with us, you can do so in a number of ways:

We’ll be posting handy tips and tricks on this blog, and you can subscribe to our RSS feed here.

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for byte-sized looks into life at Cascable.

You can subscribe to our email newsletter. It’s very low-volume, and we’ll use it to send you the occasional email about Cascable updates and new features.

We’re looking for an iOS/macOS developer to help us grow Cascable and its range of products. If that sounds like it could be you, head over to our jobs page and take a look!

Keep In Touch!

If you’d like to keep in touch with us, you can do so in a number of ways:

We’ll be posting handy tips and tricks on this blog, and you can subscribe to our RSS feed here.

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for byte-sized looks into life at Cascable.

You can subscribe to our email newsletter. It’s very low-volume, and we’ll use it to send you the occasional email about Cascable updates and new features.

You’ve been asking for it for years (and we’ve been asking Apple for it for years!) and as of macOS Monterey 12.3, it’s finally possible — with today’s Cascable Pro Webcam update, you can use your DSLR or mirrorless camera as a webcam in FaceTime, Safari, QuickTime Player, Slack, Discord, Webex, and any other macOS app that uses webcams in a standard manner.

This additional compatibility is the result of quite a large under-the-hood change in macOS that was introduced in the Monterey 12.3 update — if you’d like to read about the technical details, we’ve put together an in-depth discussion of what changed in our support article about the macOS 12.3 requirement for improved compatibility.

This compatibility update to Cascable Pro Webcam is free for all users, and you can download it from our Pro Webcam Download Links page, or by checking for updates in the app. Enjoy!

We’re so excited about being able to being Cascable Pro Webcam to FaceTime and all of your other apps that we made a fun little video to celebrate it. Check it out!

Keep In Touch!

If you’d like to keep in touch with us, you can do so in a number of ways:

We’ll be posting handy tips and tricks on this blog, and you can subscribe to our RSS feed here.

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for byte-sized looks into life at Cascable.

You can subscribe to our email newsletter. It’s very low-volume, and we’ll use it to send you the occasional email about Cascable updates and new features.

It’s finally here!

Many of you have been asking for this for a long time, and we’re happy to announce that today we’re releasing updates to Cascable’s apps that add support for a large number of Sony cameras that have, up until now, been missing from our compatibility table.

A great outcome of our work with the newer Sony cameras is that we’ve also been able to go back and add USB connectivity for most of the Sony models we already supported via WiFi, meaning you can use these cameras both wired and wireless across our line of products.

Over the span of Sony’s camera lineup, there are four separate connection modes:

• Smart Remote Control was Sony’s on-camera app that has the camera create a WiFi network that your Mac/iOS device can join. Cascable’s products already supported this mode.
• Control with Smartphone is the modern replacement to Smart Remote Control — the camera creates a WiFi network that your Mac/iOS device can join.
• PC Remote (USB) is a USB connection mode on most Sony cameras that allows a USB-connected host to remote control the camera.
• PC Remote (WiFi) is a WiFi connection mode on newer Sony cameras that has the camera join an existing WiFi network.

Cascable apps support all of these connection modes on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Unfortunately, Sony’s names for these modes will stay the same — using Control with Smartphone on your Mac and PC Remote on your iPhone may seem odd-sounding, but they’ll work!

In particular, the PC Remote modes are great for Pro Webcam, since you can use your Sony camera as a webcam for your Mac without sacrificing your WiFi connection to the camera. On the other hand, Smart Remote Control and Control with Smartphone are great if you’re out shooting in the field, since you can quickly and easily connect your iPhone to your camera without needing cables or an existing WiFi network. The benefit of all of Cascable’s products supporting all of these connection modes is that you can choose exactly what’s best for you in any situation!

Here’s a matrix of what Cascable supports with the update — a missing tick is almost always due to that connection mode not being available on that camera model, rather than missing support in Cascable:

Sony α7, α9, α1 Family

Model	Smart Remote Control	Ctrl w/Smartphone	PC Remote (WiFi)	PC Remote (USB)
α7
α7 II
α7 III
α7 IV
α7R
α7R II
α7R III
α7R IV
α7S
α7S II
α7S III
α7C
α9
α9 II
α1

Sony α6000 Family

Model	Smart Remote Control	Ctrl w/Smartphone	PC Remote (WiFi)	PC Remote (USB)
α6000				*
α6100
α6300
α6400
α6500				*
α6600

* Live view may not be available in this connection mode, preventing use in Cascable Pro Webcam.

Other Sony Models

Note: Older RX100 models not listed, since support hasn’t changed for those models. See our Compatibility table for details.

Model	Smart Remote Control	Ctrl w/Smartphone	PC Remote (WiFi)	PC Remote (USB)
ZV-E10
ZV-1
RX100 V				*
RX100 VI
RX100 VII

* Live view may not be available in this connection mode, preventing use in Cascable Pro Webcam.

Keep In Touch!

If you’d like to keep in touch with us, you can do so in a number of ways:

We’ll be posting handy tips and tricks on this blog, and you can subscribe to our RSS feed here.

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for byte-sized looks into life at Cascable.

You can subscribe to our email newsletter. It’s very low-volume, and we’ll use it to send you the occasional email about Cascable updates and new features.