RAW - Which one to choose? Resolution! 5dMark ii

[rusteam]

Hello,
i'm a beginner. I've got 5 d mark ii and 50 1.2 so far. I had a few photosesiions just for practise. I been shooting Raw (the highest resloution ,its 21 M) . I managed to get more then 600 shoots on my CF card. Ok so far, but when i started to load them to Lightroom and tried to sort them out which ones to keep and whch ones to delete - its takes ages! I been importing with Standard preview. But when its in standart - its nearly impossible to sheck wheather your pics are blurry or fine,as preview is small and not 100 %,but when i zoom in to check quality of pic - its starts loading (rendering) $which can take up to few minutes. I have 500 + pics and if i need to spend at least 1-2 minutes to preview each it will take weeks for postproduction.
Then i tried to reiport them but now with 1:1 settings. Preview works just fine now, but it took me around 3 hours to LOAD them to lightroom!!

Because i been shootin RAW 21M nearly each file is aprx 25 MB.

Question: Do i really need RAW 21 M to get great quality photos i a co easly go with other settings on 5smii like:

SRAW1 - 10M
SRAW2 -5.2 M

As i understand if i will choose for example SRAW1 10M - my pictures want be so big quality anymore .Correct? There will be not much room to play with?? As it will be with 21M.


Thank you

[OsmosisStudios]

You need a faster computer. There, I said it.
Also: are you reading these directly from the card or after you've copied them to your harddrive?

[rusteam]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

You need a faster computer. There, I said it.
Also: are you reading these directly from the card or after you've copied them to your harddrive?

after copied to harddrive.
My Pc is: Core 2Duo 1.3
3GB DDR3
Intel GMA4500



i know, i know ...dont tell me)) i will be buying iMac in the future.

But can anyone eplain abt differences in RAW formats. Do you really want to shoot the masimum megapixels you have?

[ElCapitan]

Originally Posted by rusteam

Do you really want to shoot the masimum megapixels you have?

The more information in the RAW file the better. As for the sRAW files, I remember reading a while back that they aren't true RAW files and there is more compression going on than just lopping of MP's. Not sure if that is true though.

[OsmosisStudios]

You need more RAM, a dedicated video card and preferably a faster processor.

[NicolaB]

Don't believe any one who says this photography business isn't expensive - lol.

I did a few photos for a friend - in medium resolution on the mk ii. She threw in a curve ball when she saw the images, saying that she wanted to blow them up for a large wall canvas. I learnt my lesson the hard way and now always shoot in the 'best' raw format.

So you don't NEED to shoot the largest format unless you want to blow your images up big (and still leave lots of crop room). Look in the manual and it will tell you the sizes each format will go to without loosing quality. If you are only printing 5x7 I guess the lowest quality will be fine (do check though).

I have also now got an Apple to work on (purrrrrrr) because I know my aim is to go pro. The quality of screen and speed is AMAZING. I then had to get LR, CS5, Spyder3, external hard drive, blah blah - the list is endless and the bank is empty. If you have the passion and a supportive family it is so worth it though imo.

hth

[rusteam]

Thanks! Photography is expencive but not so expencive like videography)

[3bayjunkie]

You should probably get one of these
Newegg.com - HP Z800 FM017UT#ABA Workstation XEON X5677(3.46GHz) 16GB DDR3 600GB HDD Capacity NVIDIA Quadro FX3800 (1 GB) Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Here is a nice mac
http://www.apple.com/macpro/

[JSH]

I have experienced the same Issues with large raw files, So I shoot large raw and small Jpeg ( Canon 7D ) this allows me to quickly view the image in Jpeg and make a note of images worth opening in raw. Yes it uses memory but its so cheap these days just get more CF memory, its cheeper than a new PC


Best wishes John

[DanielLane]

A faster computer will help a lot, but something else that will help a ton is Adobe Bridge. It is a fantastic place to look through the photos and preview them quickly and easily. Also a great place to add detailed information to the files for future searches. It also has photo processing tools built into it like the Photo Raw interface that comes with Photoshop. So you can do some processing straight out of bridge with out ever having to leave the application.