All three 5DrS crop factors yield 60mb+ fies

[lmhunter]

It would seem reasonable that when one chooses to create a cropped image on the 5Drs,  the smaller scene should still fill up the viewfinder to produce a good view of the subject.   It would also be expected that a cropped image would result in a smaller file when downloaded.  500 60mb images will slow down processing and fill up camera cards and hard drives very quickly.  I want to save the FULL images for special subjects in ideal settings.  25mb to 35mb files would be OK.  Do I have to give up shooting in RAW?

Also the crop factor should be displayed prominently in the viewfinder display and be easily changable.  I would like to be able to assign a button to rotate around the 3 crop menus with a push of the button while watching through the viewfinder.

[TCampbell]

Disks are cheap. I shoot RAW and I don't look at the disk space. I don't use internal storage in my computer... my images are kept on external drives.

A cropped file of the identical image and identical image storage format (including identical compression methods) will, of course, be smaller. But if you are comparing a Canon RAW image to a non-RAW image this could explain why a cropped image doesn't seem to be smaller.

A RAW file is really just data but isn't in a format that can be viewed until it is "de-Bayered". The color sensor has something called a Color Filter Array (CFA) -- the most common is the Bayer matrix. Imagine a checkerboard in which 50% of the squares are green, 25% are blue, and 25% are red. That's the Bayer matrix. Each "pixel" in the image is technically called a "photo-site" and only contains a single color channel. To "de-Bayer" the image, the value of any photo-site is compared to the value of the adjacent color photo-sites and these are combined to create an RGB color "pixel". This operation is performed for every photo-site on the array. This basically triples the image size (a non-lossy TIFF image will be considerably larger than the Canon RAW (.CR2) file from which it was made.

JPEG images, on the other hand, are lossy and tend to have very high compression. The JPEG algorithm allows for pixels to be "normalized" so that color hue or tonality which is extremely close, but not truely identical, to a neighboring pixel.... will just be normallized so that the two pixels get the identical color hue and tonality (this massively helps with image compression for storage purposes and the human eye can't tell the difference.) The downside to the JPEG algorithm is that this assumes you didn't need to adjust the image. If you DID need to perform image adjustments, the normalization of JPEG pixels means that you lost meaningful detail that you wont be able to recover. This is why JPEG is an excellent "final image" format, but a lousy image format for images that still need adjustments.

If you havea 5Ds or 5Dsr... then I highly suggest you pick up some external disks and don't worry about the file sizes. 1 TB of disk space is less than $50 and it will take a while to fill that even with a 50MP camera... especially if you go through and cull your images to dump the rejects from time to time.

[RobertTheFat]

---

@TCampbell wrote:
Disks are cheap. I shoot RAW and I don't look at the disk space. I don't use internal storage in my computer... my images are kept on external drives.

A cropped file of the identical image and identical image storage format (including identical compression methods) will, of course, be smaller. But if you are comparing a Canon RAW image to a non-RAW image this could explain why a cropped image doesn't seem to be smaller.

A RAW file is really just data but isn't in a format that can be viewed until it is "de-Bayered". The color sensor has something called a Color Filter Array (CFA) -- the most common is the Bayer matrix. Imagine a checkerboard in which 50% of the squares are green, 25% are blue, and 25% are red. That's the Bayer matrix. Each "pixel" in the image is technically called a "photo-site" and only contains a single color channel. To "de-Bayer" the image, the value of any photo-site is compared to the value of the adjacent color photo-sites and these are combined to create an RGB color "pixel". This operation is performed for every photo-site on the array. This basically triples the image size (a non-lossy TIFF image will be considerably larger than the Canon RAW (.CR2) file from which it was made.

JPEG images, on the other hand, are lossy and tend to have very high compression. The JPEG algorithm allows for pixels to be "normalized" so that color hue or tonality which is extremely close, but not truely identical, to a neighboring pixel.... will just be normallized so that the two pixels get the identical color hue and tonality (this massively helps with image compression for storage purposes and the human eye can't tell the difference.) The downside to the JPEG algorithm is that this assumes you didn't need to adjust the image. If you DID need to perform image adjustments, the normalization of JPEG pixels means that you lost meaningful detail that you wont be able to recover. This is why JPEG is an excellent "final image" format, but a lousy image format for images that still need adjustments.

If you havea 5Ds or 5Dsr... then I highly suggest you pick up some external disks and don't worry about the file sizes. 1 TB of disk space is less than $50 and it will take a while to fill that even with a 50MP camera... especially if you go through and cull your images to dump the rejects from time to time.

---

Disk occupancy isn't the only penalty you pay for very large files. They also require a great deal more processing, so you're probably going to need a faster computer. And when you send your hi-res pictures by email (and a lot of people still do), you're more likely to run afoul of message size limits imposed by IT departments or service providers.

[jrhoffman75]

It is my understanding that the crop frame is just a tag in the metadata; the entire image is recorded. The purpose of the frame overlay is to assist in framing.

Canon used to sell special viewing screens for 1D cameras with a 4x5 or 1x1 frame engraved into the viewing screen. for the same purpose.

File size, whixch. as Tim says, shouldn't be a concern in today's storage world, would be controled by shooting one of the smaller RAW file options (i.e. sRAW or mRAW).

[lmhunter]

A sentence on page 154 of the users manual says:

"Normally, images are recorded at the sensor size of approx. 30.6mm x 24mm (full frame shooting), You can record only the center of the image magnified approx. 1.3 (equivalent of APS-H size) or approx. 1.6x (equivalent to APS-C size) ..."

My experience shooting in RAW is that the entire full frame scene is recorded no matter what crop factor is set.  Approx. 60MB files for all three options.

Further down the page it states:

"If you set 4:3 (aspect ratio) or 16:9 (aspect ratio) and use the viewfinder to shoot, the shooting result will be the same as with full frame."

What happened to "Record only the center of the image?"

Issue 2: It takes a minute or two for Aperture 3 to crop one 60mb photo.  In a foreign country I may take 400 to 800 shots may be taken in a day.  I won't be able to look at many photos unless I can get the file size down to about 30-35mb.

[ebiggs1]

In photography there is no free lunch.  You always give to get.  This is the price for a 50mp camera.  Large files!  You can reduce your RAW file size to S or M but who buys a 5Ds camera and then use it at a lower resolution?  But that option to reduce file size and speed up processing time is there. You have a MRAW and SRAW setting which give two reduced size image options.  MRAW 6480x4320 (28mp) and SRAW 4320x2880 (12.4mp) images.

[RobertTheFat]

---

@ebiggs1 wrote:

In photography there is no free lunch.  You always give to get.  This is the price for a 50mp camera.  Large files!  You can reduce your RAW file size to S or M but who buys a 5Ds camera and then use it at a lower resolution?  But that option to reduce file size and speed up processing time is there. You have a MRAW and SRAW setting which give two reduced size image options.  MRAW 6480x4320 (28mp) and SRAW 4320x2880 (12.4mp) images.

---

I second Ernie's point. If a tractable file size is more important to you than very high resolution (i.e., if you're willing to sacrifice resolution for a smaller file), you're better off buying a 5D Mark III (or waiting for the Mark IV). The 5DS and the 5DSR should be thought of as specialty cameras. If the assignments you take on require that kind of resolution, and you can accept the inconvenience of dealing with enormous files, then those cameras are for you. If not, they'll be more trouble than they're worth.

[jrhoffman75]

If you want to quickly review files while traveling you could shoot RAW + JPEG. I don't know if your camera will allow choosing JPEG size, but my 1D Mark IV allows RAW + small JPEG. I have two card slots, so I write the JPEGs to the SD slot. I can download them to my iPad, do a little editing, and post them to my Phanfare site so friends and family can view them. When I return home serious procesing is perfromed on the RAW files.

In your case the JPEGs would be the cropped size. I think that would be faster than RAW viewing in Aperture, but it does result in more files on camera, at least temporarily.

[lmhunter · Accepted solution]

Thanks for taking my issue seriously.  I always knew I would more than likely take FULL RAW photos and then crop them down on computer.  MRAWs come out as "unsupported" on Aperture 3.  I'm looking for a thunderbolt solid state hard drive to take to Brazil.  That will be fast enough.  

There seems to be no reason to use the crop factors.  Just as well to crop FULL images.  If the crop views showed up full size in the viewfinder it would give you a better view of the subject.

Thanks again.

[jrhoffman75]

Look at the Notes on page 156. Second bullet in lower section.