EOS R5 & EOS R5 C - HEIF limited to mechanical shutter???

[JFoss]

Anyone know why canons HEIF format is limited to the mechanical shutter on R5 and R5C???  Would love to use it on electronic to get full savings of the format on burst mode of action shots.

[rs-eos]

My best guess is that this is due to processing capabilities of the hardware itself.  While I don't see an explicit callout in the User Manual, there are callouts regarding Dual Pixel RAW on page 141.  It notes that certain features are not available (when using Dual Pixel RAW) to include electronic shutter.

Thus, electronic shutter may tax the hardware more to the point where saving HEIF data would no longer be doable.

[JFoss]

Thanks for the interaction.  While I would agree dual Pixel raw would be taxing;  HEIF is just moving from 8 to 10 bit.  If iPhones and androids can do it not sure why we would be limited especial with a sensor that is 8K the GPU should be able to crank through it.

On another note; (please let me know if I need a separate thread). I do not see where I can batch convert HEIF to Jpeg on the R5C ike I can do on the R5.  On photo side they are supposed to be the same camera.  How does canon ensure bugs/fixes on the R5 get resolved on the R5C.

[rs-eos]

HEIF is beyond just a bit depth increase though.  Any of the high efficiency codecs for images and video are quite taxing and you really need good hardware acceleration.

One thing I cannot yet do (too costly timewise) is to re-encode my videos to HEVC.  Even with an 18-core iMac Pro, it's too slow since this Mac lacks specific hardware acceleration for that like newer Macs do.

The camera would definitely not being doing HEIF or HEVC in software, but the "bandwidth" if you will, of dealing with those computations is why it's my guess that it is disabled when other features are enabled.

[FloridaDrafter]

Short of a Canon engineer popping in, we will probably just have to speculate 🙂

My guess is the loss of dynamic range when going from mechanical shutter (14bit) to electronic (12bit). There just might not be enough info in the 12bit to meet PQ specks. Even if you go 12fps with mechanical, it drops to 13bit. I'm not sure how they deal with HDR cinema, unless it's cropping or up/down scaling. Anyway, just a guess, LOL.

Newton