# sRAW/mRAW... do you use it?



## snoke (Aug 24, 2017)

People complain "120MP, file too big!" or "50MP, file too big! slow in LR!"


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Aug 24, 2017)

Why buy a high MP camera and then throw away the resolution. There may be some emergency reasons, or bandwidth issues, but the other reasons like takes a lot of disk space don't make sense to me, I just bought a 8TB hard drive for $179.


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## tomscott (Aug 24, 2017)

One of my friends is a marine biologist and works on the national geographic expedition ships to Antarctica. One of the guests on board let him borrow a spare 7DMKII for him to try out and it was in SRAW. 

Incredibly they happened upon a polar bear on the ice with a fresh seal kill. He got some absolutely incredible images while it ate.

later he looked at the images and found out it had been SRAW, 5mp files. How devastated would you be.

In my mind there is 0 reason to shoot in the smaller raw files you can always reduce them later


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## hne (Aug 24, 2017)

tomscott said:


> One of my friends is a marine biologist and works on the national geographic expedition ships to Antarctica. One of the guests on board let him borrow a spare 7DMKII for him to try out and it was in SRAW.
> 
> Incredibly they happened upon a polar bear on the ice with a fresh seal kill. He got some absolutely incredible images while it ate.
> 
> ...



If you find a polar bear on your way to Antarctica, you need to double-check your navigational tools, because you're most definitely sailing north, not south.

That said, a very similar scenario to that which you mentioned is the reason I never switch any camera to JPEG and compulsively verify that it's still in RAW roughly every second time I pick a camera out of a bag. Preserving highlights is not a reasonable priority when shooting in JPEG with the wrong WB setting... especially not on a trip abroad... for three days straight. Burn me once, fool me no more!


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## stevelee (Aug 24, 2017)

Maybe the bear was bipolar. Or maybe a converted rectangular bear http://www.stevelee.name/macmania/rbear.html.

Anyhow I can't think of any reason I would use the reduced sizes in RAW or JPEG either one. I carry spare memory cards, and I don't travel in countries where more cannot be purchased. 

In 2002 with my first digital camera that shot only JPEGs and had a 384MB IBM hard drive that fit in its card slot, I was wary of running out of apace on the drive during an Alaska cruise, so I shot a lot of the less scenic shots at less than full resolution. I was too conservative and wound up with space left on the drive at the end of the trip. Still, any picture that I wanted to print out was at the full size, so no real regrets. 

That was then. This is now.


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## Khufu (Aug 24, 2017)

Could be useful for shooting individual frames of stop-motion animation, I guess...


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## snoke (Aug 25, 2017)

tomscott said:


> One of my friends is a marine biologist and works on the national geographic expedition ships to Antarctica.
> ...
> Incredibly they happened upon a polar bear on the ice with a fresh seal kill. He got some absolutely incredible images while it ate.



Someone very confused. Captain, navigator or someone else. No polar bears in Antarctica.



> later he looked at the images and found out it had been SRAW, 5mp files. How devastated would you be.



No devastated. I see polar bear and fresh seal kill. Amazing experience. Don't care if not on camera.

Care more if I can get good selfie with polar bear and its dinner  But I dont want be dinner either ;D


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## zim (Aug 25, 2017)

If shooting in m/s raw gave me more fps and or apsc reach then I would use it. As it doesn't then no point to use anything other than full raw for me. I'd love a 120 Mpix FF camera that shoots 1 frame per second but faster as the file format reduced to 24Mpix at 10fps 

yeah I know not going to happen


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## unfocused (Aug 25, 2017)

Same think happened to a friend of mine, except he was shooting Penguins in Alaska.


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## Act444 (Sep 10, 2017)

When I first got the 5DSR I was toying with those modes...but ultimately I decided to always leave the camera on full resolution so I don't get caught up in a situation where I forget to switch the mode back from SRAW/MRAW when I want the resolution again  guess the bear example illustrates why!


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## Dylan777 (Sep 10, 2017)

No, cards are not that expensive anymore. One or two 128GB or 256GB would be enough for many situations.


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## Ray-uk (Sep 11, 2017)

I have never used anything but full sized raw, I think there are other reasons why people use it other than file storage size.

There are a lot of people who have to have the most expensive camera they can get, they then use it like a point and shoot, doing no PP then only viewing their pictures at a small size or putting them on the web. It could then make sense to have small file sizes which are quicker to upload and require less resizing.


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## AJ (Sep 11, 2017)

stevelee said:


> Maybe the bear was bipolar.


LOL that's funny


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## Luds34 (Sep 11, 2017)

hne said:


> tomscott said:
> 
> 
> > One of my friends is a marine biologist and works on the national geographic expedition ships to Antarctica. One of the guests on board let him borrow a spare 7DMKII for him to try out and it was in SRAW.
> ...



A few years ago I took Friday off from work and stayed home with my daughter who was a toddler at the time. We spent the whole day together doing various things (from a trip to the DMV to chasing a soccer ball around on a soccer field). I brought the 70D all along the took shots all day long. There was nothing award winning here, but there were a number of good, family fun, shots captured.

I never change my settings off of RAW, however apparently the night before I needed a picture of something real quick and just needed to email it to someone. The 70D supports a a picture size S3 which is like 0.3 MP. Apparently I used the settings and in my rush to get this picture emailed never changed the setting back. My whole day was captured in the tiniest resolution. I figured it out when I was trying to review the photos on the back LCD and I would zoom in and the picture looked awful.

Anyway, never again. If I'm not willing to process the shot through LR then just use my cell phone. I couldn't believe the 70D was capable of shooting such low resolution. I've attached a sample from that day.

EDIT: I posted a few of the pictures and my story of stupidity on facebook, there is where I pulled the picture from. So in this case it is not only low res, but highly compressed.


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## Zeidora (Sep 11, 2017)

Don't know why there is even that option. Would never dream of using it.


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## timmy_650 (Sep 12, 2017)

I have used mRaw a few times, When I have done time-lapse or star trails.


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## aceflibble (Sep 12, 2017)

Only when I'm shooting casually and yet am also shooting enough to nearly fill the card; I'll switch down to a smaller raw size then to make the most out of whatever space is left. 

But on a job I'd never dream of even beginning without an excess of memory cards to hand, and it's incredibly rare that when I'm shooting casually I take enough photos to fill a card even a third of the way. That may have happened twice, maybe three times in the 13 years since I moved fully-digital?

When SLRs start putting out 100mp+ files then maybe I'll use smaller options if that 'smaller' size still comes up as something like 50mp. For now that is far from an issue and I have a Phase specifically for 100mp files so even if such high resolutions became more common, though they're overkill in many situations, I'm already a little used to it and I'm sure I could adapt if lower-res files weren't available.


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## Frodo (Sep 12, 2017)

In terms of using low res file sizes by mistake, why are you not using one of the custom functions (C) that specifies full RAW?

In terms of the question, I use full size RAW as if I'm going to the effort of processing in Lightroom, then I want a full res file. On the other hand, I occasionally use small jpgs e.g. for photos for Ebay. Hence, having the C functions specifying full RAW.


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## pwp (Sep 12, 2017)

Would mRAW increase your burst depth? 
If so, it might have its moments shooting sports action or BIF. 

Do Nikon or Sony offer this odd little feature, or is it one of those exclusive Canon idiosyncrasies?

A few years ago I shot a public relations job and didn't notice that the camera (5D Classic) was set to small jpeg after an assistant had been messing around with it. That was a heart stopper. Oops! However I was amazed with careful processing how viable the files were for press release purposes, the client was happy. But never again. 

Note: _always_ check settings if someone else has been using your camera. 

-pw


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## Act444 (Sep 12, 2017)

pwp said:


> Would mRAW increase your burst depth?



In the case of the 5DS/R, no it does not (buffer stays at 12-14 RAW shots regardless of whether it's full RAW or sRAW). Unsure about other cameras though. 

I've learned to adopt a "too much is better than not enough" approach over the years. In short, this means I'll always shoot full RAW, even if my aim is a small web-size pic. I can always downsize a pic, but cannot upsize it (without cost). Can always remove detail but cannot add it. and so on. 

In any case, now that we have terabyte hard drives, I always keep the original RAW files - as well as full-size JPGs for ease of viewing - of all the pics I'm interested in keeping from a shoot. Space no longer the concern it once was, and it's definitely liberating.


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## Zv (Sep 12, 2017)

I don't think I've ever used the sRAW or mRAW options. I might use JPEG for some quick non essential shots but other than that all my cameras are set to full RAW. I shoot low volume nowadays so even less likely to drop down to smaller file size.


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## Luds34 (Sep 12, 2017)

Frodo said:


> In terms of using low res file sizes by mistake, why are you not using one of the custom functions (C) that specifies full RAW?
> 
> In terms of the question, I use full size RAW as if I'm going to the effort of processing in Lightroom, then I want a full res file. On the other hand, I occasionally use small jpgs e.g. for photos for Ebay. Hence, having the C functions specifying full RAW.



Because I don't have a 5D series cameras so therefore I only have 1 or 2 C functions (depending on the camera). I usually reserve 1 for shooting with strobes, and another for shooting action. Otherwise I shoot a lot of Av and M usually with auto ISO. I just never take the camera off full RAW now. Problem sovled! ;D


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## AJ (Sep 12, 2017)

I have experimented with MRAW, quite some time ago, when I was on a long trip and memory cards didn't have the capacity they do now.
The idea is that for some applications, you may not need as many pixels, but you do want the advantages of raw (14 bits, processing in ACR, etc).
I found the savings in file size to be minimal. It's not worth bothering with.


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## alvarow (Sep 13, 2017)

Sports people sometimes do mRaw as after a burst it flushes faster to the card. Timelapse people often do as well (no point in having more than 4K resolution most of the time) as that speeds up processing time.


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## Pookie (Sep 13, 2017)

pwp said:


> Would mRAW increase your burst depth?
> If so, it might have its moments shooting sports action or BIF.
> 
> Do Nikon or Sony offer this odd little feature, or is it one of those exclusive Canon idiosyncrasies?
> ...



This is why I own 6 5D3's and 2 5D4's... Second (and often 3rd) shooters at all event and wedding gigs we are hired for are given studio owned gear for the duration of the assignment. I learned long ago not to trust other shooters or allow them to use their own personal gear. I sync and set all gear before use... no one changes anything. If they do that is usually their last assignment with me. Currently I have two teams of three shooters (including me) and a dedicated gear hound to take care of this for each assignment. I never want that feeling of having to "fix" a problem after the fact. Really amatuer looking and horrible for business. 

As for sRAW and mRAW... never use it, but I don't shoot sports where I could see it needed. Only weddings, events and portraiture.


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