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Archive 2017 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

PhilthePhrame
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

I'm confused about how to use the dual card slots in the a7R3.

I shoot stills of birds and wildlife and shoot RAW. I am looking forward to the improved AF, burst rate, and buffer of the a7R3.

I am assuming that the faster write speed of the uhs-II card can be useful for these features.

But, the other slot is the slower uhs-I. I don't shoot RAW+jpeg, so I'm not interested in writing jpeg to the second card. I am not particularly concerned about a back up card. (I am an amateur, and rarely shoot events.)

Should I even use the second slot? Will writing to the uhs-I just slow down the benefits of the uhs-II? Do I even need the uhs-II?

Thanks!

Nov 22, 2017 at 04:20 PM

GMPhotography
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

You can leave it empty. Never tried it but pretty sure you can. One issue maybe playback speed as this way it only reads a Raw. You could put camera on low jpeg for playback reasons only. Just format it once you fill it. But put your fast card in slot 1. I do backup ultra fine to slot one just in case but I do Pro work.

Will have to check this as I never left it blank

Nov 22, 2017 at 04:32 PM

DavidBM
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

PhilthePhrame wrote:
I'm confused about how to use the dual card slots in the a7R3.

I shoot stills of birds and wildlife and shoot RAW. I am looking forward to the improved AF, burst rate, and buffer of the a7R3.

I am assuming that the faster write speed of the uhs-II card can be useful for these features.

But, the other slot is the slower uhs-I. I don't shoot RAW+jpeg, so I'm not interested in writing jpeg to the second card. I am not particularly concerned about a back up card. (I am an amateur, and rarely shoot events.)

Should I even use the...Show more →

Yes you can leave it empty.

But also if you don't want it for any of the usual reasons you can just put a UHS-1 card in and use it for overflow.
Now you may never overflow the first card: but having the second card there prevents the super annoying thing of picking up the camera, going somewhere, and being told "cannot write to card because card not inserted" and remembering that the card is sitting in a card reader plugged into the computer...

Nov 22, 2017 at 05:05 PM

te4o
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

If we let the camera record some custom settings on the SD card do they get deleted with formatting ?
This second slot could possibly have a card which we don't format but just cut the photos from on import... Just wondering.

Nov 22, 2017 at 06:57 PM

DavidBM
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

te4o wrote:
If we let the camera record some custom settings on the SD card do they get deleted with formatting ?
This second slot could possibly have a card which we don't format but just cut the photos from on import... Just wondering.

Yes they do!
So having the custom settings on the second card that you don't reformat is a nice idea.
You could probably make a disk image of that card too, so you could replicate it if something goes wrong..

Nov 22, 2017 at 09:09 PM

SoundHound
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

If ithe MKIII is like an A9 there’s no overflow. You must manually switch over to the slot 2 card once the card in slot 1 is Full.

Nov 22, 2017 at 09:30 PM

davidnumrich
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

I've got the A9, which has the same memory card solution and I have it so the UHS-I slot records movies and the UHS-II slot records RAWs. I don't take a lot of video, but having them all on their own memory card allows me to take them more freely without having to worry about offloading them after importing the stills to Lightroom and before reformatting the card before another session.

Nov 22, 2017 at 11:27 PM

randomguy
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

SoundHound wrote:
If ithe MKIII is like an A9 there’s no overflow. You must manually switch over to the slot 2 card once the card in slot 1 is Full.

It's not, much has been improved in the A7R3 firmware. Now if Sony only would let it trickle down err up to A9...

Nov 23, 2017 at 01:15 AM

Matt Grum
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

PhilthePhrame wrote:
But, the other slot is the slower uhs-I. I don't shoot RAW+jpeg, so I'm not interested in writing jpeg to the second card. I am not particularly concerned about a back up card. (I am an amateur, and rarely shoot events.)

With the A7RII reviewing images (to check focus etc.) is much slower if you shoot RAW only, as the camera has to load and convert the RAW file instead of being able to just use the JPEG. For this reason I always shoot RAW+JPEG. With the A7RIII you could shoot RAW to your main card, and shoot small JPEG to the second card (which can be smaller/cheaper) and you ought to get fast reviews, and you should never need to take this card out of the camera, just reformat it every time it gets full.

Nov 23, 2017 at 06:50 AM

Trek_of_Joy
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

^^^ That's a great idea.

If the a7r3 can write its 4k video to the UHS-I slot without slowing down anything else, I'm going to split stills/video. Otherwise I'm just going to keep two fast cards in the body, swapping slots if one starts to get full. I was just on safari in Africa and even with 128gb cards, I filled them when shooting bursts of raw stills and 4k video.

Nov 23, 2017 at 02:26 PM

EB-1
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

PhilthePhrame wrote:
But, the other slot is the slower uhs-I. I don't shoot RAW+jpeg, so I'm not interested in writing jpeg to the second card. I am not particularly concerned about a back up card. (I am an amateur, and rarely shoot events.)

Matt Grum wrote:
With the A7RII reviewing images (to check focus etc.) is much slower if you shoot RAW only, as the camera has to load and convert the RAW file instead of being able to just use the JPEG. For this reason I always shoot RAW+JPEG. With the A7RIII you could shoot RAW to your main card, and shoot small JPEG to the second card (which can be smaller/cheaper) and you ought to get fast reviews, and you should never need to take this card out of the camera, just reformat it every time it gets full.

Are you sure that Sony still does not embed a full-sized jpeg in the RAW file?

EBH

Nov 23, 2017 at 04:24 PM

Matt Grum
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

EB-1 wrote:
Are you sure that Sony still does not embed a full-sized jpeg in the RAW file?

Pretty sure.

I haven't fully poked around inside the ARW format, but I do know that the total image size including the masked pixels is 8000 x 5320. In uncompressed RAW mode it uses two bytes per pixel, so the total image data size is 85120000 bytes.

The largest ARW file I have so far is 85623808 bytes, so the total size excluding the image data is 503808 bytes, or about 500K, not nearly enough for there to be a full size JPEG embedded. There is a slight variation in RAW filesizes, indicating there is probably at least a JPEG thumbnail embedded in there, but it's very small.

Nov 24, 2017 at 06:37 AM

virtualrain
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

On the A7RII, if you want to have acceptable performance shooting RAW+JPEG and reduce the time to chimp a shot and zoom in to check focus, you had to reduce the JPEG size to the 18Mpix or lower size. Otherwise the time to preview and zoom an image you just shot was frustratingly slow. Is it possible to shoot full size fine JPEGs to the slow slot (RAW to the fast slot) and not have this frustration with review and zoom time performance?

Nov 24, 2017 at 10:12 AM

EB-1
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

EB-1 wrote:
Are you sure that Sony still does not embed a full-sized jpeg in the RAW file?

Matt Grum wrote:
Pretty sure.

I haven't fully poked around inside the ARW format, but I do know that the total image size including the masked pixels is 8000 x 5320. In uncompressed RAW mode it uses two bytes per pixel, so the total image data size is 85120000 bytes.

The largest ARW file I have so far is 85623808 bytes, so the total size excluding the image data is 503808 bytes, or about 500K, not nearly enough for there to be a full size JPEG embedded. There is a slight variation in RAW filesizes, indicating there is probably at least a JPEG thumbnail...Show more →

Thanks for the info, but damn that sucks for workflow.

EBH

Nov 25, 2017 at 05:18 PM

elimoss
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

Matt Grum wrote:
I haven't fully poked around inside the ARW format, but I do know that the total image size including the masked pixels is 8000 x 5320. In uncompressed RAW mode it uses two bytes per pixel, so the total image data size is 85120000 bytes.

Did we ever get an answer from Sony why they won't give us a lossless compressed?

Better question. Once you get the uncompressed ARW on your computer, what is the best way to losslessly compress them while they hang out in your catalog?

Nov 25, 2017 at 06:54 PM

goo0h
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

Matt Grum wrote:
With the A7RII reviewing images (to check focus etc.) is much slower if you shoot RAW only, as the camera has to load and convert the RAW file instead of being able to just use the JPEG. For this reason I always shoot RAW+JPEG. With the A7RIII you could shoot RAW to your main card, and shoot small JPEG to the second card (which can be smaller/cheaper) and you ought to get fast reviews, and you should never need to take this card out of the camera, just reformat it every time it gets full.

How do you set that up?

Amos

Nov 22, 2018 at 02:17 PM

KarmaKramer
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · a7R3 Dual card slots: Confused

I always leave it empty..

Nov 22, 2018 at 02:22 PM


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