D7000 firmware idea to speed up card writing...

CoryUT

I recently got the D7000 (birthday gift from my wife :barb)

The camera is awesome and fits my needs perfectly! Still, I've hit the RAW buffer bottleneck a few times (Lexar Professional cards).

I know I could shell out some money for the fancy new fast cards, but I had another idea: update firmware to allow round-robin writing to the memory cards. First shot to card 1, second shot to card 2, third to card 1, etc...

Thoughts? You lose the backup capability, but if you're in a situation where you really want RAW shooting to keep up with the card writing, this seems like a decent alternative. Since we can already write to both cards simultaneously for backup purposes, or RAW+JPEG, I imagine the addition would be fairly straight forward for Nikon.

If enought people like this, how do we convince Nikon to do it?

insanefred

CoryUT wrote: »

I recently got the D7000 (birthday gift from my wife )

The camera is awesome and fits my needs perfectly! Still, I've hit the RAW buffer bottleneck a few times (Lexar Professional cards).

I know I could shell out some money for the fancy new fast cards, but I had another idea: update firmware to allow round-robin writing to the memory cards. First shot to card 1, second shot to card 2, third to card 1, etc...

Thoughts? You lose the backup capability, but if you're in a situation where you really want RAW shooting to keep up with the card writing, this seems like a decent alternative. Since we can already write to both cards simultaneously for backup purposes, or RAW+JPEG, I imagine the addition would be fairly straight forward for Nikon.

If enought people like this, how do we convince Nikon to do it?

Well, afaik, with 16.2 MP and 14-bit raw files 6FPS. It really sounds like the SD card just chokes up. This is one reason why higher end bodies us CF cards. Or the D7000 just needs a bigger internal buffer.

CoryUT

insanefred wrote: »

Well, afaik, with 16.2 MP and 14-bit raw files 6FPS. It really sounds like the SD card just chokes up. This is one reason why higher end bodies us CF cards. Or the D7000 just needs a bigger internal buffer.

Exactly...I'll clarify my thought:

My thinking is that rotating cards with each consecutive shot would reduce the load on each individual card to half of the data demand. For example, unloading a 10-shot buffer (lossless, 14-bit RAW) would mean writing 5 shots to each card, instead of 10 to a single card. This would effectively double the write speed of the cards, assuming the camera hardware can handle the task (which I think it can).

Am I missing something?

CoryUT

BTW, really impressive galleries!

ziggy53

CoryUT wrote: »

Exactly...I'll clarify my thought:

My thinking is that rotating cards with each consecutive shot would reduce the load on each individual card to half of the data demand. For example, unloading a 10-shot buffer (lossless, 14-bit RAW) would mean writing 5 shots to each card, instead of 10 to a single card. This would effectively double the write speed of the cards, assuming the camera hardware can handle the task (which I think it can).

Am I missing something?

Your scheme would require a "second" buffer to contain a file in order to "queue" the data to be written. You would have to add that buffer in addition to the firmware you are suggesting.

Probably not gonna happen.

borrowlenses.com

It's a buffer issue, not a card issue it sounds like. Those are the breaks on "midrange" cameras unfortunately. You might also consider switching to jpeg for fast action; you will get more shots in the buffer that way due to the smaller file size.

CoryUT

ziggy53 wrote: »

Your scheme would require a "second" buffer to contain a file in order to "queue" the data to be written. You would have to add that buffer in addition to the firmware you are suggesting.

Probably not gonna happen.

That's a good point. I would agree that there's no way they'll be adding a buffer. My follow-up question would be: how does the current buffer actually work? If you know, I'm genuinely curious.

Some more of my thoughts:

Buffer clearing takes the same amount of time whether in overflow mode or backup mode, which implies to me that the writes to each card are handled individually. The buffer might just unload the same data into both slots for writing, but I'd then be curious how RAW+JPEG is handled. Is the image processed and then added to the buffer after the RAW file? Is it processed between the buffer (capture) and the card writing? Does each card slot actually have it's own buffer (whether it's full size or just enough to hold a single image)?

Ultimately, I could see the design going either way. Maybe they would have put the option there in the first place, had the hardware been designed to accomodate it?

CoryUT

borrowlenses.com wrote: »

It's a buffer issue, not a card issue it sounds like. Those are the breaks on "midrange" cameras unfortunately. You might also consider switching to jpeg for fast action; you will get more shots in the buffer that way due to the smaller file size.

Yeah...just fun to think about

Ultimately it's a small issue for me, especially as card speeds go up. The numer of situations where I really want high speed RAW do not warrant a higher end camera.

insanefred

but you realize as soon as a photo goes into the buffer, it is being transfered to the card almost immediately. When you do take a burst of photos, imagine one into the buffer.. second one into the card... third one goes in the buffer... forth one tries to go to the card, but it is still writing the second photo. So, where does it go?

This idea would work better if there were two fast cards to write to. It's a good concept though.

Pupator

Get cards that are at least 45 MB/sec. I don't complain about buffer delay anymore.