UDMA? Which card?

[Jannie]

I'm currently using a MKIII with Sandisc Extreme IV and III CF cards; shooting a lot at 8-10 fps and the buffer really has me shut down a lot. My camera is supposed to shoot RAW bursts of 30 frames but curently the best I can get is 24 and can't find any more custom functions to turn off to reach 30.

I'm looking at getting a new Sandisc Extreme 16G UDMA card which is supposed to be much faster but not as fast as the new Extreme Pro but the cost difference between those is huge.

What does UDMA mean, from my reading my MKIII isn't set up for UDMA, does that mean this card won't work with it?

In the next year I very likely will be getting a IDMKIV and 5DII if I seriously go back to work so I want to get cards that will be comparable and which cards work best with video in these cameras?

[Jon]

The 1D3 will work with UDMA cards; they're backward-compatible with the older data transfer protocols. They just won't run as fast as they would on UDMA-compliant cameras like the 1DsIII.

Video's actually less critical than still as far as card speed goes. Even at 1080p, you're transferring 2 MP x 30 fps (60 MP/sec)in video mode while the 5D2 is moving 22 MP x 4 fps (88 MP/sec) and the 1D4 16 MP at 10 fps (160 MP/sec) doing stills.

[bohdank]

From my short forays into video, up to 2 minutes, on my 5DII, a Transcend 133x card seems to work without hiccups. No backlog in the buffer. I imagine you would have problems with only the slowest/oldest cards out there.

I calculated 4.9 mbytes/sec.