CF card for sports shooting 5D3

Was going to post this in storage and accessories but I thought I'd get more feedback from here. I'm going to try out some sports shooting indoors mainly basketball, badminton and indoor soccer with the 5d3. ATM I have several SanDisk CF cards 60MB/sec. Would 90/MB make much different on the 5d3 or is the buffer too slow and I'm just wasting money.

Thanks !

It will make a difference if you are doing the "spray and pray" approach and keep filling up the buffer. I rarely shoot more than couple shot bursts, even with the 1D series bodies... so I am not intending to buy the crazy expensive cards.

Thanks Mike. Your always very helpful. Another question since you have the 5d3. What's actually buffering ? The camera is always buffering once you get about 10 frames off. Is it the memory card or the camera which is struggling to keep up ?

The faster cards will. I know that on my 50D the 60mb/s cards can almost make the camera shoot infinitely in machine gun mode. I have gotten to use the low drive mode and pick what I need to shoot and go from there.

Nick

cdang wrote in post #15323208
Thanks Mike. Your always very helpful. Another question since you have the 5d3. What's actually buffering ? The camera is always buffering once you get about 10 frames off. Is it the memory card or the camera which is struggling to keep up ?

The camera will slow based on how quickly the buffer can be emptied to the card. So the card speed indirectly slows things down. I've only had the 5D3 for a few weeks and not pushed it yet. Prior body was 1D3 which had much smaller RAW files, and better buffer. I'm pretty conservative on the shutter though. I got these cards - http://www.amazon.com …ef=oh_details_o​02_s00_i00

I am trying SD because I can easily pop them in my Macbook Air.

If you are shooting RAW, then the 90MB/s cards would help. If you are shooting JPEG, I doubt you fill the buffer unless you are an absolute button masher.

The CF will top out at writing at about 85MB/s and the SD will top out at about 25MB/s.

But remember to only write to the CF card. Do not write to both cards at the same time. ie. RAW to CF and JPEG to SD. When writing to both cards simultaneously, the 5D3 defaults to the 133x speed of the SD card slot they chose to use in the 5D3.

The manual states: "When Rec. separately is set, the maximum burst will decrease greatly. (See pg 121)

And remember the 90mb/s card will also upload faster. About five mins faster when processing 400 images. Worth it right there for me.