Football RAW or JPG

I do the club photos for our youth football teams and also create individual shots of lads with several action shots in one photo. I have just upgraded from 300D to 30D and 70-200 L USM . Before my upgrade I had a 75-300 and the shots were very satisfactory. One of the main reasons for my upgrade was continuous shooting. So I previously shot in large jpg but now with the 30D i am shooting in RAW. I can see the problem is that I am going to be forever changing cards. Do you folks reckon I would really see a difference between RAW and jpg with these type of shots. If not I could take far more pics. The average game I take 250-300 pics.

I take that many or more per game and use RAW, especially for football when greater latitude with exposure may be crucial. Just establish a good workflow when post processing. I realize others may have differing opinions as the debate with RAW vs. JPEG is unending. This is just my 2 cents.

Memory cards are getting cheaper all the time. You can get 2GB cards now under $100 which should allow 250 shots.

When I used my D60 I shot JPG for sports because RAW was hopelessly slow. As soon as I got my 20D I switched to RAW, because the camera was much more proficient. There were still times when I found the buffer was not quite big enough so the camera stopped shooting before wanted to. The 30D is a further improvement on that.

If you nail exposure and colour balance perfectly, JPG shots are great. However, some of aren't perfect all the time, so it is handy to have RAW data available to better correct our errors. I find I even make minute adjustments on shots that I would have considered good enough with JPG. To me it is just good, cheap insurance to shoot RAW, especially for sports where things can change quickly.

If you are spending too much time changing CF cards, the problem isn't RAW. The problem is that you are using too small cards. Get a 4 gb card adn you can fit all your 250 -300 RAW shots on one card. I often fill one 4 gb card and get well into a second.

I'd be leery of putting all my shots on one card, as they sometimes go bad. If you shoot for pay, this would be a disaster.

I shoot everything in RAW plus Large JPG. That way, I have good high-res .JPG files to review quickly with no post-processing necessary. Often, the .JPG is good enough as-is. However, when I want to do any post-processing (akin to darkroom work other than merely making the prints), I start with the RAW file. The RAW file, which never actually gets changed, is my permanent "negative" file.