How many of you are shooting sports in RAW ?

I have no idea if shooting sports in RAW can reduce the noise. I shoot in RAW allways (but I am no pro sport shooter, so do not need to send photos to news fast etc)...

RAW here as well. Allows me to correct my mistakes so much more easily.

It's been argued endlessly, but I reason I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is this: A max jpg from my 20D is about 2,754 KB. The exact same shot with the jpg extracted from the 12-bit RAW "negative" is 4,315 KB which is 1.57X larger.
Whatever info is in my jpg is a lot more detailed than what comes right out of the camera. Why throw those extra bits away?
People talk about upgrading their cam to get better quality, when all they have to do sometimes is try to get everything out of it that it's capable of.

There are some examples on page 2, post #58, that illustrate easily seen information loss in a web jpeg derived from a RAW file & one shot in the camera.
You will see even more detail if you compare large 300ppi prints.

Some good links in here: action shooting.....

I throw them away and my camera throws them away because they are not needed. I love how my camera processes the info and gives me the jpegs I want. RAW has too much redundant info for me..now that is just my own opinion. My jpegs come out just fine. I tried raw for 2 years, CS3 came along to process jepgs in the raw editor and now my images are even better.

AdamJT wrote in post #4973892
I shoot sporting events, and specifically a lot of gymnastics. We end up with anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 images per weekend event. We definitely shoot jpeg, and horrors, small fine at that! Anymore quality is simply not needed to sell prints up to 11x14 to parents that can't tell the difference. By shooting in a small jpeg form, it allows us to finish shooting a meet and have it uploaded by Monday after. If we can't efficiently get images to the net for parents to view, we lose sales. This means no post-processing, and deleting any bad shots on the fly. That way when we get home, we dump to the computer and set it up to load to the net.

All that being said, for other personal or professional work I shoot RAW. The flexibility in the post-processing is critical if you have a great shot and want to tune it up.

I used to shoot gymnastics as well for International Gymnastics Magazine..in fact the Region 7 championships are going to be here (Chareston, WV) in May and I'm trying to get in to cover that....

I'd love to get back into it.

You can get away with shooting RAW if you don't have to turn stuff around instantly. I think you'll find most pros shooting jpg since they've got tight deadlines for submitting images after an event (if not during...)

cosworth wrote in post #4972041
Zero compression is the key for me. If I'm going to spend all that dough anf time taking a shot, I want ALL the shot. I don't want the camera to throw out half the data I captured.

Just to be clear, zero *lossy* compression is what you mean here. There seems to be a POTN rumor that floats around, equating lossy compression with non-lossy compression. Raw files are certainly compressed, they just aren't compressed with an algorithm that loses bits.

Dave

Ah, geez. I've got to start wearing my glasses. I thought the thread was called who' shooting sports in the raw and was about coverage of the nude Olympics.

FlyingPhotog wrote in post #4978192
You can get away with shooting RAW if you don't have to turn stuff around instantly. I think you'll find most pros shooting jpg since they've got tight deadlines for submitting images after an event (if not during...)

And there is nothing wrong with their images..if they have to be published then quality is a must so again, another reason not to shoot raw in sports..

I mainly shoot sports, and only shoot in RAW. Granted, I use Lightroom for post so it's not that time consuming for me.

I will only shoot Jpg if i need the buffer space for specific action sequences.

otherwise, the control i have in RAW is priceless. Feel free to disagree with me here, but even if you setup your WB for a given area of a gym and/or outdoor sport...another area of the gym you move to can be slightly different...and/or the sun has gone a little higher or lower, thus negating the WB calculation. ...although maybe I'm to picky.

I tried lightroom and hated it. I want to do processing and save my jpegs..I don't want to have to go thru the export motions..I find CS3 much better (for me) in processing...but that is just my workflow.

Oh, about throwing all that raw info away? Why should I spend my time doing what the camera will do itself based on the settings I have.

As above i only shoot RAW now! Especially when storage isnt a problem! ive got GB's everywhere!

I've been shooting indoor sports (gymnastics and volleyball) about 15 - 30,000 images per event for six years. We shoot RAW+JPG.

JPG for viewing and ordering, RAW for processing and final ouput. I simply prefer the workflow we've setup. The aspect that draws parents to our booth is the final quality of the work and a speedy RAW workflow is an important part of that for us. Enough that I'm willing to spend the money to constantly buy harddrives to keep up with the unending storage demands. We typically don't use the same drive for more than a few events before it's moved into an archival storage role. We just consider it a cost of doing business. I think we might be at around 10TB of disk storage in office now and it'll increase by about five more TB this year (we've just added a second 1DmkIII and the files from that are gorgeous but large, coming in at about 17MB per image for high ISO RAW + small JPG).

I shot JPG my first two years in business and wanted to improve my finished product and workflow. RAW was the way to go for us.

wow...interesting. If I may ask, what level of sporting events are you shooting? ie HS, College, etc...?

Given the mention of parents, I'm guessing HS level.