Nikon Z9 currently unsupported Lossy compressed and High-Efficiency RAW files
Nikon Z9 currently unsupported High-Efficiency RAW files need your VERY URGENT support. Adobe Lightroom has been supporting these RAW files since early this year! There is no excuse for Capture One not to support these. It is simply a great shortcoming that almost a year after the Z9 was launched Capture One still does not support these RAW files. I will drop my Capture One licence at next renewal if this is not rectified very soon. Thank you. Hans Hazebroek
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Permanently deleted userOh, search the bloody forum! This issue has been done to death, and the explanation for the delay in support explained umpteen times!
There is no excuse for Capture One not to support these.
Yes, there is - a very good reason, entirely beyond Capture One's control. You just don't know what it is.
Adobe Lightroom has been supporting these RAW files since early this year!
Poor "preliminary" (Adobe's choice of word) support.
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Well ON1 RAW has announced support in their next version due out shortly.
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Uh - shoot uncompressed? There is no such thing as lossless compression… (take it from a EE, hash function, specialist - the highest frequency content will look different in any “lossless compression” format)
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Well ON1 RAW has announced support in their next version due out shortly.
Yes, and funnily enough there is a new version of Capture One due out shortly too. (Whether it will provide support for these files I have no idea.) But ON1 and Capture One have both been in the same boat, that they could not begin to develop their support for these files until the developer of the proprietary technology they use released an SDK, which they did only very recently.
Ian
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Daniel , I can't argue your point, as I am no expert on such things, but that is not the understanding I've had in dealing with cameras and file types. Jpg compression sure, but lossless raw compression is "supposed" to have no effect on quality and your comment is the first I've heard say otherwise.
However, it is a moot point on the Z9, lossless compressed is the only option besides the lossy compressed options aka high efficiency modes.
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No worries - the best way to see what this looks like that most people experience is outside of photography - when they watch a movie. A movie shot on film and converted to a pile of different digital formats tends to look clean because the high frequency content (bushes, background, high res grid) is smooth from the film, but still high freq in the digital. So if there is a badly lit digital cut (like Titanic) it looks like garbage or things look strange in the background on different HD tvs (many now smooth this out - and look sort of Gumby-like because of that.)
[There is also panning with a digital which is another thing, but still funny to see.]
That blows that the Z9 has only lossless compressed - not made the leap to Z9 yet myself - for stills the D6 is still the workhorse for many, but was thinking of the Z9 just to use the 58mm .95 Noct, but I’ll just rent that. Thanks for the heads up (and on my ignorance.)
The key with new cameras (especially since they don’t take the 10 years to design them like the D3/D3x - which I still use for when a wedding has purple lights and I have to shoot entirely SB-900 - the later cameras just don’t speedlight as well as the originals. ), is that there are quirks in the first iteration.There are proprietary RAW formats and stuff like - oh the pipe in the camera won’t take uncompressed, so we will go compressed until the next version which supports some no super XQC, or other wonky-donk card that won’t work a year from now because you need to get the “USB” version or something else like that… Adobe has an in with some companies, but once C1 delivers it has always smoked everyone else for RAW rendering on Nikon so I get the frustration.
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@Daniel Roddy I'm not trying to be rude, but you're very, very wrong about lossless compression: "There is no such thing as lossless compression… (take it from a EE, hash function, specialist "
If lossless compression didn't exist then it'd be impossible to compress binaries and have them work when uncompressed. Compression types like LZW (Lempel–Ziv–Welch) have been used for TIFF files since 1992 and generate literally bit-for-bit lossless files. The Z9 uses a proprietary genuinely lossless compression algorithm for RAW files, as well as the lossy HE* and HE options.
Genuinely lossless video compression is much less common than for still images (usually "perceptually lossless", eg. ProRes is used instead) but it does exist, eg. FFV1.
Apart from the computational power required for encoding and decoding, there's no disadvantage to using (genuinely) lossless compression. Even then, the computational requirements can sometimes be outweighed by the reduced storage / transfer bandwidth.*edit: there's also an argument for storage resilience for uncompressed files -- depending on the compression algorithm if one bit is corrupted you'll lose more of an image with a lossless compressed file, but it's not an issue in practice
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Scott McLauchlan You are talking about two different things. LZW and other compression are compressions of ones and zeros binary files, and are entirely different from high frequency data sampled analog to digital in a visual or audio file for the human to see or hear. (Then there is the reverse digital to analog conversion on the other end.) This is the reason audiophiles like vinyl and 192k oversampled audio formats. To get the high frequency formants that create the full and natural sounds of specific voices or instruments to be undistorted and rich you have to go well beyond the Nyquist point, etc. (When I mentioned video on a TV it was in an attempt to give one example of where people might commonly observe and example of the concept.)
It is true that most may not perceive the difference, or the difference may not be noticeable at a give print size, but there is a difference (that is what it means to be compressed), and there potential to see that in the high frequency components.
RAW processors such as Capture One take full advantage of all of the data that they are provided and compression has the potential reduce that depth in images with high frequency content. (Yes - some may not notice in given formats or in photos with lower frequency components.)
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Version 15.4.1 just released now supports these files.
Ian
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