Burst Mode FPS - Mirrorless System

[Focus101]

I love it and I hate it at times. Twice a year, I shoot a dance performance for an organization. I use the R5 for that shoot. I shoot 1st curtain with EF 70-200 f2.8 II. The shoot usually last 3 days, about an hour and 15 minutes with about 120 - 140 dance members. I kept telling my self to quit pressing that shutter release button that long. It seems that every time I shoot this event, my total number of shots keeps going up. No self discipline!?! Last shoot in January, I ended up with almost 20K shots for a 3 day shoot. Took me months to cull those pictures. That is the part I hate - Too many photos to cull or choose from. Take up too much storage space and I am bad at deleting pictures unless they are out of focus.
Burst mode High FPS - Love that I can usually get the action shots. Hate that, I have way too many to cull!


In the past with my 5D2, I usually shoot about 1K shots a night and even if I get crazy, it would still be about 1,500.
These mirrorless cameras are just too good.
(Edit: In all fairness, before 2020, there weren't that many dancers, probably about 70-80)
Do you guys have this type of problem?
How do you deal with it?

 

[tpatana]

I've been honing my culling skills especially since I got R5. Photo Mechanic is pretty good for that. First I was skeptical but now I use it always.

Last weekend took 5k pics during 10h show, posted 927 edited pictures ~2.5 hours after coming home. LR AI masks are lifesaver for that kind of shoots where the subject doesn't change too much. Will post few from that show on it's own thread.

 

[Focus101]

I've been honing my culling skills especially since I got R5. Photo Mechanic is pretty good for that. First I was skeptical but now I use it always.

Last weekend took 5k pics during 10h show, posted 927 edited pictures ~2.5 hours after coming home. LR AI masks are lifesaver for that kind of shoots where the subject doesn't change too much. Will post few from that show on it's own thread.

I use LR to cull and edit but with dance performances, light is all over the place. Nowadays with LED stage lights, they’re can be very bad and unrecoverable blown highlights. Plus I have a full time job, I only got an hour or so when I am home. I work in IT, so many days by the time I get home, I don’t want to look at another computer screens.

 

[tpatana]

I use LR to cull and edit but with dance performances, light is all over the place. Nowadays with LED stage lights, they’re can be very bad and unrecoverable blown highlights. Plus I have a full time job, I only got an hour or so when I am home. I work in IT, so many days by the time I get home, I don’t want to look at another computer screens.

I work full time IT too

That's one reason I bought Photo Mechanic. Most of my sport shoots are 4k-10k pics and using PM vs LR saves me at least 50% of the culling time, which is easily 1-3 hours per shoot. So being short on time for photo editing, PM makes it faster for me. Time is valuable.

But for years I was happy with LR too, so if that works for you then no reason to swap.

 

[Focus101]

I work full time IT too

That's one reason I bought Photo Mechanic. Most of my sport shoots are 4k-10k pics and using PM vs LR saves me at least 50% of the culling time, which is easily 1-3 hours per shoot. So being short on time for photo editing, PM makes it faster for me. Time is valuable.

But for years I was happy with LR too, so if that works for you then no reason to swap.

I have the dance shoot coming up in 2 weeks. I'm going to start researching it. A friend of mine used it before but switch to LR and he likes LR better.

 

[tpatana]

I have the dance shoot coming up in 2 weeks. I'm going to start researching it. A friend of mine used it before but switch to LR and he likes LR better.

I think they have free 14 (or 30?) day trial license. I did that first, then went back to LR and maybe 6 months later bought PM. Worth trying maybe. LR has lot of good things too, especially if I see something I need immediately out it's just click click export and you're good.

Another interesting that has happened me since getting PM. Earlier I have saved literally every picture, like zero delete. And I even duplicate everything. So for past 10+ years, I have every picture on 2 different hard drives (I have tall stack of USB drives in my shelf), ballpark 500k pics doubled so 1M give or take.

Now with PM, assuming it's not proper photoshoot where I have to be able to pull more pics, I just plug in memory card to reader, go through with PM and only copy selected pics to hard drive. Saves me 80-90% of the HDD space. First I was feeling bad in case someone asks for more pics, but now I've just started saying "sorry those were the good ones of you" as I don't have the pics anymore. For real shoots I still copy everything and duplicate.

Also not related to PM but to R5, sport shoots I started doing jpeg instead of raw. The NR in-body seems better than LR NR so usually you get better with jpeg even though you lose some editing room. I heard good things about the new LR AI-NR so I might try that, unfortunate part is that it only works on RAW and I was kinda liking the pics not taking as much space and faster processing/editing too.

 

[Focus101]

I think they have free 14 (or 30?) day trial license. I did that first, then went back to LR and maybe 6 months later bought PM. Worth trying maybe. LR has lot of good things too, especially if I see something I need immediately out it's just click click export and you're good.

Another interesting that has happened me since getting PM. Earlier I have saved literally every picture, like zero delete. And I even duplicate everything. So for past 10+ years, I have every picture on 2 different hard drives (I have tall stack of USB drives in my shelf), ballpark 500k pics doubled so 1M give or take.

Now with PM, assuming it's not proper photoshoot where I have to be able to pull more pics, I just plug in memory card to reader, go through with PM and only copy selected pics to hard drive. Saves me 80-90% of the HDD space. First I was feeling bad in case someone asks for more pics, but now I've just started saying "sorry those were the good ones of you" as I don't have the pics anymore. For real shoots I still copy everything and duplicate.

Also not related to PM but to R5, sport shoots I started doing jpeg instead of raw. The NR in-body seems better than LR NR so usually you get better with jpeg even though you lose some editing room. I heard good things about the new LR AI-NR so I might try that, unfortunate part is that it only works on RAW and I was kinda liking the pics not taking as much space and faster processing/editing too.

Yes, they have free 30 day trial. I plan on download a trial next week when I have time to mess with it. I have an external RAID 5 storage - 18TB. Don't know how many pictures I have. I have several external harddrive that were use to backup photos but with the RAID 5, I didn't have to backup quite as often.

 

[Only RF]

Not sure how much this will help but I use Canon's DPP - Quick Check - Full screen to delete unwanted files before importing to LrC. Select all files and press X to reject as scrolling through. When done exit fill screen and out of Quick Check. Edit - Rating - Select rejected images only. Then File - Move to Trash. Quick Check shows the files as finished Jpegs and DPP's downsizing algorithm for fit to screen display is very good. Files looks sharp.

I'm sure PM is better suited and if time was an issue for me I'd look into it. As a hobbyist I have the time. Still no fun with these high FPS cameras but I find pre-culling easier in DPP.

 

[Focus101]

Not sure how much this will help but I use Canon's DPP - Quick Check - Full screen to delete unwanted files before importing to LrC. Select all files and press X to reject as scrolling through. When done exit fill screen and out of Quick Check. Edit - Rating - Select rejected images only. Then File - Move to Trash. Quick Check shows the files as finished Jpegs and DPP's downsizing algorithm for fit to screen display is very good. Files looks sharp.

I'm sure PM is better suited and if time was an issue for me I'd look into it. As a hobbyist I have the time. Still no fun with these high FPS cameras but I find pre-culling easier in DPP.

Yeah, I use DPP for quick check and rating but I moved to LR last year, as I find that I can do rating in LR faster and then delete the 0 ratings

 

[GaryM]

DPP for me as well. Basically the same as “OnlyRF“. Quickly review and make keepers a number 5.
Then invert selections. Send non-inverted to trash and import 5‘s to Lightroom. Of course it is not very effected if you don’t cull any. I do understand that issue with these new canon mirror less cameras. They really are that good!