I read on here somewhere that when the GH2 takes a picture it converts it to a jpeg and applies some processing to it to adjust color and such to whatever your settings are. This, I imagine, takes some processing time. So I thought if I set the camera to RAW only, I should be able to run burst longer without hitting the buffer as it shouldn't be doing as much processing to the file. Through testing I found this to be very wrong and I don't know why. I get that the RAW file is larger, but why does it hit the buffer faster in any mode that uses RAW, including RAW only? I thought since it wasn't applying any custom settings or anything it would use less processor time and therefore write quicker. Why is this? Thanx!
The JPEG processing reduces the file size and therefore write time substantially, more than enough to offset the processing time.
Sports photographers who shoot bursts to capture a moment tend to shoot jpegs. You'll get more frames before the buffer fills. Smaller file = more buffer space. Even if you shoot raw the camera has to process the file for previews. Raw files contain a preview jpeg. These can be extracted with something like Instant Jpeg From Raw. Aperture can be set to use the embedded jpeg for previews thus speeding up the import process.
