How does new camera support work (e.g. Nikon D5)

[Linwood]

New to Photo Mechanic.  In fact last day of my trial, so will need to order.

I've got a D5 on pre-order.   I'm expecting a painful period with Lightroom until they support it.

But how does PM work?   A user told me elsewhere it didn't matter about new cameras as it does not do raw conversion, and the previews work the same.  But I noticed the just released version listed all sorts of new cameras supported.

I'm not asking for a commitment of timing but rather the general process.   When the D5 comes out, should it just work in PM?   Or will you need to produce a new PM version to support it?

And if I'm not mistaken, the Canon in the new release is not actually out yet, so (if you can say) how did you provide support before you could get one?   Or has Canon released raw images for consumption?   (Nikon hasn't done so publicly as best I know).

[dennis]

I've got a D5 on pre-order.   I'm expecting a painful period with Lightroom until they support it.

But how does PM work?   A user told me elsewhere it didn't matter about new cameras as it does not do raw conversion, and the previews work the same.  But I noticed the just released version listed all sorts of new cameras supported.

I'm not asking for a commitment of timing but rather the general process.   When the D5 comes out, should it just work in PM?   Or will you need to produce a new PM version to support it?

And if I'm not mistaken, the Canon in the new release is not actually out yet, so (if you can say) how did you provide support before you could get one?   Or has Canon released raw images for consumption?   (Nikon hasn't done so publicly as best I know).

Congratulations on your order of the D5.  It looks like a nice update.

Although I haven't yet looked at a D5 file I don't expect there to be any issues.  Since PM doesn't do RAW conversion we rely on the embedded preview and Nikon has been very consistent through the years with how this is stored in the NEF files.

For some other makes like Canon and Olympus, we currently white list models as we have a chance to test them.  This is because these manufacturers haven't been as consistent in the past with their file formats (Canon having gone through numerous filename extensions even).  However, lately both Canon and Olympus haven't made any fundamental changes and so going forward we may instead remove the white list and have an option to black list a model if it causes problems (until we can come up with an update to fix it).  I've already verified the new 1D X Mk II and white-listed that model in the upcoming update.  Am hoping to get a D5 file from Nikon before we release this update, but again I don't expect any issues. UPDATE: PM build 17146 was released yesterday Wednesday Feb. 17th so if there are any issues with Nikon D5 (unlikely) we will update.

Regards,

--dennis

[Linwood]

Thanks for the quick response, and that's good to know.  I'm probably going to shoot raw + jpg (something I never do now) at first so I have something to use, and something if I want to edit later.  Originally didn't care about the raw + jpg handling options in PM, but now glad to have them.

Culled, cropped, straightened and uploaded basketball to Lightroom, and blew through it there to the web last night in record time.

[Linwood]

I found some D5 raw images online, and they mostly work.

The ISO display is incorrect, however, peaking out at 65535.  Not sure if they changed datatypes or store the higher ISO in another field, but it is displaying incorrectly.

But the images themselves worked fine, which is terrific.

If you want samples, this thread at another web site has sample links: http://nikongear.net/revival/index.php/topic,3077.0.html

Post #32 had a link to about 2 dozen images which offer a rather broad sample set.

[dennis]

The ISO display is incorrect, however, peaking out at 65535.  Not sure if they changed datatypes or store the higher ISO in another field, but it is displaying incorrectly.

Well the original Exif specification (tag 0x8827) uses a 16 bit short value for ISO which is limited to 65,535 (0xffff).  The Exif spec says that this value should just clip at its max (65,535) if the ISO is (equal or) greater, and therefore this value is clipped at 65,535.  Nikon has its own Maker note ISO tag for extended ISO and apparently PM isn't parsing this quite correctly (for D5).  Since the D5's native ISO goes beyond 65,535 (which is a first) to 102,400, the Nikon Maker note's "base ISO" of 1024*100 (or 102,400) is stored in the maker note without any need for "ISO expansion".  PM was only using this Nikon Maker note tag for ISO expansion but apparently this is not needed for the max native ISO setting of 102,400.  I suspect that PM will correctly read ISO values > 102,400 from the D5 (when expansion kicks in) but I don't have any sample files to verify.

I'll see if we can update PM 5 with a fix for this if it is easy to update and can be verified.  Otherwise it will have to wait for PM 6.

--dennis

[mbbphoto]

PM 6 !!!
Don't start us Dennis...

[Gruffer]

Hi Dennis, it displays 100K incorrectly, but above that it seems to work accurately and as expected. Shout me up if you need files to work with.

Cheers,

Craig