Raw or JPg

[paul beumer]

Hi...
Just out of curiosity...

What can be the reason that JPG pictiures and RAW (sony ARW) pictiures have different alignment results?

I just tried to align as series of 45 raw images and only 8 were aligned... after starting up a new project and using the JPG images (i safed images in sony ARW (RAW) and in JPG) all JPG images aligned superbly..
Does RAW have any benifits?

[cam3d]

Hi Paul -

RAW has the benefit of flexibility. You can make tweaks to your images after they have been captured (exposure/white balance/colour profiles etc...) - I'd recommend to shoot RAW but process 3d reconstructions in JPG or TIFF - That way you always have the original images to go back to and alter if need be.

The other bonus for converting from RAW to JPG yourself rather than pushing RAW's directly through 3DF Zephyr is the time savings - (JPG's process much faster, at least they did the last time I checked.

- It looks like support for .ARW2 was added recently so they should work out the box - If you could post a link for us to download the dataset, we can investigate further Andrea Alessi

[paul beumer]

Thanks for the reply.. :-) and best wishes for 2019...
Due to end of year and new year holidays i reply a bit later. I'll upload my raw footage and jpg so you can download the data set.. to whom shall i send the link? And could we transfer work for you?

[Andrea Alessi]

Hi Paul,

thank you and best wishes to you too

You can send a download link (e.g. wetransfer, dropbox link) to support@3dflow.net or we can upen up a sharing account on our server for you.

As Cam mentioned, there isn't a significant advantage in reconstruction using raws. Personally i prefer JPGs as they are much faster to process for zephyr. It's a good idea to shoot in raw or raw+jpg (so you can always fix some images, if needed) but i always use JPGs for the process.

Unfortunately some RAW file formats may differ slightly depending on the camera age, so yes, please share the photos so we can investigate further

[paul beumer]

Files have been send to support@ through we transfer... {ARW = native Raw format for Sony A6300)

btw... images are some test shootings :-) on the fringes of amsterdam (https://goo.gl/maps/oqkxLkY6ANH2)

[Andrea Alessi]

Hi Paul!

Thank you for sharing the photos!

I think this is a very limit case. In fact, trying your photos with 4.302 I had no luck at all with JPGs but better luck with ARW. your mileage may vary depending on settings and zephyr version as well. As i said, this is probably a limit case for a few reasons:

- the images are not very sharp; most of them are blurred
- there is a lot of contrast
- there is a lot grass, which unfortunately, paired with the previous two reasons, will probably create a lot of noise and thus false matches.

When converting to JPG you're converting from 16 bits to 8 bits, so it's natural to expect some discrepancies between the two sets. Were they taken well, you would have probably gotten very similar results between one format or another.

However, since this is a limit case, sometimes you may have more luck with one format and some other times with another one.