I don't think 3x Crop Mode is an option for me considering the water clarity where I'm shooting
It's not that, It really when you shoot fine patterns or angler objects and better low light performance ,
because of line skipping and pixel binding in 1:1 and 3x crop mode is 1:1 pixels no pixel binding.
I've been pointed towards the SanDisk Extreme PRO 64GB CompactFlash Memory Card UDMA 7, 160MB/s. How does that compare to the Lexar or Komputerbay for RAW?
Lexar are top cards and the most reliable but cost a little more, Sandisk are fine it come down to cost and the valve you put
on the footage. If you are filming on a paid job then I would go for the best (Lexar) if not then Sandisk or the Komputerbay
will work. But the Lexar is faster , and record more frames @ very high resolution size before it drop frames.
I'm not sure what 1000x means.
The speed of the CF Card
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompactFlashCompactFlash IDE (ATA) emulation speed is usually specified in "x" ratings, e.g. 8x, 20x, 133x. This is the same system used for CD-ROMs and indicates the maximum transfer rate in the form of a multiplier based on the original audio CD data transfer rate, which is 150 kByte/s.
R = {K \cdot 150}, kByte/s
where R = transfer rate, K = speed rating. For example, 133x rating means transfer speed of: 133 * 150 kByte/s = 19,950 kByte/s ~ 20 MB/s.
The speed rating quoted is almost always the read speed, while write speed is often slower.
If understand correctly then, I am limited to a certain amount of time, like your 10 -15 seconds, depending on if I'm putting tons of data onto the card but can record continuously if it doesn't overwhelm the card speed? Is that correct?
Yes, because of the CF card interface is limited to about 80 MB/s verses the 5D3 at about 95-120MB/s.
The more I read (it's been a lot) the more I feel like problems are rare and easy to correct if encountered. Sure hope that's the case because I think I'm going to go for it!
Good ! once you go raw you won't go back to h264 no matter on tough the raw workflow is.
