Crap! Took the plunge for the 5D4, and now I have egg all over my face.
I was so excited. Like a lot of 5D2 shooters I passed on the 5D3 because for someone who is primarily a landscape shooter it was no way a $3500 upgrade. The years dragged by, the usual 5D three-year refresh timeline brought nothing. Five years and counting from my 5D2, Canon was blithely trotting out the same old sensor technology (with algorithmic refinements) in cameras like the 5DS, as if there was no problem. I seriously considered changing horses, but hung in because of the lenses, the ergonomics, the usual good Canon stuff. But with growing doubts: I stopped giving myself the annual Christmas/birthday present of one shiny new L a year. Still, I couldn't bring myself to make the expensive switch of brands until I had seen if the 5D4 would address the issues that landscaper/portrait type shooters have been complaining about for years. (Sorry, but for certain kinds of shooting, DR does matter.) But where was the semi-mythical 5D4?
Finally, in mid-September, it was here, and the reviews were glowing. Even Canon's harshest critics were saying that Canon had significantly upgraded its game for my kind of shooting. Hell, DPR loved it--dozens of significant improvements as a general-purpose tool. And DxO--yes, DxO--rated its DR as two full stops better than the 5D3. I was there. After nearly seven long years, I plunked down my money for a new 5D. In fact, I went nuts. Call it a retirement gift for myself, or maybe playing Christmas catchup: but in the same week I also went ought and bought the two lenses I'd been lusting after since their release: the 24mm TS-E II, a landscaper's dream, and the 100-400mm L II, in my mind the ultimate all-purpose telephoto for someone who is only occasionally a wildlife/sports/action shooter. (Now that I had the body, what excuse for not owning the lenses?)
I was happily gassing about all this to a friend, who happens to coach the local girls high school tennis team. He wanted a slide show for the team banquet--a slide show like all the major sports had, and asked if I'd do the shooting during their last match on Thursday. Are you kidding? I went out and fired off 675 shots at (for me) an orgasmic seven shots per second--exactly twice the frame rate of my 5D2. And just to cut down on the computer-screen clutter, for the first time in my life I shot RAW without a JPEG backup.
I went home and put the files on the computer. Then I tried to load them into Elements 14. Nada. Nuttin'. Never had this problem with three previous Canon bodies. O.K. After struggling with Adobe's convoluted website for several hours, saw the welcome message that I had successfully downloaded Camera RAW 9.7, with Adobe-certified support for the 5D4. Back to Elements 14 to finally bring those 650 shots into the catalogue. Nada. Nuttin'. According to Elements 14, the files were still corrupt, or already in the catalogue, or in a format not supported by the program.
I'm frustrated; I'm furious--why does this crap have to be so complicated? More to the point, I have a friend and team of high school girls hoping to see for the first time something more than Mom's cell phone pictures of themselves in action. (Only major sports--football and basketball--get serious photographic attention at the high school level.) The banquet is about a week away, and I have nothing to show them. Can't find any help elsewhere on the net. There's a work-around I'm guessing: I could process the RAW files in Canon's proprietary software, save them as JPEGs and move them over to Elements, but Canon's software is so clunky that I've never used it and I'm sure it would take me more than a week to get up to minimum speed. I'm hoping someone on this forum has encountered a similar problem and can provide me with a magic bullet to get the files into Elements.
