Uploaded October 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Yesterday I shot my very first game shooting the newer Sony file format called .HIF files instead of .jpg. I was really impressed at how much more information there was in the files! I have never been a .RAW shooter as my background is photojournalism and we never had time on deadline to mess around with RAW files, or to store them because of their size. Most sports photographers shoot in the .jpg format for this reason.
There are many upsides to shooting in Sony's .HIF format, namely a wider color gamut (dynamic range), more information in highlights and shadow even when exposure is wrong by a ton, and tiny file sizes when they are just sitting in your hard drive.
The downside is that many editing applications are not really .HIF ready, and they either don't support this new file format or they are doggedly slow even if they do. As an example, I shot 2900 frames at this football game yesterday but it took me over 1.5 hours to edit the game and find 100 keepers. Typically, this would be a 20 min. job for me with that many .jpgs. But the ability to massively crop into these files, create massive changes in post processing, and their smaller files sizes for storage will keep me coming back to the .HIF format... but only when I feel like I need the extra go-juice for this type of files. If the .HIF files could be previewed and edited as fast as .jpg files, I'd likely never shoot a .jpg again. Still, I'm super happy that Sony gives me three choices instead of just two for file formats. In future, I will shoot all my landscape images in .HIF for sure though.
For sports? I'll stick to .jpg's unless there is a good reason to shoot the .HIF. The alpha 1's jpegs are amazing anyways :)
Yesterday I shot my very first game shooting the newer Sony file format called .HIF files instead of .jpg. I was really impressed at how much more information there was in the files! I have never been a .RAW shooter as my background is photojournalism and we never had time on deadline to mess around with RAW files, or to store them because of their size. Most sports photographers shoot in the .jpg format for this reason.
There are many upsides to shooting in Sony's .HIF format, namely a wider color gamut (dynamic range), more information in highlights and shadow even when exposure is wrong by a ton, and tiny file sizes when they are just sitting in your hard drive.
The downside is that many editing applications are not really .HIF ready, and they either don't support this new file format or they are doggedly slow even if they do. As an example, I shot 2900 frames at this football game yesterday but it took me over 1.5 hours to edit the game and find 100 keepers. Typically, this would be a 20 min. job for me with that many .jpgs. But the ability to massively crop into these files, create massive changes in post processing, and their smaller files sizes for storage will keep me coming back to the .HIF format... but only when I feel like I need the extra go-juice for this type of files. If the .HIF files could be previewed and edited as fast as .jpg files, I'd likely never shoot a .jpg again. Still, I'm super happy that Sony gives me three choices instead of just two for file formats. In future, I will shoot all my landscape images in .HIF for sure though.
For sports? I'll stick to .jpg's unless there is a good reason to shoot the .HIF. The alpha 1's jpegs are amazing anyways :)
