How to merge setting between Z9s

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RichF

RichF

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A friend share his setting for night photography (in a bank). Wondering if there is a smooth (easy?) way to merge setting from different Z9 cameras? I could record all his setting via pencil and paper but that seems like a lot of work and possibly error prone.

Any thoughts?
 
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I think the save settings is all or nothing. I don't believe you can just pick one think like a bank. Other than exposure what other setting did they have that you wanted to copy? I'm curious, as night photography (at least for me) the settings are very simple from an exposure point of view.
 
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It is all or nothing. And unfortunately Nikon stores the settings in a binary file, not in a format you could simply copy and paste from. As far as I know, there are no tools out there to assist with this.
 
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Pencil and paper is the only way to go I can see. I saw a free Z9 Excel file that listed everything in the past couple of weeks…think it was posted here. That would make things a bit easier to manage but if you really want to merge the settings without writing anything down…then decide which body is closest to 'right' and sit down with both bodies set to never time out into standby (temporarily) or even better a second person (wife, kid, SO, whatever) on the 'less right' body and then go manually through each setting and each bank in an organized manner and put the settings you want from the 'less right' one into the 'more right one'. Then save to card and move that card to the 'less right' body for Load settings…then put 'less right' body's card back in and Save to it's card. And yeah…save a copy on your computer as well…I have a whole folder that lives on DropBox named Settings files, inside is a folder for each body we have, and inside there are folders with names like Factory, FW 2.1, 20220105 and 20220815 (with the binary files inside there so I can find the right one by date or firmware or whatever.
 
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I had a quick look at the binary file with settings, there is obvious structure repeating in it that is connected with storing of the banks. Hence it should be relatively easy to find the boundary of the individual banks and then merge two files in a Hex editor.
But I have not looked at it in details. If I have free time to look at it I will post here what I find.
 
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RichF said:
A friend share his setting for night photography (in a bank). Wondering if there is a smooth (easy?) way to merge setting from different Z9 cameras? I could record all his setting via pencil and paper but that seems like a lot of work and possibly error prone.

Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

As far as I can tell one can SAVE and LOAD complete settings. ONE CANNOT save or load only one menu or setting bank.

I shared a spreadsheet a while ago and so have others -- did you not get it? Here it is again
 
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Tibor Hrnko said:
But I have not looked at it in details. If I have free time to look at it I will post here what I find.
Click to expand...
There is one problem with the Nikon binary file editing, which may be difficult to solve. Last two bytes of the file are checksum based on the file content. Without knowing the checksum algorithm, it is not possible to calculate it.

Content of the file though seems to be reasonable straightforward. I have not checked all menu entries, but in those which I have seen it was either ACSII code (e.g. prefix of the filename) or the binary number starting with 0 for first menu entry and incremented by one for next items (e.g. usage of the second card slot). It could take some time to map all positions, but it is not impossible.

I will try to guess which checksum algorithm is used, but any suggestions are welcome.
 
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One day, with a bit of luck, Nikon will release an interface where all the settings can be viewed, changed, and saved using a program similar to Camera Control Pro on a PC (or tablet).

Today, maybe even with an Android tablet/cell. Been waiting many years. I recall there was a 3rd party program that did that at one time with the D3/D4 series. Maybe time to hire some Olympus engineers made redundant in the Oly > OM System transfer. (eg: OI.Share, OI.Track, Image App (Panny)).
 
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I did read somewhere that somebody had decodedit the binary, isolating the relevant part per bank. I could not check as I don’t have a z9. If I can recall where I’ll post a link….but I post this in case somebody remembers it
 
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Patrick M said:
I did read somewhere that somebody had decodedit the binary, isolating the relevant part per bank. I could not check as I don’t have a z9. If I can recall where I’ll post a link….but I post this in case somebody remembers it
Click to expand...
decoding is not that bad. Checksum type is what I have not guessed yet.
 
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Ideally I would like to be able to copy setting between cameras without changing copyright info, folder names, ... Also it would be nice to be able to save and restore one bank at a time. I know, this is item 101 on the 100 most important things Nikon needs to do
 
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