Camera Raw: Save raw at lower resolution

I think you mean "Adobe". I certainly don't have the power or means to negotiate with camera manufacturers.

I mean we should just assume Adobe is "giving the nod" to disk manufacturers and backup services, by not introducing such an obvious consumer-friendly feature. A gesture of kindness, from one monopoly to another ;)

I think you mean "Adobe".

What I mean is what I wrote: It's not something Adobe raw converters are able to do as you request. Adobe treats proprietary raw data as read only. 

Adobe can barely find camera manufacturers to supply them with beta's of proprietary raws before camera release so we don't have to wait for updates to process that data. I don't think they will find much progress asking them to alter the resolution of their raw data. 

You are the customer. Ask the people who you paid good money for a camera to consider this feature. Again, it's not something Adobe or any other 3rd party raw converter can provide for you. 

I mean we should just assume Adobe is "giving the nod" to disk manufacturers and backup services, by not introducing such an obvious consumer-friendly feature. A gesture of kindness, from one monopoly to another ;)

I go out of my way not to assume. 

I go out of my way not to assume. 

You are okay with getting taken for a ride... gotcha

Nobody is getting "taken for a ride". What Rodney is telling you is that raw files are a specific size set in camera. There are some cameras that allow you to set the size, most do not. It sounds like you need a camera that has that capability.

Sure, buy another camera. "Hello monopoly, we're here to worship you with ever more cash" lol

A simple software solution would suffice

@James Stuart Johnson Max Quality JPEG is one way to approach it, if your workflow has no need to access to any RAW-only adjustment

I think it is an important point that the raw data is not really an image the way that a jpeg or tiff file is.  It is a Bayer array.  I think shrinking the pixel dimensions of a raw file would be far more complex than doing it to a jpeg or tiff file.  To the best of my knowledge camera manufacturers do not provide Adobe or other companies with the spec for their raw file format.  So the raw file format needs to be reversed engineered which is ok if you just want to read the format.

No matter how you approach it, you lose data to save space. Do you want half the sensor data or all the data converted to 32bit and lossy compressed at 80%-100% compression.  There's always a trade off, depending what you needs are and where the acceptable loss is applied.

Like everything else, it comes down to: Speed, Quality or Cost, you can only pick two...

By default the DNG lossless format can save up to 30% depending on the image. DNG would be the perfect solution if they simply build an image resizing feature as part of DNG. See below it remains disabled unless you select a supported format.

Absolutely doable.

But it is not camera raw sensor data and one can render a lower resolution variation in a DNG but a TIFF provides the same thing.

Not asking for undemosaiced camera raw sensor data, asking for a DNG with all the metadata/maker notes in.  It would be a handy feature even with caveats. 

Not asking for undemosaiced camera raw sensor data...

The OP is. 

Sorry, I thought he was just asking to save it at reduced image resolution.

I hadn't considered timelapse.  Adding the ability to export directly to various high bit depth flavors of DPX or Open EXR directly from Bridge though camera raw, would be useful for those working with image sequences. Both Premiere and After Fx support DPX and some Open EXR flavors.