Well, perhaps, but I'd suggest trying it without a scratch drive and see if you have any hiccups. I don't have a scratch drive, but I don't work with big files (>10mb); that's also why I can get away with so little RAM.
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Is MacPro overkill for digital photography?
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Well, perhaps, but I'd suggest trying it without a scratch drive and see if you have any hiccups. I don't have a scratch drive, but I don't work with big files (>10mb); that's also why I can get away with so little RAM.
No, not one for OSX. However, if PS is paging out RAM to my faster external drive, it seems to keep the System Swap drive smaller on my MB, so if the MB has a smaller size to search over....
I'll start digging my hole right here, and it's getting deeper. I'm make more guesses here than a back-street Vegas Magician. Things just seem a tad more responsive even after working on some big .psd's in PS as compared to before.
(Hi all ... its been awhile)
I've been running a G5 PowerMac for 5 years now, with a strong emphasis on photography.
This has also included fairly frequent instances of scanning 35mm slides at the 50MP - 200MP range, which is a real fast way to get the machine bogged down and crying for mercy. Bottom line is that while this faithful beast still does fine with generic routine tasks, modern digital photography eats up more and more processing power (and disk storage).
As such, I will be replacing this machine in the near future -- I'm partly just waiting until the next hardware bump (it is due soon), but I'm also waiting on a camera gear 'bump' too.
IMO, it is fairly safe to say that there's no such thing as overkill. Instead, its merely a question of how long will you be able to run the machine before growth in 'other factors' eats up whatever excess power you originally had.
For example, while I've had my current G5, much of the original "stress" from digital photography was a 4MP camera that only shot JPG. Today, I'm asking it to routinely handle an 8MP camera that does RAW+JPG (plus film scans).
And on the horizon for tomorrow is whatever the hardware specifications are going to be for Canon's 5D replacement, which is currently a 12MP camera and is rumored to jump to somewhere around 18-21MP. The number isn't as important as the simple observation that the bar is going to be moved up again in terms of what is going to be asked of the computer to handle it.
Since I've gotten a healthy 5 years out of my current Mac, I'm not too terribly concerned about the cost of its replacement. Bottom line is that it will be a Mac Pro and I won't step down from the dual Xeon quad to save $500 today...buying that second CPU will cost me less than $10/month over the next 5 years (2009-2014) of its anticipated minimum lifespan.
In the meantime, my current G5 will be re-purposed as an OS X (Tiger) Server, so while it doesn't have enough horsepower for modern digital photography needs, I'll probably get another 3 years of useful life out of it
Sure, I might be able to 'get away' with less power today, and get a good iMac or something, but given how photography has continued to grow (and continue to grow), I simply don't expect that an iMac today will last as long as a Mac Pro will before the expectations bar gets pushed higher. As such, the cost question for me is along the lines of buying two iMacs over the next ~5 years versus just one Mac Pro. Perhaps if I had a strong need for having a house full of computers that trickle down through family members, I'd go that route, but since I don't need multiple computers, I tend to take bigger steps and hold each one longer.
-hh
I've been running a G5 PowerMac for 5 years now, with a strong emphasis on photography.
This has also included fairly frequent instances of scanning 35mm slides at the 50MP - 200MP range, which is a real fast way to get the machine bogged down and crying for mercy. Bottom line is that while this faithful beast still does fine with generic routine tasks, modern digital photography eats up more and more processing power (and disk storage).
As such, I will be replacing this machine in the near future -- I'm partly just waiting until the next hardware bump (it is due soon), but I'm also waiting on a camera gear 'bump' too.
IMO, it is fairly safe to say that there's no such thing as overkill. Instead, its merely a question of how long will you be able to run the machine before growth in 'other factors' eats up whatever excess power you originally had.
For example, while I've had my current G5, much of the original "stress" from digital photography was a 4MP camera that only shot JPG. Today, I'm asking it to routinely handle an 8MP camera that does RAW+JPG (plus film scans).
And on the horizon for tomorrow is whatever the hardware specifications are going to be for Canon's 5D replacement, which is currently a 12MP camera and is rumored to jump to somewhere around 18-21MP. The number isn't as important as the simple observation that the bar is going to be moved up again in terms of what is going to be asked of the computer to handle it.
Since I've gotten a healthy 5 years out of my current Mac, I'm not too terribly concerned about the cost of its replacement. Bottom line is that it will be a Mac Pro and I won't step down from the dual Xeon quad to save $500 today...buying that second CPU will cost me less than $10/month over the next 5 years (2009-2014) of its anticipated minimum lifespan.
In the meantime, my current G5 will be re-purposed as an OS X (Tiger) Server, so while it doesn't have enough horsepower for modern digital photography needs, I'll probably get another 3 years of useful life out of it
Sure, I might be able to 'get away' with less power today, and get a good iMac or something, but given how photography has continued to grow (and continue to grow), I simply don't expect that an iMac today will last as long as a Mac Pro will before the expectations bar gets pushed higher. As such, the cost question for me is along the lines of buying two iMacs over the next ~5 years versus just one Mac Pro. Perhaps if I had a strong need for having a house full of computers that trickle down through family members, I'd go that route, but since I don't need multiple computers, I tend to take bigger steps and hold each one longer.
-hh
Depends on
what you do,
your budget, and
what your time is worth.
Only you can figure it out. Mac Pro is ideal for some people.
what you do,
your budget, and
what your time is worth.
Only you can figure it out. Mac Pro is ideal for some people.
Are you 35mm slide really that good that they need even 50MP scans?
I've yet to see any 35mm film that needs to be scanned at more then 4000 DPI.
A 50MP scan works out to almost 6000 DPI and a 200MP scan works out to about 11,000 DPI. Do you mean "megapixels" or "megabytes". Megabytes seems reasonable as the size of an uncompressed tiff file.
From what I've read and seen Both Fuji Velvia and Kodak 100VS top out at around 100 cycles per millimeter and there is absolutely no detail below that level.
I'd like to think that a few of them are
For the most part, I'm currently doing quick scans at 3200dpi @ 48bit, which works out to ~15MP. If its something clearly superior & noteworthy, I may notch it up to 40-50MP.What I really see as more of the real underlying question is partly philisophical in that oversampling permits a "save all the data" approach to avoid future 2nd or 3rd re-scans for other projects. The problem is that if the size is so large that the computer hardware ends up choking, reality trumps philosophy.
The 200MP number was megapixels. The final image was 17433 x 11551 pixels, which works out to roughly 200MP; the file size in Photoshop format was 1.2GB. This had been a personal experiment which came from a "push all the hardware" trial that I had first done way back in 2005.
This file size proved impactical for the hardware, as a simple "Autolevel" would take nearly 7 minutes to complete. In the workflow that followed, this is what was then down-sampled to 8717 x 5778 ... roughly 50MP (120MB Photoshop file size).
~100 line pairs per mm is the general rule of thumb for a 'Good ISO 100' film, although there's a lot more to the question than that. For example, Kodachrome 64 was generally considered to deliver around 120-150 at 1:1000 contrast ...but only 60 at low contrast. As usual, context is everything. For example, there's some philisophical hair-splitting over the measure of lines itself, with the point-of-debate being that a "line pair" technically is a dark stripe with a bright one next to it, it is actually 2 pixels, so 50 lines/mm is 50*2 = 100 pixels. Bottom line is that this (and many other factors) makes it impossible to try to boil down all the variables to one "equivalency" number.
And in adding to this mix, I have some tripod-mount work with Ektar 25. As per this source, they state that Ektar topped out at 200 line pairs per mm. Similarly, other sources allude to Kodachrome 25 supposedly being in the 200-250 range...so there's still potentially open questions.
In general, my personal take on the age-old question of "digital equivalency" for 35mm has waffled from 40MP down to 25MP. The more that we investigate the subject, the more good points are found on the question of how to measure a qualitative subject...its not just quantity, but also quality.
And something else to consider in terms of computer hardware to support the scanning of historical film is that not all film is 35mm; I figure that medium format (6x4.5mm) will be roughly 40 megapixels at 3200dpi.
-hh
fast disk drives, for data, backup
Hello again,
On my PC (its for sale, any takers ;-), I have 3 SATA 7200rpm drives. one for OS and apps, one for data, one for other data or backup.
on a new MacPro, (buying very soon), what is recommended? comes with 320gb. I assume the OS and apps would go there. should the second drive for data be super fast? 10Krpm ? would you notice a difference from 7200rpm?
Perhaps a backup drive would not need to be fast, just large. any big advantage of going external vs internal?
Hello again,
On my PC (its for sale, any takers ;-), I have 3 SATA 7200rpm drives. one for OS and apps, one for data, one for other data or backup.
on a new MacPro, (buying very soon), what is recommended? comes with 320gb. I assume the OS and apps would go there. should the second drive for data be super fast? 10Krpm ? would you notice a difference from 7200rpm?
Perhaps a backup drive would not need to be fast, just large. any big advantage of going external vs internal?
The advantage of an external backup drive is that you can take it with you. Ideally, you should have at least 2 backup drives, one of which is always off-site in case the building that computer is in is destroyed.
For some of the 1TB and soon to be 1.5TB drives the 10k's won't be much faster. If you can order your MacPro online, get it configured with the 1TB stock so that you don't have to worry about replacing the main drive in the future and have a useless 320GB sitting around.
The second drive can be for backup internally, or you can stripe two drives for speed as the main, then stripe two more for backup and speed.
A bit over the top, but yes.
The problem I have with ordering my MacPro with 1TB drive is that I thought I would get better performance with separate drives for OS+apps (320gb), and Data (500 or 1TB). Then you should easily be able to backup just the data drive.
Would striping two identical drives provide better performance? reliability? both? Does the MacOS allow you to stripe the drives or would I need a Raid card? (if so, that would put me over my budget).
The OS will allow you to do a RAID through Disk Utility, and you can access that through the install disks so you can RAID your drives then install Leopard.
It may not be as necessary though, even if you want that speed, to do a non-hardware RAID with two 1TB drives since they will be fast enough.
As far as speed goes when it comes to applications and boot disks, you have nothing to worry about as a photographer. Running the application from the system drive is required by many apps, and wouldn't yield you much of a speed gain if you stuck them on another drive.
To clarify, I would expect to install all applications on the OS drive. But all data would go on the 2nd drive. and a 3rd for backup. This has been the recommendation in the PC world, especially for streaming types of applications (like audio and video). Does this rule of thumb also apply to the Macs ?
I'd rather just have OS, applications and data on one drive, and a second drive for backup. I would only use 3 if it improves performance for photography and some video work.
Is 10.6 Snow Leopard going to assist in providing the ability to have both a software RAID and also have redundancy?
If your video isn't full HD video editing with Final Cut Studio then leaving everything on the main drive is okay. Or if you aren't doing video every single waking moment of your professional life either SD or HD then you can leave everything on the main drive.
For organization, it may help putting all your content on an alternate drive though, then backing up that main drive with your content and the other with all the apps and OS software.
osx will make better use of lots of ram than 32-bit windows (never used 64-bit), which might or might not help (depending on the app as well). it will not change your drive performance.
this pdf-guide has good recommendations (pages 15, 16) for setups.
Wow, Localghost, thanks for the article (pdf) ! great info that I've been looking for .
The article indicates a performance boost by using 10K SATA for OS and Apps and image files , and a second 10K drive (perhaps ~150gb) dedicated for scratch.
Question: how do I change the 320gb drive that comes with the MacPro to 10k (from 7200) ?
The article indicates a performance boost by using 10K SATA for OS and Apps and image files , and a second 10K drive (perhaps ~150gb) dedicated for scratch.
Question: how do I change the 320gb drive that comes with the MacPro to 10k (from 7200) ?
The other interesting option for Photoshop high performance from the article is going with two pairs of drive in Raid0 for OS startup, apps and files. Could I do that by adding a second 7200rpm 320gb SATA drive after I get the Mac Pro , and using MacOS to create the Raid0 pair ??
The same document suggests using the faster (because its more dense) 750GB drives. And as was said, the 10k drives aren't as fast as the 1TB drives and most likely the 1.5TB that is out soon.
Yup, it was said a little while ago. You can strip (RAID 0) two fast drives and make them faster.
I do, and I don't get paid for a lot of the stuff I do. Most of it is for myself. Going out and taking a crap load of pictures. Or when my wife and myself go out to take pictures. We have amassed over 10K worth of pictures in a very little time period.
But then again, I have a couple of assignments where I have filled up my 2 8gig sticks and several 2 and 1 gig sticks.
I have a Mac Pro, and I don't think it is overkill (see sig). It works pretty darn good for what I need it to do and I don't find myself waiting very long to do what I need it to do.
My husband and I took over 9,200 photos (all RAW) in a three-week period this summer.
And then there was the rest of the summer!I wish I had a Mac Pro. Since I loaded all those photos into Aperture, the program has turned into a slug on my MacBook Pro.
Are they any good?
I remember training a few shooter students and they shoot just as many images simply by holding down the shutter button. Real waste of space and editing time.
I second what Digital Skunk said. 10k drives (= hardware feature you can't change) are only worh it if a) you don't have the space for 2x7200 drives or b) you want ultimate speed with 2x10 drives.
to get an idea what you might need and how to get there (or if you are bored at work ;-) ) also have a look at barefeats and xlr8yourmac.
Yeah, the vast majority of them are great, but these are what you might call technical photos. We go into museums that have Graeco-Roman sculpture and shoot every single object on exhibit, from multiple angles and with many detail shots. We also go to archaeological sites and shoot every important feature (lighting permitting). Our goal is to get images that (ideally) are suitable for academic publication, but that are at least very high quality teaching images.
Along the way we occasionally stop to smell the roses and take what we now call "daily thread shots", which are meant to be more artistic, purely for fun, and potentially something we might share on the Photo of the Day thread.
i understand where you are coming from, but these days you are rarely the only one with a dslr on any scene. the big agencies often send more than one pj, and on my last wedding "uncle bob" showed up with a 1dIII. having the perfect moment in focus AND nailing the exposure is what will get you your next commission. at least i am not able to verify the first one without a large display and the second one without aperture/cs etc.
spray and pray get's you nowhere, but skimping on exposures when your competition doesn't is a different story.