Nikon Capture 4.xx RAW converter

[nirofo]

Hi Stephen

What is the spec of your computer, for instance can you tell us what components it uses, motherboard, CPU, memory, hard drives etc. It may be there is a workround depending on your system. What operating system are you using, if it's Windows XP there are many and various tweaks which might improve the speed of operation.

Old doesn't necessarily mean you can't get good results, you may be creating your own bottlenecks by strangling your system with old drivers and software. I still have an old computer with an AT motherboard, a 500 mhz AMD CPU, 256mb of SDRam, 20Gb hardrive, running Windows 2000 Pro and Photoshop 7 which renders photographs very quickly, (20 - 30 seconds). My latest all singing and dancing computer with very fast CPU, 300Gb hardrive and 1.5Gb memory is not noticably quicker!

nirofo.

nirofo.

[Leif]

Originally Posted by robski

Rather than stabbing around in the dark if you can get the PC to display the task manager when you are running the program.

Example attached - PC has 512MB of which 40% is available.

All good advice. There is also performance monitor:

Start Menu -> Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Performance.

That can also be used to work out which resources are maxing out.

Leif

[Canis Vulpes]

Thanks chaps for the good information, here are some answers to questions.

Below are two shots of task manager with NC running the graph was taken when NC is converting to TIFF and passing to CS. I dont think I have a memory issue more disk as 300MB is VM.

Computer Spec
MSI motherboard K7N2 Delta, spec here http://www.msicomputer.co.uk/Product...3422&cat_id=77
Two Seagate Barracuda 120GB HDD's as PM and SM, OS and VM on PM whilst Nikon temp folder on SM.
AMD 2600+ Athlon XP CPU
Nvidia 64M graphics
XP pro SP2
Nikon Capture 4.40
PM is 85% free
SM is 20% free

Motherboard does support SATA.

What speed increase should I expect by utilising SATA disks?

[robski]

Stephen I have not had time to look at the data you have supplied yet I've just got home. But I've had another thought while driving home. Are you running any anti-virus software ? On software that is very disk active it can trigger the anti-virus software into overtime. If you do have it, try a simple test with it turned off and see if it makes any different. If it does then maybe the anit-virus can be configured not to scan the areas of disk that the raw software uses.

[Canis Vulpes]

Great thinking Rob,

Norton Anti-virus 2002 is installed

Unfortunately makes negligible difference turned off.

Forgot to mention VM and a few bits
VM set to 2500k initial size and 4096k as maximum from a previous speed increase attempt.

Processor scheduling and memory set as below.

[robski]

Originally Posted by Stephen Fox

What speed increase should I expect by utilising SATA disks?

The fact that it will on it's own controller will help ( are your two current drives on the same controller ? ). The disk speed will be about the same 7200 unless you can find a higher speed one. if you can get a drive with a 8Mb cache or higher will be better than the 2Mb cache your current drives have. I am not a PC guru my back ground is Sun Server machines. Where todays SCSI drives are 15000 rpm 16Mb cache disk access of 3 ms. compare to your drive of 7200 rpm 2Mb cache 8 ms access.

I suspect if you get a 15-20% increase your be lucky and then is it worth at least £50 for the new hardware.

The bottom line of this maybe that the program is not well written for memory management and possibily suffers from memory leaks. One my functions is to alpa and beta test software for correct operation, crashing, speed and memory usage and get the problems resolved with our programmers.

I can't understand why it's grabbed so much memory in the first place and then using disk when free RAM is available. Photoshop is good at grabbing the memory but this something else if you have only processed one file.

A simple Disk Speed test to try. In Photoshop create a new file 150cm x 150cm 16bit rgb and save it as an uncompressed tif. This should write a 100Mb file to disk. On my system which is a lower spec PC than yours it took 40 seconds. If this is quick on your PC the I suspect NC is paging in and out chunks for memory all the time.

Are there any setting is NC related to memory usage ect ?

Where can I download this software from and a test Raw file ? Maybe I'll try it on one of our dual xeon dell servers when I return to work on Friday.

[nirofo]

Hi Stephen

The system you're running should be more than adequate to render raw images at the fullest speed, the 2 hard drives you're using are among the fastest around, I doubt upgrading to SATA will make a noticeable difference. The only thing which springs to mind is you mention virtual memory is manually set. I'm fairly certain that Windows XP prefers to set it's own VM, it's much better at handling memory than previous windows operating systems. Try re-setting your system to allow windows to control VM. Another thing , you say your slave drive has only 20% free space and that your Nikon temp file is on this disk, you may find a dramatic speed increase if you free up a lot more space on this disk, or put your Nikon temp file on the master disk where you have more space!

nirofo.

[robski]

Originally Posted by nirofo

Hi Stephen

The system you're running should be more than adequate to render raw images at the fullest speed

nirofo.

Yes I agree - it does not make much sense.

Stephen did not come back to us on the disk fragmentation question. If the programs performs best with a contiguous block of disk for the VM and temp this could go some way to explain the problem.

[Canis Vulpes]

Over the weekend I shall move NC temp folder to primary master and let windows decide its own virtual memory and do some speed trails with primary master defragged. NC grabs approx 100MB or so of RAM when opened but when a NEF is opened within NC is bloats using more RAM and disk, slowly it builds as the file is opened and processed to a max of around 300MB.

I find AMD PC's noisier (sound) than Intel and as my study is next to my little boys room I am ordered by the BOSS to turn off that computer. I often use a wireless laptop for Internet access in the evening when young-one is asleep. Not to mention the compulsory use of i-tunes when image processing!

[nirofo]

Hi Stephen

Just one last thought, have you checked your bios settings lately, some motherboards are notorious for losing bios settings but will still run adequately for most operations. An operation like raw file rendering is hard work for the system when everything is ok, it would certainly slow your computer if bios settings were way off. I certainly think that if all else fails, before you go lashing large dosh on a new system, (the one you have is perfectly adequate), I would try re-booting your operating system and software. Make sure you have downloaded all the latest drivers for your hardware and backed up your files etc before you do.

Incidentally, the latest Intel CPU's draw more power run much hotter than the AMD CPU's, they require bigger heatsinks and fans and are just as noisy, they also require higher wattage power supplies to feed this extra power rquirement. To top that they are a lot more expensive and no longer the best CPU's on the block! AMD now rules! (for the time being that is?)

nirofo.