Hmm. I'd not done any performance testing on the mini and this last exchange made me curious. When I get curious ...
I opened Lightroom 4.3, selected 100 18 Mpixel M9 raw files, and started one export process to output them as full resolution, zip compressed, 8bit TIFF files. Half a minute later, I started a second export process to output the same set as full resolution, 85% quality JPEGs. The JPEG output caught up with and finished about 20 seconds before the TIFFs, indicating that size of the output file is likely the gating factor between the two formats in terms of throughput speed. Both exports were finished in a few seconds under 8 minutes, or about 4.8 seconds per JPEG and TIFF export file. The TIFFs totaled 2G exported data, the JPEGs 560M. For my needs, that's fast enough. :-) G On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Godfrey DiGiorgi <gdigio...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 10:28 AM, Larry Colen <l...@red4est.com> wrote: >> Which is why, now that I've gotten a paycheck, I'm starting to look for a >> good deal on a used 8-core mac pro for my photo processing machine. >> >> I've seen a few of them on craigslist for $1,000 -$1,400. I expect I'll >> need to add drives, memory, a second display card, a USB 3 card, and might >> need a second ethernet card. > > I dunno, Larry. I do my photography with a Mac mini quad-core 2.6GHz, > 16G RAM, 1T internal drive, and lots of external storage (12 Terabytes > at present) connected over FireWire 800 bus. My medium format film > scans run into several hundred Mbytes apiece in DNG format, the little > mini is quite responsive. 18-24 Mpixel raw files ... no sweat at all. > Would cost $1300 or so at retail, new with a three year extended > warranty. Takes up 1/10 the space (or less) on my desk and is utterly > quiet in operation, uses far less power. > > You can flip the 1T internal for a 250G or larger SSD from OWC for > more performance. > > What do you really need a Mac Pro 8-core for? My brother uses one of > those but he does real-time work (video/audio editing - it's his > business: http://www.headlinestudios.net/Headline_Studios.html) which > is orders of magnitude more demanding than still photography work. > > -- > Godfrey > godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
