Nikon Capture 4.xx RAW converter
 

I have been really happy with the output quality of Nikon Capture 4.xx but its real slow. I have the latest version and it takes 2-5 minutes to apply noise reduction and a similar time to convert and pass to photoshop. At first I did not mind because the quality is high but the speed issue is putting me off as I can only work on one photo per hour or so...

Two questions:-

Can Nikon Capture be configured to run faster, hardware upgrade is out of the question.

What RAW converter, if any has a similar high quality output but with much faster operation.

Computer hardware is as follows:-
Athlon XP 2800+
XP Pro
1GB Ram

Stephen

Does the software have a recommended Hardware spec ?

Is there a lot of disk activity when it processes file ? It could be your disk drive is the limiting factor and a faster Drive would help a lot.

The Athlon is a very basic CPU and is OK for most programs. It maybe the program wants to use features in the higher spec CPUs which are missing in the Athlon and ends up using a long winded squence with commands available in the Athlon.

I know one of the frebie Canon raw converter won't run on my AMD PC at home but will on my Intel PC at work.

[quote=robski]Stephen

"The Athlon is a very basic CPU and is OK for most programs. It maybe the program wants to use features in the higher spec CPUs which are missing in the Athlon and ends up using a long winded squence with commands available in the Athlon."

I do not agree that the Athlon is a very basic CPU - I consider them to be equal if not better than the same speed Intel pentiums. AMD do make a basic CPU but this is a 'Duron' which is akin to the Intel Celerons.
I agree that the 2800 is not the speediest by todays standards but neither is the equivilent speed Pentium.
My last three PC's have all been Athlons and I have never had any performance problems (currently running a Athlon 3400 - 64bit CPU).

Nikon Capture takes around 5 mins per complex operation but Bibble is instant. The computer specification is higher than the minimum Nikon suggest and I am aware its known to be very slow.

I believe that a computer should be upgraded when it does not perform acceptably or has failed. Photoshop CS2 performs to my satisfaction but NC dos not.

If I can divert to question two by rephrasing it...

What RAW converter is renowned for quality output, similar to NC. I am thinking of trying another but appreciate the views of other members.

I have tried RAW shooter but did not like the way sharpness is added in the viewer without any control. Bibble I also have but find it complex, learning is not an issue but I found NC easier to use but slow, I payed for NC but trialled Bibble.

Have a look at RAW Shooter Premium. In addition to now being able to vary sharpening it has also got tools for Levels & Curves, Noise suppression, Saturation Hue & Vibrance, Croping, Rotating/Straightening. It also supports a side by side comparison of up to 4 RAW images to check for the best quality shot and a good system for sorting and batch processing.

I've also just timed a conversion to JPEG at 12 secs and my PC is an Athlon 2400 with 512 RAM! I can't compare it with NC as I've never used anything else but its worth a look.

It is now $99 +VAT but I think you can download a 15 day trial first.

http://www.pixmantec.com/

Which version of Photoshop are you running? Adobe Camera Raw is a free plugin for photoshop but not all versions of ACR will run with all versions of photoshop. Strangely enough, ACR V3.x doesn't work with CS, but does work with elements 3 or higher! I find it works very quickly with my Athlon 3200 and 1GB RAM.

Duncan.

Some more info here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html

I am not keen of the quality of ACR when compared with Nikon Capture. I have now found a way to dramatically increase processing speed.

NEVER use the multiviewer, it must load lots of images and hold in RAM strangling the core application. Instead view thumbnails in windows and drag one for processing into Capture. I mainly use the camera at airshows so each folder/session must hold approx 350 images so it was really bloating Capture. This way only one image is held in RAM, the one that is being processed.

Now noise reduction takes two SECONDS and transfer to photoshop around 90 seconds which is excellent compared to using the multiviewer.

Thanks for that Stephen, a bit worried on my old system if I was to move up to 4.xx.

I am currently on 3.5 and do not have multiviewer so speed has not really been the same issue as for you.

From your previous thread ' 2/3rds difference between RAW convertors ' . I was a bit concerned about how other converters might affect colour, and as Nikon Capture does not influence them I wanted to stay with the product. From the histograms in that post I was sure Bibble ( a well known converter ) would have some influence.

Don

The most obvious speed gain can be obtained by doubling your RAM. You should notice an improvement even adding 512MB.

The AMD processors are supposed to be very good indeed.

Unfortunately NC is slow, even on my 3GHz Pentium with 1.5 GB RAM. Disk speed probably also makes a difference, so maybe getting a SATA disk (if your motherboard allows) and using it for the scratch file can help, though I am guessing here.

There is a free RAW converter, being pushed by Andy Rouse, which is well respected. You could always give it a try. Unfortunately I like NC due to the near perfect CA removal and quality RAW conversion.

Leif

I Guess if the drive light come on during processing will give you the clue.

Using the newfound speed improvement procedure, the image 'loads' much faster, 1 Second. NC then performs 'processing' which is as fast until 50% complete then slows to 25% of the first 50%. I am sure this is due to RAM. I have three slots for memory and currently occupied are two slots with 512MB in each. If I can place a 1GB stick in the free slot then great otherwise I can only upgrade RAM to 1.5GB.

As I am getting older I am losing interest in computers and I am sure if I can mix memory capacities.

The drive light is always on and I have moved the Nikon Capture temporary folder to a free drive on its own IDE channel for maximum speed. Windows scratch pad (Virtual Memory) disk is on the windows drive separate from NC again I figured for max access speed.

Sticking a 1gb stick of ram in the spare slot might not be such a good idea, you may find it slows down your computer even more, that's if it works at all! I would fill your spare slot with a 512 mb stick only, or renew the lot with 3 sticks of 1 gb ram, (costly!)

If your drive light is constantly on then I think sticking in the extra memory probably won't make that much difference, I think you may need to look at a bigger drive or remove some of the programs, files, pictures etc that hard drives become cluttered with. A complete re-format and re-intall of your operating system and programs might be an even better bet! (don't forget to backup your files and pictures etc, if you go down this road).

nirofo.

Have you tried Disk defragmentation ?
How full is the disk ? Disk I/O performance tends to drop off when over 80% full.
The other thing to do is lookup (google) the tech spec of your disk drive(s), Spindle speed, cache memory and head access times. On a budget PC the disks tend to be lower performance spec than the top end machines. This is where SCSI drives have the advantage because their more complex controller can handle multiple read/write sequences. You maybe able to replace the IDE drive with a higher spec version without too much extra expense.

A 7200 rpm drive compared to a 10,000 rpm drive is 25% slower.

Also if you do a Ctrl + Alt + Del and then click on the task manager button. You need to get screen shots of the performance and processes tabs whilst the machine is being trashed these should indicate if you are infact running short of RAM.

Some programs memory map files rather than pull a big file into physical memory but this requires a good disk sub system speed to give good performance.

It maybe this program was designed to use server based hardware rather than a desktop machine.

A new SCSI hard drive may well be ok for a MAC, but a PC would require a SCSI driver card, special leads, new drivers, and they are difficult to set up on a PC if you are not familiar with them! Oh yes and they are expensive, especially the big capacity drives. A typical 300 Gb Serial ATA hard drive will cost approx £70 inc, a 146 Gb SCSI drive will set you back approx £260, and that's just for the drive.

nirofo.

Yes SATA is the route I would take were I to upgrade the disk for the reasons you give.

I doubt adding 1GB RAM would slow the system. I have 1GB + 512 MB and that was much faster than 2 x 512 MB. In the old days you had to match memory as it was in paired banks. I think DDR2 as used in Dells also needs to be in matching pairs, but if you have 3 slots, then it sounds like you do not need to match.

Leif

That's why I did not suggest a SCSI drive because I know Stephen wants a cheap fix. Maybe a faster IDE drive will help if his hardware does not support SATA. The thing is we need to find out what resource the program is struggling to get. Is it purely RAM or slow disks ? if he looks at the performance data in the task manager it will show if all the physical RAM has been used.

Absolutely,

A cheap fix is on the cards. I realise the computer is now considered old and I do not feel it economical purchasing items when I will probably change the computer entirely shortly after new Windows OS is available.

I shall add RAM in due course but purchasing a SATA drive sounds good as I could use it in the new system as photographing in RAW permanently uses lots of HDD space, 10MB each compressed NEF.

I talked to the guys at the local computer shop and they warn of timing issues when populating all three memory slots. They suggest purchasing a 1GB stick and if it does not work then remove the two 512MB and be left with the new 1GB. Sales scam I know but I could e-bay the 512's and put toward another 1GB from the same source thus matching timing peramaters.

I need to check if the motherboard is compatible with SATA.

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.

Glad the task manager was mentioned. I use it all the time. NC has no progress indicator and noise reduction used to kill the computer for ages - rendered it totally useless. I use task manager to see when noise reduction is finished and then transfer to CS. Processor is often 100% during this process and memory around 50% or so, as I recall.

I'll take a capture later and let you chaps see what you think.

From what you have just said sounds more like disk than RAM.

Whilst you in that area also click on the processes tab. Most of the columns are hidden. View > select columns menu will reveal extra data. displaying Peak Mem, VM Mem, I/O Reads and I/O writes would be useful to see too.

Another area of setting maybe useful to know. right click on my computer. Select properties from list
then click on the advanced tab
then click on performance options

what is the system optimized for ? Application or Background
How is your virtual memory setup ?

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.

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

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?

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.

Great thinking Rob,

Norton Anti-virus 2002 is installed :o

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

This afternoon I did some photography and processed a NEF in NC beforehand I allowed windows to manage VM and moved NC temp file to primary master which did not require defragging. I dragged an image from windows thumbnail into NC and did seem a bit faster. Its hard to tell but operations seem around 10% faster but conversion to TIFF and pass to CS took 2.5 minutes. Every image is different and some have been taking 90 seconds or so. A big leap found from not using NC's multiviewer. The gong shot (posted in gallery today) took 2.5 minutes and in that time I monitored task manager and found:-

Processor totally max'ed out at 100%
Little change in RAM and VM usage
NO to minimal disk usage

I believe that NC's conversion algorithm is very processor dependent and I think my biggest speed improvement will come by replacing or overclocking my existing CPU. The fastest CPU my motherboard will accept is an AMD 3200+ Barton. I believe should provide 25-30% gain but cost approx £125.

One thing I am tempted to try is having no VM page file forcing NC to use RAM and overclocking my CPU to 2800+ to provide 10% improvement.

I set no VM once in windows 98 and goosed the computer so I am a little nervous doing this again but logic is tempting me.

Don't you need high performance memory to overclock?

I once tried tweaking my memory settings in BIOS to improve performance but the PC became unstable.

Hi Stephen

Changing your CPU will make little if any difference to the rendering speed, your processor already works far faster than the software you're using requires, overclocking will only stir up more problems! You have a bottleneck somewhere, something is tying up your computers access to memory, you may have one or more programs trying to use the same facilities at the same time. Some programs are great at changing files needed by others to run properly. either way it sounds as though your system is totally messed up and requires a re-boot to flush out the crap (if you pardon the expression). As I said previously, Win XP prefers to handle it's own vm, I doubt changing this will make any difference. I would be loathe to do anything radical at this stage, overclocking will solve nothing and buying new equipment is really the last resort, there are several things you can still try. First of all I would try resetting the bios, don't set it too agressively, maximum speed settings are sometimes counter productive and are only really for gamers anyway! After re-setting the bios do a complete 'C' drive reformat and re-boot Win XP, as I said earlier, make sure you have all the latest drivers for your hardware and have backed up all your files etc. I think this is the only way to go.

Incidentally, have you tried Phase One Capture One v3.7 - ( PM me! ).

nirofo.

I agree don't overclock you could corrupt data on the disk and lose it forever.

I am not convinced that it is your OS is screwed up because from what you have said it is the only program that is slow. It would be interesting to see if this runs slow on an intel cpu. It could be using a function call that is not very efficient on the AMD. My son who is a gamer says the AMD is tweaked to perform better with functions calls used by games programs.

I'll see if I can download it and run on an intel box at work on monday.

Hi robski

I use an Athlon 2200XP CPU and 1gb (2x512mb) standard memory in the computer I use for graphics and it handles everything I throw at it no problem at all. I've used AMD CPU's for years running all sorts of graphics programs etc., and I've never had a problem that I didn't cause myself! If an Intel CPU is faster on graphics, then I suggest that it is so marginal in normal computer use as to be insignificant. Bear in mind that nearly all the CPU tests are conducted with games in mind, this is a completely different ball game as most games are operating in 3D. If you want a significant improvement in 2D graphics then I suggest a MAC with a top spec 2D graphics card is more appropriate.

nirofo.

Windows OS is not screwed up. I don't do porn, peer-to-peer file sharing or visit 'free' sites. I am very careful what I install and download, the snap shot of processes in task manager should show the computer is quite clean and efficient. As the processor is 100% occupied during RAW - TIFF conversion then a faster processor with more operations per second should reduce conversion time.

Rob, I appreciate you spending time to look at this situation but if you download NC, it will need several 'upgrades' to get to NC4.4. I purchased NC4.1 which took an amazing 40 MINUTES to convert and screwed the PC during this time. I used it once and forgot about it. I realised 4.2 was available by upgrade and offered more efficient processing and took 5-7 minutes to convert and we became friends. 4.3 fixed problems with d-lighting (Nikons shadow recovery) and 4.4 has D200 support. I think these upgrades need a full licenced copy in order to install.

I read that the MAC version of NC is a bigger dog than the x86 version!

Through my job I visited a large portrait franchise company and had free access to roam (I work in CCTV, Security). Equipment being used was digital backs to medium format cameras (40Mpx) Capture one and Lacie computer equipment and Sony Triniton CRT monitors. The studio has just opened and is a testament to CRT and the Trinitron.

I am interested in comparing Capture One with NC.

I think you miss my point nirofo, I am not saying that intel is generally better at graphics than AMD. Nor I am I trying to slag off AMD. I am using an AMD myself at home.

The point I am trying to make is that there are hardware differences between the 2 processors otherwise AMD and Intel would in court everyday slaging it out over copyright issues. These differences will mean that each instruction will take a different number of steps to achive the same thing. If you look at the core design in each case they use different methods of instruction and data cachcing, pipelining and a different sequence of low level instruction to perform some of the higher level functions. In all it will be swings and round abouts when things average out. It maybe that NC is making a function call that is much more efficient on one processor than the other.

Considering that Nikon is not a Software company there expertise will not be in producing efficient and optimised code. My belief is that this program has not been optimised for speed. Which is a point I made earlier. We can only come to this understanding by discounting other factors as we have been slowing doing by getting Stephen to do various tests. The only thing outstanding is that we have not had it confirmed that it also runs slow on an Intel.

My background is electronic, I started in analogue with radio and my introduction into digital was learning how to machine code program a Z80 8 bit processor back in the 80's. I then did some assembly, basic, pascal and C programming. Recently I have done some java programming for a project at work. I also have to get my head around the compliler's operation, C++ and multithread programming when trying to find a bug in our software to a level where the programmer has a pretty good idea which block of code to look at.

I sounds like a no go then Stephen. Shame. If it had been a free download and a five minute job I'd be asking you for a test RAW file.

I would not re-install XP simply because it is such a pain to re-install all the other gubbins including Windows XP SP2.

Performance manager should help identify the operation that is taking the time. It is certainly not rendering that is the issue. The calculations might be, since NC seems to use the equivalent of layers i.e. each filter such as D-Light and Unsharp mask is applied independently and hence NC probably has a huge memory requirement. Anyway performance manager will identify the bottleneck. (At work our product thrashes after 40 minutes use, and PM allowed us to track this down to the TCPIP access.)

Leif