PEF files and iMac OS X

When processing RAW PEF, I typically I use C1pro on my PC based XP system. Occasionally, i will use my iMac G5, because the monitor has better resolution and more accurate color. I'm noticing a few quirks. If I shoot jpeg, iPhoto and uploading, in general are trouble free. Since i know that the OS X system and iPhoto in general do not support PEF, I NEVER try to upload into iPhoto, data from a card that is purely PEF, or even mixed PEF and jpeg. What happens in most cases, is that the computer will just hang.

does anyone have trouble with uploading a PEF onto their MAC hard drive. Not opening or previewing, but simply just uplaoding or backing up to a Mac hard drive?? I have the pentax 2.1 photo browser and it often hangs when attempting to catalog or view my PEF files. This never happens on my PC based system. Is the 2.1 version of photo browser written for Pre OS X??

thanks for any suggestions!
--
life is too short, surf waves, own a convertible, and marry for love!

I never have a problem with the PEF files.

Photo Browser often hangs or quits unexpectedly on my Mac but I don't use it anyway. I turned off the automatic starting of Photo Browser whenever my camera is connected and I download to a new folder and just drag the folder to Silkypix, Photoreviewer or Graphic Converter.

mark dimo said:

When processing RAW PEF, I typically I use C1pro on my PC based XP
system. Occasionally, i will use my iMac G5, because the monitor
has better resolution and more accurate color. I'm noticing a few
quirks. If I shoot jpeg, iPhoto and uploading, in general are
trouble free. Since i know that the OS X system and iPhoto in
general do not support PEF, I NEVER try to upload into iPhoto,
data from a card that is purely PEF, or even mixed PEF and jpeg.
What happens in most cases, is that the computer will just hang.

does anyone have trouble with uploading a PEF onto their MAC hard
drive. Not opening or previewing, but simply just uplaoding or
backing up to a Mac hard drive?? I have the pentax 2.1 photo
browser and it often hangs when attempting to catalog or view my
PEF files. This never happens on my PC based system. Is the 2.1
version of photo browser written for Pre OS X??

thanks for any suggestions!

Click to expand...

I don't have the answer to all of your questions, but I have no problems transferring pix (RAW or JPG) to my Mac, which is running OSX 10.3.5. I use a SanDisk card reader.

I have the latest version of Photo Browser (they just released an update last week), tho previous versions behaved similarly. It's slow (5-year-old PPC Dual 500 MHz), and works for awhile (10-15 minutes) and then crashes. Tried to no avail to fix.

I don't know what Photo Browser is written for, but it's clearly junk software as far as the Mac goes. I'm hoping Pentax will remedy this with the release of the new camera.

You might want to check out iView Media Pro for cataloging and viewing your pix. It's made for Mac and therefore much more stable.
Another issue might be RAM. Obviously, the more the better.
--
Joe G.
'The universe is wider than our views of it.'
-- Henry David Thoreau

how do you disable the auto upload into the iphoto browser, ive been searching the preferences but cant find a way to disable it.

thanks
--
life is too short, surf waves, own a convertible, and marry for love!

I am not using iPhoto any more, after shooting with RAW format. At this moment, software from APPLE would not support PENTAX RAW image files. Even if you convert RAW-PEF files into TIF, the APPLE-Preview can not display the tiff images properly.

Adobe Bridge can browse PENTAX RAW images. Bridge has a nice feature that can brwose image files with thumbnails in different sizes. The RAW thumbnail images in Bridge are "Auto" adjusted like in Photoshop. Plus, it also shows info of each image file in a sub-frame.



The slider at the bottom lets you change the size of thumbnail images.

)

In your applications folder, open a program called Image Capture. In preferences, under "general" you will see a drop box that allows you to open any program you want or no program when a camera is connected.

--
life is too short, surf waves, own a convertible, and marry for love!

I've had no problem with PEF files on my mac until recently. (I just use the finder to copy from the card reader & use Bridge / ACR / PS CS2 for processing.) A couple of weeks ago, I bought a 2G SD card for my DS. Somehow, my mac (800MHz G4 - OS X 10.3.9) doesn't like the files beyond the 1G boundary. Well, more specifically, neither Bridge, CS2, or the latest DNG converter can read the files after a certain count (roughly after the 1st 95 PEFs - I haven't dug into the details of the problem too much yet). RSP on my Win XP laptop reads these files just fine. In fact, if I download from the card to the laptop, copy the PEF files from the laptop to a keychain flash drive, then copy them onto the mac, they are fine. So what the (bleep) is going on? Any ideas folks?
-Mark

hi mark,

thanks for posting. along those lines, i experience similar problems in regards to quantity. If it is just ttransferring a small number of files, usually it works without a hitch. however, when i transfer 1GB worth, from a card, it will ultimately hang and fail to transfer. it seems so unstable, as if it attempts to transfer more than it can handle it corrupts itself. I dont know why this happens, but in a PC environment, I can transfer fast and without problems.

any thoughts anyone?

mark
--
life is too short, surf waves, own a convertible, and marry for love!

Now that's a frustrating problem and I wish I had a definitive solution. Have you repaired your permissions?

Perhaps it is the PhotoBrowser application that cannot handle it--I've never used it. Or iPhoto if you are trying to transfer lots of jpegs into it. I quit iPhoto last year for iView Media Pro as it handles larger volumes of media better, though the iPhoto interface is still the best.

I use a USB2 card reader and upload PEF packed 1G SD cards into my storage repository on an external firewire drive. Then I use Bridge to preview and delete and then move the remains into iView. I am running OSX 10.2.8 in an older G4 with a juiced CPU at about 1.1 MHz.

Time for a new G5 is approaching for me--three days after the Intel PowerMacs are announced I'm planning to purchase the top of the line PowerPc G5 which should be a bit less pricey by then.

SWEngineer said:

.. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a 2G SD
card for my DS. Somehow, my mac (800MHz G4 - OS X 10.3.9) doesn't
like the files beyond the 1G boundary. Well, more specifically,
neither Bridge, CS2, or the latest DNG converter can read the files
after a certain count (roughly after the 1st 95 PEFs - I haven't
dug into the details of the problem too much yet).

Click to expand...

This is most likely a problem with the card reader's ability to read FAT32 directory structures. What card reader are you using?

I use 1G and 2G CF and SD cards in the Pentax DS and Sony R1. The card reader I use is a Belkin 8-in-1 USB 2.0 model, about $28 at Micro Center near me. I upload hundreds of PEF and SRF files every week from card reader to Mac OS X v10.4.5 with not a single hitch.

Godfrey

iPhoto's latest version, from the iLife '06 package, is better than previous versions but I only rarely use it. iView Media Pro does a much better job for me as a cataloger since I capture about 99.9% of the time in RAW format. My systems run Mac OS X v10.4.5.

Here's the workflow abstract:

PEF and SRF to RAW Download folder.
DNG Convert to working folder.
Open with Bridge for sorting, metadata editing.
Archive catalog with iView Media Pro.
Backup to archive storage.

I only installed the Pentax software once to see how bad it was. It was terrible and I removed it from my system immediately thereafter.

Godfrey

What version of X are you running? I have panter edition 10.3.9. No problems with the Pentax browser...
--

Fly an Eclipse 500-- Visit Jet's Flickr Page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jetseteclipse

Godfrey said:

SWEngineer said:

.. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a 2G SD
card for my DS. Somehow, my mac (800MHz G4 - OS X 10.3.9) doesn't
like the files beyond the 1G boundary. Well, more specifically,
neither Bridge, CS2, or the latest DNG converter can read the files
after a certain count (roughly after the 1st 95 PEFs - I haven't
dug into the details of the problem too much yet).

Click to expand...

This is most likely a problem with the card reader's ability to
read FAT32 directory structures. What card reader are you using?

I use 1G and 2G CF and SD cards in the Pentax DS and Sony R1. The
card reader I use is a Belkin 8-in-1 USB 2.0 model, about $28 at
Micro Center near me. I upload hundreds of PEF and SRF files every
week from card reader to Mac OS X v10.4.5 with not a single hitch.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice, Godfrey. I did a bit more snooping around today. The bad files are definitely messed up. I opened & compared to good using TextEdit. Good files have an obvious header w/ Pentax DS & firmware version. Bad files have no such header. Good files have many lines with just a few (visible) characters while bad files have very few or no such lines. Oddly, the file sizes are dead matched to the byte level using GetInfo. (I'm comparing good & bad of the same IMGP file - bad directly copied from the card reader to the mac, good copy via my WinXP laptop & keychain flash drive).

I guess it could be the card reader, but my Win XP laptop reads all the files without problems. I had no trouble using the card reader with my original 1G card or with the xD cards the rest of my family uses.

I'm quite sure I only have problem reading files that "live" in the 2nd GB space. I've had 2 failures. The first time, the 1st 95 files were ok, the remaining 40 or so all failed to read in DNG converter. The second time, the 1st 97 files were ok, and the remaining 8 files all failed. The few times I've had less than 90 files on the 2G card, they all copied over to the mac and worked fine.

I guess it's cheap enough to try a new card reader. Mine is some no-name (CE??) 8-in-1 USB2.0 type made in Taiwan. I would guess the Belkin isn't much different & likely uses essentially the same chips if not identical ones.

Still, it's a very odd problem. Maybe it's something to do with my iMac (being older) only having USB1.0? My WinXP laptop is USB 2.0. My wife has newer iBook with USB2.0. I guess I'll try copying from the card reader to her computer before I try a new card reader. I'll report again once I have more info.
-Mark

SWEngineer said:

... The bad files are definitely messed up. ...
I guess it could be the card reader, but my Win XP laptop reads all
the files without problems. ...

Click to expand...

For whatever reason, your tests demonstrate that the card reader definitely has problems with Mac OS X v10.3.9. I've used the Belkin reader with a PB G3 (year 2000 vintage) USB 1.1 and 10.3.9 when I was still running that version of the OS, but that was a year ago now and I can't replicate a test on it with a 2G card because I've upgraded that laptop to 10.4.5 now.

SWEngineer said:

I guess it's cheap enough to try a new card reader. ...

Click to expand...

Yes. A good reader is only $25 these days.

SWEngineer said:

Still, it's a very odd problem. Maybe it's something to do with my
iMac (being older) only having USB1.0? My WinXP laptop is USB 2.0.
My wife has newer iBook with USB2.0. I guess I'll try copying from
the card reader to her computer before I try a new card reader.

Click to expand...

That's a useful test. I'll be interested to hear what happens. Have you installed all system updates and any firmware updates for that iBook?

I have to applaud your patience in using USB 1.1 for a 2G storage card! I couldn't deal with download time using a 1G card on that slow a connection, so I turned to using a FireWire CF card reader and an SD-> CF adapter for my Pentax DS cards. It's FAR faster (about 40x faster ... a 1G card downloads in 2 minutes).

Godfrey

This is typical of a bad card reader. My partner lost a lot of her images on what she thought was a bad card, but after three bad cards in a row with random errors on some of the files, we tried my reader and it read them perfectly on her (shudder) Windows machine.

It's not the Mac. It's the reader.

i figured it may be the card reader, which brands do you guys use?

--
life is too short, surf waves, own a convertible, and marry for love!

mark dimo said:

i figured it may be the card reader, which brands do you guys use?

Click to expand...

Running Mac OS X exclusively since 2001...

I have a Belkin 8-in-1 USB 2.0 reader that does an excellent job with everything I've thrown into it. I also have a Lexar CF FireWire card reader and a Sony MSAC-US2 USB 2.0 Memory Stick PRO card reader, both of which work very well.

I'd suggest going with any reader that has a known brand name ... Lexar, Sandisk, Belkin, etc. all make good products.

The ones I've heard the most problems with are the Dazzle readers. Stay away from them.

Godfrey

hi godfrey,

thanks for the advice, the problem was in fact, my card reader. I was using a generic, non-name barnd CF reader. Today, i went out and bought a Sandisk CF card reader and not only is it worry free, it is much faster. I should have thought of that earlier, but i never clued it to be the card reader, because it never had a problem on a PC system. I'm assuming it was optimized for a PC platform, nonetheless, Im happy i solved my dilemma!

thanks all!
mark
--
life is too short, surf waves, own a convertible, and marry for love!

Good to hear it.

I doubt that the old one was optimized for anything, but it probably was never tested on Mac OS X at all.

Most of the USB devices that fail have poor USB firmware, and Windows is somewhat tolerant of their failings. Mac OS X implements USB protocols pretty rigorously so more of the marginal devices fail to operate properly.

Godfrey