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D300 NEF & Capture NX processing times (mine are slow, resource hog?)

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TheeBadOne

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I'm running a 2.4 Pentium 4 with 2 gigs of RAM, lots of hard drive space. CS3 runs quickly enough, as does Nikon Capture. When I use Capture NX to process my NEF files it takes what seems to me an unreasonably long time to process each change I make. Anyone else find Capture NX 1.3 to be a resource hog?
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Zoom zoom zoom
 
TheeBadOne said:
I'm running a 2.4 Pentium 4 with 2 gigs of RAM, lots of hard drive
space. CS3 runs quickly enough, as does Nikon Capture. When I use
Capture NX to process my NEF files it takes what seems to me an
unreasonably long time to process each change I make. Anyone else
find Capture NX 1.3 to be a resource hog?
Click to expand...
I am running a 2.4 GHz Core2Dual with 3.5 GB usuable RAM in Vista and it takes about 15 sec to process a D300 14bit NEF in CaptureNX, more if I had Active D-Lighting turned on. It is difinately slower than runing a D200 NEF file through it.

Mike

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http://www.pbase.com/mjmorrison/nikon_d300
http://www.pbase.com/mjmorrison/nikon_d200
http://www.foveon.com/gallery.php
http://www.pbase.com/mjmorrison/sigma_sd10
http://www.pbase.com/sigmadslr
 
Do you notice any difference in processing speed between low (ISO 200) and hi ISO (> 800) nef files?

Best, zz
TheeBadOne said:
I'm running a 2.4 Pentium 4 with 2 gigs of RAM, lots of hard drive
space. CS3 runs quickly enough, as does Nikon Capture. When I use
Capture NX to process my NEF files it takes what seems to me an
unreasonably long time to process each change I make. Anyone else
find Capture NX 1.3 to be a resource hog?
--
Zoom zoom zoom
Click to expand...
 
I just got the camera, so haven't done more than the basics. My current computer system runs quite well processing the NEF files from my D70, but the larger files from the D300 really slow my system down. Granted, it is a few years old, but hey, for everything else its just fine. Dang, hate to think I might need to get a newer system if I want to use NX as my primary NEF converter. I do like the results from NX, but hate the interface and speed. Anyone know if 1.2 was faster than the new 1.3?
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My computer is from 1999 and it takes 5-10 minutes to fully convert an image, once its converted changes only take a brief time. If I don't let it do its thing its likely to hang.
 
Yesterday I worked with NX 1.3 for the first time on D200 NEF files and 1.3 is noticeably slower than 1.2.
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Best regards
 
I guess now I'll have to look at what the differences are between 1.2 and 1.3 and see if I should go back to 1.2 for the performance gain.
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The only difference I know between 1.2 and 1.3 is that 1.3 can work with D3 and D300 files. 1.2 was the big update and 1.3 was released for the new cameras.
TheeBadOne said:
I guess now I'll have to look at what the differences are between 1.2
and 1.3 and see if I should go back to 1.2 for the performance gain.
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Zoom zoom zoom
Click to expand...
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Philip

 
I running a 3GHz Quad Core with a 10K RPM drive and 3.5GB usable memory. It uses all 4 cores and NX is still slow. It's a resource hog. Period.
 
AustinTed said:
I running a 3GHz Quad Core with a 10K RPM drive and 3.5GB usable
memory. It uses all 4 cores and NX is still slow. It's a resource
hog. Period.
Click to expand...
Rats. I guess it's "good new/bad news", won't have to fork out for a new computer yet, but will have to decide if I can live with the slowness of NX. I think I'll have to find a way to process another way for many shots, and use NX for the best shots.

--Zoom zoom zoom
 
TheeBadOne said:
AustinTed said:
I running a 3GHz Quad Core with a 10K RPM drive and 3.5GB usable
memory. It uses all 4 cores and NX is still slow. It's a resource
hog. Period.
Click to expand...
Rats. I guess it's "good new/bad news", won't have to fork out for a
new computer yet, but will have to decide if I can live with the
slowness of NX. I think I'll have to find a way to process another
way for many shots, and use NX for the best shots.

--Zoom zoom zoom
Click to expand...
Just for calibration. It might take me about 1 minute to open the NEF, do what I need to do, and then save the file. What is slow for me might be fast for someone else. If you have 500 pictures a minute each really adds up though.

Some people do ok with batch processing...get the first one right and then clone the settings on the 499 others. Some people will also just convert the RAW to JPEG in batch (or shoot RAW+JPEG) and only edit a pic when a raw adjustment is clearly needed. Still others might shoot 500 pics and keep only 10 in which case they can tweak to their heart's content.

The net is that it depends on what you want to do. There are ways to deal with it. But NX is too slow to do hand tweaking on large numbers of pictures on even the fastest computer if that's what you had in mind.
 
my D300 shots don't seem to take much more time than the D200 shots did. It's possible some of that is due to "under the hood" differences between NX 1.2 and NX 1.3.

Most functions happen fast enough but the time killer is D Lighting
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Byrne
 
Yep! My equipment has only 512Mb of Ram in a 1 and 1/2 GHZ P4 with SDRAM. I did FOUR good tiffs one day!!!!

I thought it was lack of RAM but you have 2GB. WE also need to find out what and why we have to put up with C++ redistributable and NkManager on our hard drives too. And why we MUST have Microsoft Network or NX doesnt run at all. All very suspicious.......keep your files offline.

I use it because I HAVE to. I do not have the possibility of running Photoshop plugins as my version is only 6.

I am however surprised as I reckoned what you have, should be easily enough. Easily. Its more than they demand. Never had same problem with Lightroom on trial with D200 NEFS. Not once. Its what La Rockwell rightly dismisses as buggy software., and I am going to need a hard copy of NX because when I installed their update on V.2 it wiped all my video drivers and put up shortcuts on my desktop to lots of other programs and Paint Shop Pro does NOT run as well with it there. I need to be able to rely on a CD that actually can be installed on an OFFLINE machine, but then Nikon know that, dont they......

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narayana
 
another thing you can do is to set your nef files to "Lossless compressed" in the menu:

Menu - NEF (RAW) recording - Type - Lossless compressed

so your NEF file only has 12MB against 20MB uncompressed

Capture NX works faster.

Kind regards
Roy
 
It IS a resource hog; thank-you Nikon for providing a free license, but unfortunately, I won't be a regular user because it is such a pig.. I've got two machines that I'll regularly do image processing on: 1) a 2.4 GHz Intel dual-core with 2 GB RAM and SATA-II drives. 2) a 2.8 GHz Dual Xeon (ie 4 cores) with 4 GB RAM, and Ultra SCSI (for the scratch/swap; the primary storage on this is actually the terabyte RAID NAS box).. Both are running XP Pro.

On both these boxes, which are blazingly fast for any other application, NX remains intolerably slow.. People have claimed that more memory makes a difference but I'm right up to the 4 GB limit, with fast processors, and the program is still a slug.. It's really a shame because there are things that it does exceedingly well, blowing Adobe out of the water; it's tolerable for processing a handful of photos, but if you have a few hundred, or even thousands of photos, it's unusable; Lightroom, with all its shortcomings, will remain my primary sortiing and image tweaking platform..
 
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