Raw workflow - Mac

Started by LGphotographyy, January 13, 2014, 04:49:53 PM

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LGphotographyy

I have been doing raw video for a month or two now. I was looking through the forum and u couldn't really find the answer to my question, does anyone have any accessories or hardware they use to improve their workflow. I have a slowish computer, is there anything that can help it work a bit faster? I can't upgrade my ram, but if I edit from my external instead of my computers hard drive will it change anything?

Malcolm Debono

Having an external drive definitely helps. One of the most cost-efficient storage solution which still gives good speeds is getting a USB3 dock and using 7200rpm drives.

What kind of workflow are you using? Are you using any particular programs (Resolve, AE..)? Since you mentioned that you're using a slow computer, you should definitely look into integrating proxy footage in your workflow which should help performance-wise during editing (it won't affect rendering performance though since you'll need to reconnect original media).
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dmilligan

You're going to have to be a lot more specific than "slowish computer" if you want any help. What computer exactly (detailed specs please)? What kind of external HD? What software/workflow are you using? What version of the OS? What part of the workflow seems "slow"?

LGphotographyy


Quote from: dmilligan on January 13, 2014, 05:24:40 PM
You're going to have to be a lot more specific than "slowish computer" if you want any help. What computer exactly (detailed specs please)? What kind of external HD? What software/workflow are you using? What version of the OS? What part of the workflow seems "slow"?


I have a 2012 MacBook Pro. Icore 7 with 8 GB ram. I just wonder if there is a faster way to render the raw files on the computer. I use all adobe software so I use AE for rendering and color grading.

dmilligan

ACR is very slow, but it does a great job (it wasn't really intended for video, so Adobe hasn't done much to improve the speed, but things are changing and perhaps GPU acceleration for ACR is on the horizon). I think that is probably your bottleneck, so using different or faster media isn't going to help you any, as the disk IO is likely very small amount of time compared to demosaicing and the other things ACR does. Also I assume that your MBP has an SSD? If so, then using an external HDD is going to be way slower for disk heavy operations, though you probably wont see much of a difference for computation heavy operations like demosaicing and transcoding.

Like Malcom suggests proxies will help a lot, you could use something other than ACR to generate your proxies a lot faster, something with GPU acceleration like Resolve (there's a free version), or you could drop ACR altogether in favor of GPU accelerated software (assuming you have a good enough graphics card).

LGphotographyy

Very well said, thank you for your help!