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Mac Book Air

Jeffg53

Member
Phocus is really demanding on graphics power. I think that the new Air only has 256MB so it would be very slow. On my 3 year old 15" MBP with 256MB graphics it is close to useless. 512MB seems to be the point where it starts to perform.
 

jotloob

Subscriber Member
MAC BOOK AIR ? ? ?

A beautiful toy for those who already have everything .
Thats about all which comes into my mind .
 

ptomsu

Workshop Member
Has anyone tried running Phocus or C1 on the new Macbook air? Does it pack enough power to process big files?
Would love to se a MB Air which can handle SW like Phocus, I really doubt. Run it on my MBPro 1 year old with 4G RAM and it is not really fast.

Peter

PS: Woody, I thought you sold all your Hasselblad and M9 gear for the S2? Did this change already again ;)
 

Terry

New member
Would love to se a MB Air which can handle SW like Phocus, I really doubt. Run it on my MBPro 1 year old with 4G RAM and it is not really fast.

Peter

PS: Woody, I thought you sold all your Hasselblad and M9 gear for the S2? Did this change already again ;)
Perhaps instead of increasingly needing hardware to solve for it perhaps the hope would be that the engineers and software developers would work on making the software more efficient :rolleyes:.
 

Woody Campbell

Workshop Member
Would love to se a MB Air which can handle SW like Phocus, I really doubt. Run it on my MBPro 1 year old with 4G RAM and it is not really fast.

Peter

PS: Woody, I thought you sold all your Hasselblad and M9 gear for the S2? Did this change already again ;)
Peter - Nope. A year ago I considered all the options including S2 and Phase One, but decided to stick with M9 and Hasselblad. I've had an H4D-60 on order under H's exchange program since December last year - Foto Care says there is finally one with my name on it in the US on its way here.
 

Woody Campbell

Workshop Member
Since I need to run Phocus the video memory issue is a show stopper for me on the macbook air. The reason for starting this thread is that my MF kit has grown to backbreaking weight so I'm looking for other places to shave pounds.
 

jonoslack

Active member
Would love to se a MB Air which can handle SW like Phocus, I really doubt. Run it on my MBPro 1 year old with 4G RAM and it is not really fast.

Peter
HI Peter
I don't know which MBP you have, but you might be surprised, in my experience the fact of the Flash HD makes more difference than the slower processer. Of course, I'm using Aperture, not Phocus, but Aperture is a bit of a beast, and my library is well over 50,000 images. I find myself using the MBP with it a lot because it's so convenient, and with the screen realestate of a 15"MBP it knocks my 9 month old 13"MBP into a cocked hat (Emma's cocked hat to be precise :ROTFL:)

Certainly worth trying one out, but I think you DO need it to be fully loaded.
 
No experience with C1 or Phocus, but I did a little test with one at the Apple store by exporting raw files (Canon and Aptus) to a 1200p jpeg. Since I have no idea how to use Aperture it seemed like a fair comparison. What I found was that across the board, a 17" 2.8g i7 with 4g ram was a little less than half the speed (i.e. took twice as long) as a Mac Pro 2.8 Quad Core with 3g of ram. In the test of converting about 20 Aptus 22MP files to jpegs, the Macbook Air (13", maxed configuration) was about half the speed of the Macbook Pro or a bit slower (1/4 the speed of the Mac Pro with no ram).

On the Aptus files, the Mac Pro took about 1 min, the Macbook Pro was a bit over 2 min and the Macbook Air was a little shy of 5 min. I didn't run the test of converting 100 5DII files on the Air because I ran out of patience.

Whether you think this test is useful or valid is entirely up to you. All these machines and files can be found at any Apple store, try it yourself and see what you think.

To be honest, it didn't really answer any questions for me, but I was really surprised how much faster the Mac Pro was, even with only 3g of ram. If the Macbook Air had USB 3 (for external drives) I would probably buy one and a Mac Pro. Right now I think I am going to hold out and see whether the Sandbridge chips show up in Macbook Pros early next year.

If you have not played with a new Macbook Air, you really should. It is an impressive machine for what it is and already I have seen more of them in the wild than I ever saw of the original Airs.

I have a big trip scheduled for Belize next year and I think in a perfect world I would shoot it with a Leica M9, 4x5 film and a 13" Macbook Air.
 

SergeiR

New member
MAC BOOK AIR ? ? ?

A beautiful toy for those who already have everything .
Thats about all which comes into my mind .
Not travellin' much, are you? :) I am doing transatlantic/transpacific hops every couple months, sometime more often, and do domestic flying/driving a lot. Air is fairly good replacement for most of stuff in the field, when you dont need tethering, and need to get results out fast, and trying to reduce some weight.
 

symbolphoto

New member
I cannot contribute to the AIR discussion but i will say that my i7 17" MBP, with 512MB VRAM 8GBRAM, and SSD is quite fast for a laptop. I mean sure - my desktop will always be faster. But as far as laptops go, it's totally acceptable.

I open Phocus 2.5 up, shoot, it's on the laptop in just a few seconds. I import, manipulate and export no problems.
 

KeithL

Well-known member
OK, the Mac Book Air can't cut the mustard, but what can? Is there anything out there that's really compact and really light, can run Phocus and can cut the mustard?
 

jonoslack

Active member
OK, the Mac Book Air can't cut the mustard, but what can? Is there anything out there that's really compact and really light, can run Phocus and can cut the mustard?
Why are you sure that it can't cut the mustard? I rather felt that the opposite had been suggested.
 

jonoslack

Active member
Power or Weight/Size

pick one :) MBP's really aren't that big. Have you held one?
HI There
I have a 17"MBP with 8gb RAM and an SSD, and it's certainly faster than the 13MBA, but it's not that much faster - certainly not so much faster that I'm noticing it in normal work with Aperture / VMware etc. (hungry programs all).
 

Woody Campbell

Workshop Member
Phocus has its own performance issue - as pointed out above Phocus's performance is sensitive to the amount of video memory because it offloads a portion of the processing to the video card. If you don't have at least 512 mb video memory it moves like a snail. I had to upgrade the video card on my desktop for Phocus.
 

dougpeterson

Workshop Member
To be honest, it didn't really answer any questions for me, but I was really surprised how much faster the Mac Pro was, even with only 3g of ram. If the Macbook Air had USB 3 (for external drives) I would probably buy one and a Mac Pro. Right now I think I am going to hold out and see whether the Sandbridge chips show up in Macbook Pros early next year.
I can speak from personal experience that Capture One and Aperture scale nearly linearly across multiple cores when processing JPGs and close to linear when processing TIFFs. So an 8 core mac will go nearly 2 times faster than a 4 core iMac or 4 times faster than a 2-core MacBookPro. Play generously with those numbers as you change ram/disk-speed/cpu-clock-speed, but that's the general idea.

An informed user on LL said last month that Phocus also makes good use of multiple cores.

Doug Peterson (e-mail Me)
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Jeffg53

Member
OK, the Mac Book Air can't cut the mustard, but what can? Is there anything out there that's really compact and really light, can run Phocus and can cut the mustard?
I'm using a 15" MBP with 512MB video memory, 8Gb memory and a 7200RPM disk. It's ok for me when travelling but I don't shoot tethered so can't speak to that. I do get to spend time watching the little wheel spin as I move around an image at 100%. So I guess that your mustard variety would be a deciding factor. Do you have a friendly Mac shop handy?
 
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