Concerns about Using Aperature

Question

My wife is a professional photographer. I provide her technical support. We use a competitive image database product today. We are both curious about Aperature. But, I have some concerns about how it will work for us.
These concerns arise first from the fact that Aperature, like iPhoto, uses a single library to manage all of its images. Our current tool lets us save image info into separate database files.
The benefits to these separate files are signficant. The first, is that it frees her from editing the shots from every shoot in the database. For, the database is a reference tool to be used well after jobs are finished (say to build a specialized mini-portfolio for a client). As a result, our workflow has us dumping every image into the db, regardless of quality. Occasionally, we quickly flag those of special value.
Since it keeps everythign in a single file, I worry that Aperture would satisfactorily handle the 5 terrabytes of images she has shot in the last year, plus those which preceded it. Is there some convenient way to segment the data?
Also, she tends to work on laptops (right now, G4s, since Photoshop is so slow on Intel). I was under the impression that Aperture requires a pretty high powered computer. Will it run satisfatorily with a large db on a G4 laptop?
Lastly, she uses a Phase One back. I don't see Phase One RAW format as one of those supported by Aperature. Does it work with Phase One?
Thanks,
Gary
Powerbook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

Aperture currently allows you to specify the library file it will use when it starts up. The setting is in the preferences screen. This allows you to use different libraries for different purposes. The limitation is that only one library can only be one library open at a time. I don't know why they don't have a normal File Open option in the menu. This would be easier.
Creating additional libraries is also a workaround since there is no New Library command. There are a variety of ways to do it. The easiest is to just make a copy of the empty library Aperture installs in your system by default and copy that every time you need a new library file. It's inconvenient, but not too bad since you only have to do it once in a while and it only takes a few seconds if you have the empty library to copy from handy...
Matthew