Incredibly slow rendering when editing raws from the new Nikon D800

Question

I would be happy to hear from users of the D800 and Apple's "Aperture" 3.2.3. My own experience is that the rendering of f.inst. a "burned" file/picture (Raw-file) is incredibly SLOW....what is your experience. Any knowledge of whether Apple will come forward with an upgrade of Aperture?

Answer 1

mamster37 wrote:
I am fully aware of all about the file size, and that one should expect a slow down in the rendering, but this is really a significant slow down, and unless Apple come up with a solution I am afraid that one is obliged to find other solutions for the editing of Nikon D800 raw files. My details are:
MacBook Pro Intel
OS: Mac OSX, 10.7.3 Lion
Installed memory: 8GB
You have not described which MBP CPU/GPU, drives SSD/HDD, how full any HDDs are. That is essential information.
As all the photo sites have discussed, the D800 files are huge and will require more horsepower to handle. With a new D800 you are the experimenter here on the bleeding edge of technology, so all of us will learn from your observations.
I would guess that only the strongest Sandy Bridge MBPs with 8-16 GB RAM will do well. I was doing fine with 8 GB RAM (zero page-outs) and then recently I did some very aggressive Photoshop/Aperture work and page outs skyrocketed: I need more RAM, and I don't have a D800 yet so my NEF files run only ~20 MB each. How large (MB) are your NEF files?
You can evaluate whether or not you have adequate RAM by looking at the Page Outs number under System Memory on the Activity Monitor app before starting a typical work session; recheck after working and if the page outs change (manual calculation of ending page outs number minus starting page outs number) is not zero your workflow is RAM-starved. Ignore page ins, the pie charts and other info in Activity Monitor.
If your test shows that page outs increase at all during operation it is affecting performance. You can
• add RAM as feasible
• restart with some frequency if you suspect memory leaks (common especially with less-than-top-quality applications)
• and/or simply try to run only one app at a time, for sure diligently closing unneeded apps like browsers
• and/or switch 64-bit operation to 32-bit operation (which will make some additional RAM space available). Note that your Mac may already default to 32-bit. See Switching Kernels:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4287
Note that RAM is cheap and heavy apps' usage of more RAM is a good thing. Photoshop for instance has been able to under OS X take advantage of up to at least 32 GB RAM for years.
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
-Allen
EDIT: Note my focus on discussing RAM above is because that is all we know about your MBP. It does not mean that I necessarily suggest that RAM may be your primary issue.