MFD and Macbook Pro advice

[bcroslin]

Anyone out there have any experience with the Macbook Pros and MFD? I'm currently using a dual 1.8 G5 tower with 4 gigs of ram and I'm wondering how the MB Pro's stack up with batching files and regular post-processing. I've shot tethered to an assistant's 1.8 MB Pro with my Valeo 22 and had virtually no issues but I never did open any files with it. James commented that he's had issues shooting tethered with the new laptops and I'm wondering if anyone else has had any issues. My thinking is I'd like to replace my desktop with just the MB Pro to eliminate the clutter and cord farm I have raging in my office. If an Intel MB Pro is as fast as my current setup I'd pull the trigger in a heartbeat.

Apple just released a new version of the MB Pro today btw. Apparently FW 800 is back. Not sure if the FW issues James described have been taken care of.

TIA

[william]

I have a 17 inch MacBook Pro with 2Gb of RAM and just finished my first tethered shoot with it and my P30 back about a week ago.  The previews came up quite quickly when shooting tethered (about 2 seconds) and everything worked like a charm; no hiccups at all while shooting, even when I (twice) accidentally stepped on the FW cable and yaked it out while shooting.  Just plugged it back in and kept going.

Batching/post-processing was a different story.  It took about 2 hours for it to batch process about 200 P30 RAW files into JPEGs.  This was using Capture One, which is now "native" on Intel Macs (I can only imagine how slow it would be under virtualization).  The batching speed is therefore less than ideal.  I don't know if that's of C1 or the MacBook Pro, but I wouldn't want to be a wedding shooter or high volume shooter of any sort processing thousands of files per shoot using this configuration.   The forthcoming Version 4 of C1 is supposed to be much faster -- we'll see.

Anyone out there have any experience with the Macbook Pros and MFD? I'm currently using a dual 1.8 G4 tower with 4 gigs of ram and I'm wondering how the MB Pro's stack up with batching files and regular post-processing. I've shot tethered to an assistant's 1.8 MB Pro with my Valeo 22 and had virtually no issues but I never did open any files with it. James commented that he's had issues shooting tethered with the new laptops and I'm wondering if anyone else has had any issues. My thinking is I'd like to replace my desktop with just the MB Pro to eliminate the clutter and cord farm I have raging in my office. If an Intel MB Pro is as fast as my current setup I'd pull the trigger in a heartbeat.

Apple just released a new version of the MB Pro today btw. Apparently FW 800 is back. Not sure if the FW issues James described have been taken care of.

TIA
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[bcroslin]

I'm using PS CS2 for most of my conversions as Leaf Capture 10 is too slow for conversions and just not very robust. Tethered I use Leaf Capture 8 which seems to run fine on Intel.

My main concern is post-processing and batching. With no native version of CS2 I'm concerned about speed.

[william]

What about Lightroom?  It's now native on Intel Macs.

I'm using PS CS2 for most of my conversions as Leaf Capture 10 is too slow for conversions and just not very robust. Tethered I use Leaf Capture 8 which seems to run fine on Intel.

My main concern is post-processing and batching. With no native version of CS2 I'm concerned about speed.
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[Dustbak]

I use both LC10 as well as LC8.4 on my MBP 15. I use a Valeo11 (next week this will be an Aptus17).

Capturing tethered is no problem. For this I prefer 8.4 because it is a lot faster in showing the capture.

I have used batch processing from LC10 as well as the image processor in ACR, this is not a process to wait for. I normally leaf, get a cup of coffee (or 2) have a bite, read some newspapers.

About 100 images will take about 2 hours of processing (both in LC10 as well as in PSCS2, can't wait to get CS3) . The badge will contain, levels, curves, sharpening and saving in PSD/Tiff files. All processing is done on 16bit files. After this process I can handselect PSD files for further work.

I use a MBP15 2.0Ghz with 2Gb of memory and the 100Gb 7200Rpm drive.

Sometimes I do the postprocessing in Windows on the MBP this will go significantly faster. Cannot tell you how much faster because I basically never timed it that way.

Under normal circumstances this would be totally unacceptable but this way I don't mind that much.

Eventually I might just add either a MacPro or a Quad Amd just for batch processing but than I need to pump the files first over the network to that machine which also costs my time.

[pss]

phase back with a MBP 2.16 2gb ram...shooting tethered works like a charm, no problems whatsoever...used to have the 1.8DP G5, shooting speed is about the same (never timed the latest C1 version on the G5 so it is hard to say), with the native C1 version, processing of files is faster then it has ever been, but i also don't have a problem letting the computer run for a couple of hours if i have to run 100s of files....PS CS is slower on the MBP then on the G5, but workable...

[Photomangreg]

Hasselblad's Flexcolor software runs natively on the Intels, very quick!