| Joined: | Sun Apr 1st, 2012 |
| Location: | South Lakeland, UK |
| Posts: | 4066 |
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Yesterday I took a few, (70) not that many, exposures with the D800 and fed them into the newer iMac (late 2013) 14.2 which is a 4 core i5 but with only 8GB of memory. While the outcome is OK, the pictures have processed well enough, the frustration with almost continuous spinning beachballs and apparent inactivity as I opened Photoshop and transferred the processing between the two applications was terrible. I only processed three images and it took me best part of 4 hours to HDR 2, 3 image sets and make minor adjustments. At worst I would have done it in half an hour with the MacPro and not have been on the verge of tearing my few remaining strands of hair out.
While the MacPro 4.1 upgrade to 5.1 firmware has given me about 3 years excellent use, performed well and been rock solid, now I am having issues for whatever reason, I am now experiencing more difficulty in sorting it due to the fact it's been upgraded beyond the norm, I wish I had got a real 5.1 MacPro at the time but they were much more expensive, then and now. What I need is a bare bones 5.1 with two decent processors. While my upgraded 4.1 worked very well, for the larger files and newer software, some more grunt would help smooth the workflow and provide an effortless solution for processing large numbers of very large files which I get from astro and other subjects like time lapse and focus stacking.
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Robert.