[Eug Wanker]

I will be buying a work machine specifically for Aperture and nothing else. This machine will be used mainly for image organization and searching (keywords), and very little editing.

I think I've got what I need, but any other suggestions?

2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
250GB Serial ATA drive
ATI Radeon X1600/256MB VRAM
SuperDrive 8x (DVD+R DL/DVD+RW/CD-RW)
Keyboard & Mighty Mouse + Mac OS X - U.S. English
Accessory kit
AppleCare Protection Plan for iMac - Auto-enroll
20-inch widescreen LCD
2GHz Intel Core Duo
AirPort Extreme
Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
CAD$2404

Kensington security cable

Aperture 1.1 <-- Intel native, to be released in March

Office: Mac 2004 <-- Works under Rosetta

Toast 7 <-- Works under Rosetta

External 160 GB hard drive <-- For backup of Aperture vaults

[I Bent My Wookiee]

Sounds good to me.

[I Bent My Wookiee]

Double

[mduell]

Looks good to me... depending on what size and how many images you're working with, you may want to upgrade to 4GB RAM after 2GB SO-DIMMs come out and drop to a reasonable price.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by mduell

Looks good to me... depending on what size and how many images you're working with, you may want to upgrade to 4GB RAM after 2GB SO-DIMMs come out and drop to a reasonable price.

It will be thousands of 8 Megapixel images, but I figure 2 GB RAM will be enough. If I really wanted to future proof this machine I'd get a Power Mac, but I don't think I could get the dept. to release that amount of coin. BTW, the 2 GB is from Apple. I figure it's easier this way because it will come under AppleCare.

I was also considering upgrading to a 500 GB drive, but I don't expect to need much more than 10 GB per year, and that's a generous estimate. (Even though the camera is a Canon 20D, all the pictures we take are actually JPEGs. Using an older camera, we have less than 25 GB in 4 years.) Or maybe if I can swing the extra $333...

P.S. We have been using Cumulus on a PC, but Cumulus is a serious pain in the @ss. Aperture is much easier, even though I would prefer it to use iTunes like file directories.

[MaxPower2k3]

Why don't you shoot RAW? a little slower than JPEG in Aperture, but you get so much more control over the image. And it's really easy to export a JPEG version if you need to send it to someone or whatever. I couldn't imagine going back to JPEG now with my D70.

The machine you specced out there looks nice. I hope they have 1.1 reasonably optimized for the Core Duo... it definitely still needs work on the G5 (which I'm hoping will also come with 1.1)

[Maflynn]

Looks good to me, I found using Aperture with 2 gigs vs. 1 really made a difference, especially since I usually have photoshope open at the same time.

I also echo Macpower2k3's opinion on shooting in RAW. Aperture is designed to process RAW files and I vaguely recall some of the auto editing features are turned off for JPGs I could be wrong but shoot solely in JPG. Advantages to RAW are many, but what I like the most is the ability to tweak/adjust the white balance. You lose al ot of that ability since the information is not stored in the JPG. On a couple of occasions, I totally blew the WB setting and I was able to fix it, I wouldn't have been able to do so in JPG.

Just my $02.
Mike

[Eug Wanker]

Aperture 1.1 is supposed to be much faster than 1.0.1, including on G5s.

We don't shoot RAW at work because this is just for documentation of objects. We don't care too much about the slight colour balance differences. (I do shoot RAW for my own personal pix however.) Plus, for basic functionality in Aperture, JPEG is faster than RAW for obvious reasons.

I've been toying with the idea with iView, but it looks to me from the descriptions to be almost as annoying as Cumulus, with the only real benefit being that you can use your own file structure. (This machine will be used by people in my dept. who aren't particularly heavy duty computer geeks, so ease-of-use for cataloguing is my prime concern.)

[MaxPower2k3]

Being able to use your own file structure in iView is nice, but I would give that up for Aperture's picture organization.

Aperture's file system organization is rather awful, though. Instead of iPhoto's dated folder + central database file method, there's just level after level of bundles. The entire library (pictures, DB, and all) is one bundle, in which there are project files and a folder of rolls, each of which is a bundle, in which there is DB info for that roll and a folder of the actual images (each of which is in its own folder with DB info for that particular picture)

This is mostly made up for by the ability to easily export versions/masters from within Aperture, but if you ever need to get to an image without opening the program, you're out of luck unless you really go digging.

[Eug Wanker]

Hmmm... I wonder if I should wait until April 4 for the rumoured media event.

It looks like I'm gonna have to wait a week or two anyways, because I want the install disk I get for Aperture to include the 1.1 universal binary.

[fhoubi]

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

It will be thousands of 8 Megapixel images, but I figure 2 GB RAM will be enough..

Sounds like Canon BTW I dropped my POS 1st Rebel against a D50, never happier since. Just a stupid remark, Toast Lite 5.2.2 which came free with a magazine works great under Rosetta too...

[imitchellg5]

Originally Posted by mduell

Looks good to me... depending on what size and how many images you're working with, you may want to upgrade to 4GB RAM after 2GB SO-DIMMs come out and drop to a reasonable price.

You can't get 4 Gb in a iMac.

[MaxPower2k3]

Originally Posted by imitchellg5

You can't get 4 Gb in a iMac.

yet.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by imitchellg5

You can't get 4 Gb in a iMac.

Which is why I said "after 2GB SO-DIMMs come out and drop to a reasonable price." The chipset in the Intel iMacs supports 4GB (see Intel's site).

OTOH, if I wanted to be pedantic, I'd point out that 4Gb is only 512MB.