[jhogarty]

Anyone able to tell if Aperature is distributed as a dual binary? I don't want to have to buy a PowerPC version now and an Intel version a few months from now. I would do most of my work at home on my G5, but want some flexibility for going mobile when needed.

J.

[Demonhood]

they won't charge for an intel version down the road. it'd just be a point upgrade. so don't worry about it.

just picked up my copy. shiny shiny box...

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by tomrock

C1 is from a company that makes medium format digital back (Phase One). They also make a software called Capture One http://phaseone.com/Content/Software/PROSoftware.aspx

A lot of pros swear by their conversions.

I like that conversion by C1 better too, but ironically the guy who took the pictures says that overall he likes skin tones from Aperture are better than C1.

Originally Posted by jhogarty

Anyone able to tell if Aperature is distributed as a dual binary? I don't want to have to buy a PowerPC version now and an Intel version a few months from now. I would do most of my work at home on my G5, but want some flexibility for going mobile when needed.

Apparently it shows up as a PowerPC binary.

[MOTHERWELL]

Originally Posted by Demonhood

they won't charge for an intel version down the road. it'd just be a point upgrade. so don't worry about it.

just picked up my copy. shiny shiny box...

I got the last one at the Apple store. The box is all beat up and wrinkled.

....this app is defnitely not speedy. I am trying to auto stack around 1000 photos on my quad and it's been about 10 minutes and it's still chuggin.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by djsbon

i just bought my first g5 pm yesterday with aperture and it wouldn't install on my computer since i only have 512RAM.. too bad.. now i guess i have to upgrade my ram

<3grey

Well having a G5 with just 512MB of RAM is like having a Ferrari and putting tires from a Dodge Neon on it.

tooki

[powerbook867]

wow motherwell, that's not what I wanted to hear. Do you have a lot of stuff going on the backgound or is Aperature it? I was seriously looking at the low end powermac tonight and if your quad is struggling w/1000 photos I'm not filled w/ confidence....

[- - e r i k - -]

Come on. Surely that must be some initial indexing procedure and the app will be speedy after that. I seriously hope this is faster than iPhoto.

[kcmac]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

Come on. Surely that must be some initial indexing procedure and the app will be speedy after that. I seriously hope this is faster than iPhoto.

Well, he did get the old wrinkly one..

[jhogarty]

Originally Posted by Demonhood

they won't charge for an intel version down the road. it'd just be a point upgrade. so don't worry about it.

just picked up my copy. shiny shiny box...

Unless you are a student and have a student version. Hopefully the price for students is less than that of an upgrade price.

J...

[CaptainHaddock]

Most reports I have seen remark at how fast Aperture's RAW image import and handling is. However, auto-stacking seems to be the one function that isn't optimized very well.

[mattmarshall]

why is conversion necessary? i thought Raw was raw....there's no compression, so why is it different?

are people saying C1 is better?

- matt

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by mattmarshall

why is conversion necessary? i thought Raw was raw....there's no compression, so why is it different?

are people saying C1 is better?

- matt

"conversion" in this case can mean "interpreting the bits that are in the RAW file and showing you what the file looks like." Because RAW formats aren't totally "open," and because different vendors see things different ways, different RAW converters can come up with slightly different results.

Conversion *could* also mean, changing the RAW file to a format to a bitmap format (like TIFF or PSD) so you can work on this file in Photoshop.

[slugslugslug]

Originally Posted by tooki

Yep, my school's bookstore sells all Apple products at the institutional prices.

tooki

I just found out mine (Univ. of Pennsylvania) does too. At $150, it's really tempting, but I wanna hear how it does on a 2.0 GHz 20" iMac before I take take plunge.. Hey Eug, you buy it .

Actually, I'll probably wait to see what tricks iLife '06 will have up its sleeve (bet y'all didn't know software had sleeves). A few improvements in iPhoto's RAW handling would probably keep me happy..

[Eug Wanker]

Yeah, I'm probably gonna wait until the new year and after I read some more reviews before I jump in. If it were US$150, I would have already bought it. Since it's closer to US$250 for me, I'm thinking about it more. (I'm not a photo pro.)

BTW, some people are complaining now that there is slightly more colour noise when converting from RAW in high ISO pix, when compared to C1 and other RAW converters. Mind you, OTOH, they say that Aperture is much faster, and they're not complaining about it with pix shot at lower ISOs. I wonder if I'd really notice the noise difference though, since I'm just beginning to tinker with RAW. (I used to shoot exclusively with JPEG.)

As for me testing it... I will point out I have the previous model iMac. While my 2.0 GHz is similar to the current 2.1 GHz, I will point out that my Radeon 9600 is significantly slower than the current Radeon X600 XT. It'd be nice to test it out in the store on an iMac, but my guess is that my local stores will have Aperture only on the Power Macs.

EDIT:

This may or may not be applicable, but I found this on BareFeats:



The Radeon 9600 (previous G5 iMacs) is slower than the Radeon 9600 Pro.
The Radeon X600 Pro (current 17" iMac) is similar to the Radeon 9600 Pro.
The Radeon X600 XT (current 20" iMac) is faster than the Radeon 9600 Pro.

[GENERAL_SMILEY]

I have seen Aperture running on a 17AL rev A, 1.5 Gig Ram. It took about 2 hours to simply import an IPhoto library of 5000 images.

I don't think the sys requirements are specific to what is needed to be able to run the app (like, for instance, Motion), but just what is needed to be able to use the app productively.

Haven't had a chance to use any of the image features, will give it a go later.

[QuatermassX]

I'd love to run Aperture on my beloved Mac Mini - anyone try and load it on just to see what would happen? Smoke, fire from the mouth of Steve Jobs?

[monkeybrain]

I'd like to know if it can install on a Mini too. But I read that the Installer won't allow it on any unsupported system. Someone will have to hack that installer first I suspect.

[QuatermassX]

... shocked that someone might do naughty things with the installer! By the by, Front Row works nicely on my Mini ;-)

[Mediaman_12]

Speaking of un-suported systems, It also needs a good graphics card. It didn't want to run on my twin 1.8 G5 with 1GB of RAM because of it's original 64mb GeForce FX5200. Fortunately I found a way round this. I also foresee another problem people may have with this app. Again Apple has chosen (like with iPhoto and iTunes etc.) to create the applications own library to store any photos imported in to it, If you already have 1000's of photos sorted on your computer the way you like it, but you want to use Aperture to process your pic's then tough, You have to now use the organisation facility provided by Aperture to access the Pictures.
But unlike iPhoto Aperture's Photo Library is contained in a package file, so accessing the files outside of Aperture is more difficult, this is also why it takes so long to import an extensive library of photos, it's making copy's of them all on the disk, there also doesn't seam to be a method to chose where the Aperture Library gets located, so you better make sure you have the room on your HD before importing 1000's of shots of that external disk.

[inkhead]

It's importing the photos into Apertures database system which (after being imported) is really fast. SQLite I believe. You shouldn't be able to work with the photos outside of aperture's database system. Importing is the way to go considering you'd have to figured out why all your iphotos were suddenly manipulated.

I think aperture is pretty damn fast on my new 15" powerbook with 2gb of ram considering what it's doing. If I were to attempt anything like this in any other application, capture1, bridge, photoshop it would be freeze city.

[inkhead]

It's already been "hacked" with the "nocpu" supoprt thing. However it's absolutely pointless to run this on a macmini....Don't even bother.

It does take a while to import photos from iPhoto (but then what pro photographer is using iphoto???) However once imported it's very fast.

Importing from folders or just directory structures was very fast.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by Mediaman_12

Speaking of un-suported systems, It also needs a good graphics card. It didn't want to run on my twin 1.8 G5 with 1GB of RAM because of it's original 64mb GeForce FX5200. Fortunately I found a way round this.

You got it running on the 5200? How fast does it run?

[gnomexp]

Well inkhead, it actually works sorta smoothly on my 12in 867MHz Powerbook after a NoCPU Hack and me personally tweaking the info.plist for RAM. Good for Newspaper usage... something that my school will definitely purchase since we're getting a Dual 2.0GHz 2GB RAM 7800 GT next week (first Mac in the school).

[powerbook867]

Mediaman_12, give us a little more info on how you got it to run on a machine w/ a 5200...Please?

[- - e r i k - -]

Hobby photographers (like myself) use iPhoto. It has a very powerful tagging and smart album structure as you may or may not be aware of. And this complex system imported straight into Aperture. Yay!

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Smooth as silk on my Rev a Dual G5 with 2.5 gigs of RAM.

[- - e r i k - -]

Uhm. Actually it did not import my smart albums from iPhoto. Bad show

Crop tool seems weird too. It's just... sluggish to activate? Sometimes it works, sometimes I need to click the picture a couple of times. And I don't like that it's not default like in iPhoto.

[siMac]

Runs acceptably well on an iMac 2GHz with 1GB of RAM. Waiting on localised versions though - shame on Apple for releasing an English only app.

[Eug Wanker]

So I tested Aperture in the store.

Dual 2.3 with GeForce 6600 256 MB and 30" display is reasonably fast.
Dual 2.0 with GeForce 6600 LE 128 MB and two displays (30" plus 19") is very slow.

What really bugged me though was the very limited photo management capabilities. In some ways it really does feel like it's iPhoto on steroids. Apple simply refuses to make its imaging apps convenient in terms of image management and I just don't get it. I do need to test it some more to be sure about the photo management stuff, and I'm really impressed with many of the other aspects of the program, but colour me disappointed nonetheless.

[powerbook867]

I'm probably going to the Apple store to check it out today. Eug, that 6600 LE had to have been pushed to the max running both those displays...

I am happy to hear though that the 2.3 w/ the single 30 was running fairly smooth. I have an older 20 inch Cinema Display and that and the 2.0 w/ the 6600 LE I plan on getting should be a fairly solid performer...

I'll report back later this afternoon my opinion...

[callefoss]

Mediaman_12 can you please explain how you got it working with a FX5200.
Thanks man.

[gnomexp]

If I'm not mistaken, the app simply does not check for graphics cards. It checks for CPU in the installer and for RAM in the app.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by gnomexp

If I'm not mistaken, the app simply does not check for graphics cards. It checks for CPU in the installer and for RAM in the app.

The app will not install (by traditional means) on machines with an unsupported GPU, even if the RAM and CPU are sufficient.

[Montanan]

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

The app will not install (by traditional means) on machines with an unsupported GPU, even if the RAM and CPU are sufficient.

So can someone post at least a hint as to what the "non-traditional" means are?

[Mediaman_12]

The Install didn't check the graphics card, but when I launched the app a popup appeared instantly reporting that the card wasn't supported*.
To get it running I had to use part of the many 'No CPU check' hacks there are about (no I don't really want to link to where it came from here). There doesn't seam to be any problems running it with a 'lesser' graphics card on my Cinema Display
my G5 tower has to be up to the job (twin G5 1.8's with 512kb of cache each, Ok so it's go the min of ram at 1GB)

* when I got the app I thought the graphics card mentioned on Apples page would have been a 'preferred' option, but It would still run ok on a slightly lesser card, similar to PC games.

[dazzla]

I can't get it to read RAW files from my 350D Says unsupported image format. Any clues? It says in the tech specs it supports CR2 files :/


Edit, anyone with a 350D should check this out:

http://minimal.cx/2005/11/01/make-os...50d-raw-files/

Mine now work perfectly in all apps

[tooki]

Yeah, that really is a goofy oversight, considering that the Digital Rebel XT -- the U.S. name for the 350D -- is explicitly supported.

tooki

[GENERAL_SMILEY]

It is bizarre which things are slow and which are pretty fast - scrolling is very fast, switching to full screen surprisingly smooth, but cropping, levels, and red eye tortuous. Then again my machine is well below spec.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by Mediaman_12

To get it running I had to use part of the many 'No CPU check' hacks there are about (no I don't really want to link to where it came from here). There doesn't seam to be any problems running it with a 'lesser' graphics card on my Cinema Display

Would you mind posting links? I think people should have the right to run a piece of software they purchased on whatever hardware they want. (With the understanding that performance may be negatively impacted.)

tooki

[Thinine]

Originally Posted by GENERAL_SMILEY

It is bizarre which things are slow and which are pretty fast - scrolling is very fast, switching to full screen surprisingly smooth, but cropping, levels, and red eye tortuous. Then again my machine is well below spec.

Would you mind posting your specs? I'm thinking these things are slow for you since they're trying to use Core Image, which may be especially slow on your machine.

[tooki]

First impressions on a 1.25GHz 15" AlBook with 1GB RAM and a Mobility Radeon 9600 w/64MB VRAM (in other words, the exact rock-bottom stated minimum requirements) on the stock 4200RPM 80GB HD:

-The interface is mostly responsive, but definitely a hair slower than iPhoto in places. In other areas, it's actually faster than iPhoto. It's clearly VERY optimized.

-Performance with the included tutorial 6MP RAW images is unacceptable. It takes around 15 seconds to load a RAW image upon click (or by moving the loupe over it).

-Performance with my camera's 4MP JPEGs was very good, taking about 1 second to load images if nothing else is happening in the background.

-It's got a learning curve. It's a good thing they include a tutorial DVD (like, video). But it looks like once you've got the basics down, it's very powerful and efficient.

-It has keyboard shortcuts for everything. Far more than anyone will ever be able to remember.

-The loupe is really damned handy.

-This thing needs a big display, and ideally more than one. It's a good thing it has the loupe, because with all the stuff on the screen, it doesn't leave too much room to see the pictures!

-iPhoto import worked great. Note that it did import separately every image that was edited in iPhoto, as well as the backup original that iPhoto made, so it has a lot of duplicates (in my case, lots of rotated images). It did, however, automatically stack those, so the edited version is the "pick" in the stack.

-I wish it had a Curves function. That's one of the things I use in Photoshop a lot.

-I had a few freezes (esp. when using the Auto Stack HUD). But my system has been acting up a bit lately anyway, so this is most likely not Aperture's fault. (When the semester is over, I'll redo my system nice and clean.) None of the freezes caused any corruption to the library.

-For the tech geeks out there, it may be of interest that, as far as I can tell, Aperture doesn't use the standard windowing system. I was only able to observe this when the system was under VERY heavy load (i.e. to the point of near unusability), but when dragging one window over a light box view in Aperture, it was redrawing using regions, only redrawing the areas that had been obscured, while the correct window background was drawn ahead of time. This is a strong indicator that it's doing Funky Things™. (To those who don't know: in OS X, applications should never have any idea what windows are covering them, and should therefore neither know about regions nor ever use them.)

tooki

[Thinine]

Actually, that last point is merely one part of the view being updated before the rest. I see it on my iBook 500 occasionally while loading pages in Safari and closing a small window or something that was covering the loading page. The part immediately under the window with show as soon as it's uncovered while the rest will update when the page is done loading.

[tooki]

No, trust me, it most certainly was not the same thing. Aperture's not a web browser; it doesn't take time for things to load. This was redrawing windows that had already been fully displayed; no changes to the window contents occurred. The effect was exactly the same as the region-based drawing of windows on OS 9 and earlier: the window background (in this case, even the window's background pattern!) drew immediately, and then the app drew the obscured portion of the contents in over the background.

tooki

[Montanan]

Well, I just got Aperture running on an officially-unsupported system -- a 1.8 GHz G5 iMac with the GeForce FX 5200 chipset and 1 GB RAM.

Basically, my impressions are similar to those Tooki noted with his Powerbook. With JPG's, import is a tedious process ... but once that's done everything works pretty smoothly, a bit slower than I'd like but certainly acceptable. I would NOT want to use it with RAW files on this computer, though -- that's where the greatest GPU processing power is clearly needed.

And I love what the program can do ... Aperture is both powerful and surprisingly intuitive. The loupe is a great tool, and the book and webpage templates it provides are excellent. It's definitely going to be my image management tool of choice, even though I won't use it for RAW workflow until someone buys my a shiny new PowerMac.

[tooki]

FWIW, I just tried moving the Aperture library to a fast external disk (a 7200RPM, 300GB Seagate over FW400), and it makes a very appreciable difference in speed. Load time (based on how quickly the loupe shows the image after hovering over a thumbnail) for JPEGs was reduced by maybe 1/3, and the load time for raw images by easily 2/3. My hunch is that Aperture is highly disk and CPU bound at times -- I think it needs for the graphics card to support certain functions, but doesn't actually need a particularly fast GPU.

tooki

[Goldfinger]

Originally Posted by tooki

I think it needs for the graphics card to support certain functions, but doesn't actually need a particularly fast GPU.

tooki

I think they require the fast GPU to compaste for the slowdown caused by hard drive access. Make the eye candy appear faster.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by tooki

FWIW, I just tried moving the Aperture library to a fast external disk (a 7200RPM, 300GB Seagate over FW400), and it makes a very appreciable difference in speed. Load time (based on how quickly the loupe shows the image after hovering over a thumbnail) for JPEGs was reduced by maybe 1/3, and the load time for raw images by easily 2/3. My hunch is that Aperture is highly disk and CPU bound at times -- I think it needs for the graphics card to support certain functions, but doesn't actually need a particularly fast GPU.

I dunno how important the GPU speed is after you get to a certain level, but I'll just mention again that my superficial test at the store tells me the amount of GPU memory probably is very important. On a dual large screen system with a GeForce 6600 LE 128 MB, Aperture was slow to über slow. On a single large screen system with a GeForce 6600 256 MB, Aperture was much, much faster.

[Catfish_Man]

I don't quite see what the confusion is... moving to a faster disk speeds up load times? DUH. The GPU speed is primarily going to be relevant for applying operations to the image, not loading it from the disk (that said, it's interesting to hear that it had to hit the disk for the loupe. I suppose caching the images in ram isn't particularly feasible for an app with that kind of dataset).

[GENERAL_SMILEY]

Originally Posted by Thinine

Would you mind posting your specs? I'm thinking these things are slow for you since they're trying to use Core Image, which may be especially slow on your machine.

No problem, my machine is under the minimum reqs. Rev A 17 inch, 1Ghz, 1.5 Gig Ram, GeForce4 MX - got a 7200 drive in it though.

Still, good for organising, very quick in dealing with PS CS2, can't fault it on many levels.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by GENERAL_SMILEY

No problem, my machine is under the minimum reqs. Rev A 17 inch, 1Ghz, 1.5 Gig Ram, GeForce4 MX - got a 7200 drive in it though.

Still, good for organising, very quick in dealing with PS CS2, can't fault it on many levels.

What the?!?!?!? You're running it on the Version A 17" PB????

That machine doesn't have the GeForce4 MX, it has the GeForce4 440 Go, but either way it does NOT have the supposedly necessary hardware Core Image features (ARB_fragment?) at all. (Even the unsupported GeForce 5200 has the necessary hardware features.) If those are truly your correct specs I guess the stuff in Aperture allows Altivec fallback. Very interesting...