Two computers simultaneously with photos on NAS? Tips?
My wife and I are considering switching from LR to C1. Our 1tb and growing photo collection is stored on a NAS and we use a combo of LR classic and CC to make it work. All photos are imported on the PC with classic and put in collections so that a PC with CC can edit as well. We want to work with photo sorting, rating and processing simultaneously. But not with the same photos at the same time of course. Is C1 the one for us.
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C1 is notoriously bad with it performance and NAS. Especially opening a collection and sessions stored on NAS is very very slow. That's because Capture One seems to re-read every file and seems to open each and every preview instead of just one file.
So imagine having a collection or a session with a few thousand images and then imagine a NAS accessing those thousand files individually.
It works but it's slow because the C1 developers are not interesetd in improving the performance on NAS devices. They don't care even a bit. I mentioned it dozens of times, put in requests etc. But they are deaf when it comes to these things (and other stuff too).
Truth be told: if Lightroom improves its engine (with regards to color editing, sharpening and the overall speed of editing) I'm looking into switching back to Lightroom.1 -
Wow! Thank you so much for the honest and informative response. This is indeed crucial for us.
Though you don't say anything about simultaneous editing. Do you know if that works?
If C1 fix the NAS bug, I will for sure consider a subscription. The NAS is a Synology DS718 by the way.1 -
christianlv wrote:
Wow! Thank you so much for the honest and informative response. This is indeed crucial for us.
Though you don't say anything about simultaneous editing. Do you know if that works?
If C1 fix the NAS bug, I will for sure consider a subscription. The NAS is a Synology DS718 by the way.
I have a Synology DS218+ and although it seems effective and reliable at what I ask it to do outright speed is not that great, compared to what is theoretically possible form the specs of the various devices involved, even for direct file transfers using USB3. With or without C1 in the mix.
This may or may not be a settings issue that a Synology guru could advise about. And that for various reasons of hardware location the NAS is connected to my network via Wi-Fi - but still the basic transfer speeds that I can monitor do not max out against the theoretical values.
That said it does work well enough much of the time but I prefer to work from local drives.
This is partly for the absolute speed of interaction during editing and partly because there are times when the NAS might be dealing with internal tasks or the network is doing something that slows it down (being Wi-Fi this is not uncommon).
Much of the perceived slowness is related to start up processes for C1 or those who seem to be affected by such things. Keep it running in a session/catalogue and such matters are minimised. That said this is a matter of 'perceived' slowness and not everyone would necessarily end up with the same perception.
Getting back to the NAS concept - it is, basically, meant to service multiple network users rather than being dedicated to serving a single user at high speed - although no doubt Synology and the others would say they have hardware and software that will also satisfy that demand with the appropriate disk storage installed.
So, thinking along those lines, if I run a copy process from my PC to the NAS and monitor the transfer speeds the process will typically settle down to an average transfer speed of about 1/3 of nominal maximum capacity. If I then set up another concurrent large copy (several Gigabytes each) that too will tend to settle down at about 1/3 of available capacity and generally barely affect the speed of the other process at any point - at least not in a way that the monitoring software can report or that seems to affect the expected process time overall.
If I set up a third process the chances are that some transfer speed decline will be reported as the network is now being asked to operate at maximum throughput with no real allowance for operational overheads and other traffic.
I suspect that hard wired and using a fast router better results than I obtain should be possible if needed.
But the main point is that for normal editing work using different sessions or catalogues on client machines, I would not anticipate the NAS service to be evidently slower with 2 users reading and writing relatively small files (mostly).
The major data transfers are at startup where the C1 data and preview files, etc, are being loaded into local memory on the client computer and, potentially, at shut down of a session/catalog where backlog of recent processing (say a mass change of some sort) is still being written to the edit files (or whatever the purpose might be) for some reason. This is rare in my experience but not impossible to see reported in C1 from time to time.
I think the best idea would be to try it using the 30 day Trial facility. It's the full software so what you will see is what you should get. Also check whatever source you can find for NAS optimisation ideas.
But most importantly the question of performance is VERY MUCH related to personal expectations and perceptions and what works well enough for one person may look terrible to someone else. It's similar when one gets used to an SSD based system but still sometimes needs to work with a non-ssd based system. How can something that, once upon a time, seemed to be so fast compares to what went before now look like the slowest thing ever?
HTH.
Grant1 -
Thank you for the reply. I will look into optimization of the NAS. I am also considering getting a new router. Using ASUS AC66U at the moment.
I would very much like for my wife and I to be able to rate, sort and edit the same images. How can that be done? Is it possible to use the same catalogue on to pc's at the same time or in sessions the way to go then?
My trial has expired, so I wont be able to test these things.0 -
christianlv wrote:
Thank you for the reply. I will look into optimization of the NAS. I am also considering getting a new router. Using ASUS AC66U at the moment.
I would very much like for my wife and I to be able to rate, sort and edit the same images. How can that be done? Is it possible to use the same catalogue on to pc's at the same time or in sessions the way to go then?
My trial has expired, so I wont be able to test these things.
I wouLd think sessions (editing separate and different sessions) and then at some point import from the sessions to a catalogue would make practical sense.
Or you might investigate the "Studio" version functionality.
Personally I would probably ask the C1 Support Team to comment (using a Support Case) and take things from there.
Grant0 -
I have the same situation, not with my wife, but I edit sometimes from the macbook, sometimes from the iMac. All files are located on my NAS DS718. Since I don't have soooo many photos in the catalogue and a fast router I have no issues with speed.
Coming back to the topic. I think the major problem will be, that the C1-DB is locked if you open C1 on one machine. The DB is also located on another Synology NAS. Means if I open C1 on e.g. macbook, I cannot edit at the same time with the same catalogue from the iMac. In my case not an issue since I never edit from both machines at the same time. But I think this is what would be your situation.
I can check if there is a possibility to unlock the DB while two machines access the same catalogue, but I have some doubts that this is possible. There would be some sync mechanism necessary in the C1 app to get the modifications coordinated.0 -
Isn't it to deliberately prevent two users accessing the catalog at the same time that Capture One creates a "writelock" file in the catalog package?
Ian0 -
I would say so and I think it is good and necessary. Otherwise this may lead to inconsistencies. 0 -
christianlv wrote:
Thank you for the reply. I will look into optimization of the NAS. I am also considering getting a new router. Using ASUS AC66U at the moment.
I would very much like for my wife and I to be able to rate, sort and edit the same images. How can that be done? Is it possible to use the same catalogue on to pc's at the same time or in sessions the way to go then?
My trial has expired, so I wont be able to test these things.
I don't know how you would cope with conflicts, i.e., both of you editing the same image. At some point you'd need a structure to choose which edits you keep; no idea if C1 can do that. I do know that keeping all original images on the NAS, but C1 sessions/catalogues on local drives on two computers is fine. Each computer ends up with a session or catalogue with individual edits. To consolidate, you copy the session/catalogue from one computer (B) to the other (A), then on computer A import the session with edited images from B - be careful not to change the location during the import process; if the location stays the same then C1 is smart enough not to import the raw files again - and C1 imports the edits that were made on B. You can then simply copy the session back to B and have everything synchronised, but it's not a solution for further edits.0
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