Capture One Performance on 2013 Mac Pro

Paul Steunebrink

February 08, 2015 19:02

Sounds atypical. Should be blazingly fast. I suggest you contact support.

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yann.queniart

February 08, 2015 19:32

Same problem here.

I plan to switch from Aperture to Capture One. I have the same MacPro but with dual D700 GPUs, 256TB SSD and promise Pegasus R6 12TB (pictures are on it).

I have make test with a little library migration 22.000 pictures and sometime i have the wheel of death, computer respond from network, mouse move but can't do nothing, kill application shortcut don't work.

I have try enable OpenCL but don't appear more responsive.

I plan to use Capture One massively for sports photographies (250.000 pictures last year) so i need a solid rock solution.

Any patch or something to do ?

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SFA

February 08, 2015 19:37

[quote="NN635395445685152850UL" wrote:

Any patch or something to do ?

Contact Support.

There are so many variables involved with computer systems these days that the potential for a few users to have extremely untypical experiences is high. I'm sure that the support team would welcome the opportunity to identify new factors that adversely affect users even if the number of users affected is quite small.

It all adds to the information available for future software engineering decisions.

Grant

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VirtualRain

February 08, 2015 20:46

Here's a video I just recorded showing the performance of doing some basic adjustments in both Aperture and C1 on my system... The funny thing is that Aperture is highly regarded as being a poor performer, but it's much smoother than C1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkMCLsv ... e=youtu.be

I'll contact support.

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Boris Sheikman

February 08, 2015 20:48

Interesting observations! I have a mid-2011 with a small 21.5" screen and 20 GB. C1 roars on my humble machine compared to Aperture after the last update.

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Andrew Mumford

February 08, 2015 22:47

I can confirm / +1 all your observations about lagginess and general pauses. Capture One is also horribly sticky to use for cropping and rotation in particular.

There was definitely a speed update in the latest release but for many operations Aperture is still "like buttaah" - seems to refresh the screen at 30fps or close. Capture One seems to max out at a few fps in terms of updating the UI and screen.

I have a hard time believing the base performance of the software is this bad and suspect some of the display routines are less than optimal.

However Copying and Pasting multiple adjustments too large numbers of photos frequently ties up the machine for a few to 30 sec's and import speed although better is still a joke compared too Aperture.

This is on a MacPro 2013 "Tube" base specs - generally I see the same difference between the apps on any m/c I have had access to though.

I'd appreciate someone from support confirming or denying that they see problems with the MacPro vs the iMac.

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Edward Caruso

February 09, 2015 02:49

For all new Aperture converts - as someone stated earlier in this thread and almost all others- if you are having performance issues that dramatic - don't waste time on this forum, go start a support case. Someone will be on it quickly.
v8 improves the catalog feature alot compared to v7 but I would say generally sessions work better. But I've never had close to the issues described here - and I am using a 2009 2.93 quad Mac Pro!

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Grant Hodgeon

February 09, 2015 14:57

It's your 4K Displays. Capture One isn't really the best at redraw performance but I'm sure it's something they're working on.

Can you see in C1 Preferences what your Preview Size is?

http://share.photogrant.com/image/0z3W1L0y0W15/Screen%20Shot%202015-02-09%20at%208.55.38%20AM.png

If it's higher than this or similar, try lowering it considerably and taking out one of your 4K displays. Then see how the performance of your image redraw is and report back!

I'm all for submitting support cases but it detracts from sharing knowledge on how to fix or improve these issues. And the voices aren't few and far between with issues like this.

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VirtualRain

February 09, 2015 20:19

I tried different preview settings along with OpenCL on/off and they don't make a difference at my screen resolution of 3840x2160.

Video here of what I tried and the results...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhDyim-KufM

I did find that with OpenCL disabled, it uses the low res preview for display in the viewer while making adjustments. With OpenCL enabled it uses a full res image in the viewer.

Neither performs very well at 3840x2160.

If I scale the Capture One application window down to a much smaller size, the adjustments are a lot smoother.

It appears this app does not perform well on 4K displays. I imagine the 5K iMac has similar problems.

I'm certainly open to ideas, but it seems the dev team needs to do some optimization of performance on 4K and 5K displays.

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Grant Hodgeon

February 09, 2015 23:04

[quote="VirtualRain" wrote:
I tried different preview settings along with OpenCL on/off and they don't make a difference at my screen resolution of 3840x2160.

Video here of what I tried and the results...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhDyim-KufM

I did find that with OpenCL disabled, it uses the low res preview for display in the viewer while making adjustments. With OpenCL enabled it uses a full res image in the viewer.

Neither performs very well at 3840x2160.

If I scale the Capture One application window down to a much smaller size, the adjustments are a lot smoother.

It appears this app does not perform well on 4K displays. I imagine the 5K iMac has similar problems.

I'm certainly open to ideas, but it seems the dev team needs to do some optimization of performance on 4K and 5K displays.

There's definitely room for improvement on the UHD resolutions front and we're still in early days with a lot of software compatibility so I'm sure it's high on P1's list of priorities.

I'm curious did you have Open CL enabled in your initial attempt? I'm fairly certain that your test with Open CL being enabled/disabled with the above video is flawed as you have to restart Capture One for it to take effect. Not saying that's going to fix your issue but something to note.

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Andrew Mumford

February 09, 2015 23:38

Personally I would dispute that - I see the same general ui lag / slowness, (vs Aperture), on an older 1920 x 1200 Apple display as well as on a 2008 Unibody MacBook Pro and it's been consistently slower regardless of Display or Computer across several versions now.

This is not to say that C1 did not get faster in v8 - it just still seems pretty unoptimized around the whole display / redraw code area. Even Lightroom is smoother / faster in this area and thats an application that's unusable because of general sluggishness IMO.

Someone should sit the engineers down in front of a current Mac running both applications and demo the differences to them.

[quote="photoGrant" wrote:
It's your 4K Displays. Capture One isn't really the best at redraw performance but I'm sure it's something they're working on.

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VirtualRain

February 10, 2015 02:55

[quote="photoGrant" wrote:
[quote="VirtualRain" wrote:
I tried different preview settings along with OpenCL on/off and they don't make a difference at my screen resolution of 3840x2160.

Video here of what I tried and the results...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhDyim-KufM

I did find that with OpenCL disabled, it uses the low res preview for display in the viewer while making adjustments. With OpenCL enabled it uses a full res image in the viewer.

Neither performs very well at 3840x2160.

If I scale the Capture One application window down to a much smaller size, the adjustments are a lot smoother.

It appears this app does not perform well on 4K displays. I imagine the 5K iMac has similar problems.

I'm certainly open to ideas, but it seems the dev team needs to do some optimization of performance on 4K and 5K displays.

There's definitely room for improvement on the UHD resolutions front and we're still in early days with a lot of software compatibility so I'm sure it's high on P1's list of priorities.

I'm curious did you have Open CL enabled in your initial attempt? I'm fairly certain that your test with Open CL being enabled/disabled with the above video is flawed as you have to restart Capture One for it to take effect. Not saying that's going to fix your issue but something to note.

I just retried my performance test by restarting after changing the OpenCL settings.

http://youtu.be/ufMYUmtyh6U

Unfortunately, OpenCL doesn't seem to make any difference? Adjusting the slider is just as poor either way.

How can I tell if OpenCL is doing something at all? What's a test that can verify it's working?

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Grant Hodgeon

February 10, 2015 14:11

I haven't performed any benchmarks with the D500 GPU's so I'm not sure if this would reflect for you but typically for me a batch processing of images is a factor of two faster with Open CL enabled.

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LSdigi.com

February 11, 2015 00:01

It will definitely have something to do with UHD resolution, as my 6 core / 32gb / dual D500's are lightening fast on dual 1920x1200 resolution.

While having the image on one screen only, press shift+CMD+4 and drag over the exact area of the preview of the image - and check what size the image is?

If it's higher than what you can set Capture One Preferences (2560) then it probably means that C1 has to render the full resolution JPEG each and every time you move a slider.

The short term fix would be to extend the thumbnails on the right / bottom and make the preview image smaller on the screen. See if that works?

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VirtualRain

February 11, 2015 02:15

Thanks... I tried your suggestion, and I tried resizing the window to try different viewer image sizes. With my preview set to 2880, you would expect the refresh rate of adjustments to be pretty good as long as the viewer area was less than that. Sadly, the performance doesn't really pickup until I resize the viewer until it's under 2000 pixels. It really makes no sense. Maybe it's all optimized for standard 1440p displays? They really need to do some testing on 4K and 5K screens.

Support has been little help other than advising me to turn off OpenCL (really? why is it there then?) and reduce my preview image size (which didn't help at all and makes no sense on such a large high-density display). None of these makes any difference. The only thing that does make a difference is resizing the Capture One window to be small enough that it would fit within a normal 1440p display.

I'm going to hold off purchasing for now, and see if they address this in the near future - it's an expensive piece of software for it to be performing like a dog on my screens. I'll stick with Aperture a bit longer I guess.

Thanks to everyone that chimed in... much appreciated.

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N Belll

February 11, 2015 17:40

While I occasionally notice interface lags, it isn't very often. I am using a MacBook Air i7 dual core 1.7GHz machine which only has integrated graphics and 8GB RAM, and I run it on two displays, the built-in and a 20" external monitor.

Given the extra horsepower of your Mac Pro I can only imagine it is the high res displays doing this. Obviously a fast drive with your image files on (I have them on internal SSD) is going to be crucial (as it is for Aperture, LR etc), plus as much available RAM as you can. Working with reasonably-sized previews is definitely advisable (I use 2560px), and provided that Open CL hardware acceleration isn't causing problems then it should be helping.

One question, I'm assuming that after importing 500 RAWs you allowed CO8 to do all its background tasks generating previews etc before you started playing with it? With 500 that will take a few minutes. This is one thing where I agree with one of the other replies, both importing and exporting images seems to take longer than Aperture. General UI handling though, I don't see anything of concern.

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VirtualRain

February 11, 2015 17:54

For viewer refresh rate making adjustments... I'm fairly certain Capture One is not optimized for high pixel density displays like 4K and 5K. As I've said, I can get smooth adjustment performance if I resize the window to something more like 2560x1440. Of course, I didn't buy 4K displays to run my software at 2560x1440. So for now, I'll be holding off buying C1 and wait and see if Phase One can do some optimization here. Aperture runs very smooth on 4K displays so it's something that definitely CAN be fixed.

As for importing photos... I also tested this. I created a DMG of the CF card contents and put it on my Mac Pro SSD to eliminate the performance of the import media as much as possible. I then imported all 500 photos with half-sized previews (2880px) in both Aperture and C1. It took around 14min in either case. So both applications require the same amount of time to import.

I'm still not convinced that OpenCL acceleration does anything. Is it possibly just a placebo? Has anyone confirmed it does something? If so, how? I'd like someone to give me a way to verify it. What is a task I can do with OpenCL enabled/disabled that will actually show a difference? So far, nothing I've done indicates it has any impact on performance.

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Grant Hodgeon

February 11, 2015 18:19

[quote="VirtualRain" wrote:

I'm still not convinced that OpenCL acceleration does anything. Is it possibly just a placebo? Has anyone confirmed it does something? If so, how? I'd like someone to give me a way to verify it. What is a task I can do with OpenCL enabled/disabled that will actually show a difference? So far, nothing I've done indicates it has any impact on performance.

As I already stated previously it helps tremendously with exporting images. It's easy to benchmark something like that but Phase-One haven't been very receptive/communicative with regards to other ways of benchmarking performance (rendering previews for example).

You can easily batch process the images with and without OpenCL enabled and check the time-stamps of the first and last file, split the difference and you should be able to work out what performance increase (or decrease) enabling OpenCL will give you.

In the mean time, don't hold your breath for any real headway with your requests/tests. Capture One is an old ship and it seems to move slow. Performance increases with new releases comes in the single percentage digits unfortunately. The people are great and I've had extremely quick replies to my support tickets but once they've acknowledged your feature request/bug report it seems to just disappear into another department and there's never any feedback beyond that.

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SFA

February 11, 2015 18:41

[quote="VirtualRain" wrote:
Aperture runs very smooth on 4K displays so it's something that definitely CAN be fixed.

I would agree that it is something that can be DEVELOPED.

Bear in mind that Apple have a a head start (or should have) with hardware since they know what they are introducing and clearly must support it or they have no market. Adobe, most likely being a monolith of the repro graphics market that will adopt anything Apple throws to them, will also want to be very much up with the game and preferably ahead of it.

Phase is a somewhat small company and really needs to assess demand for larger display performance support along with everything else that people are asking for. Things may take a little longer to develop to the point at which they are seen as fit for purpose and can be released.

Grant

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VirtualRain

February 11, 2015 18:43

[quote="photoGrant" wrote:
[quote="VirtualRain" wrote:

I'm still not convinced that OpenCL acceleration does anything. Is it possibly just a placebo? Has anyone confirmed it does something? If so, how? I'd like someone to give me a way to verify it. What is a task I can do with OpenCL enabled/disabled that will actually show a difference? So far, nothing I've done indicates it has any impact on performance.

As I already stated previously it helps tremendously with exporting images. It's easy to benchmark something like that but Phase-One haven't been very receptive/communicative with regards to other ways of benchmarking performance (rendering previews for example).

You can easily batch process the images with and without OpenCL enabled and check the time-stamps of the first and last file, split the difference and you should be able to work out what performance increase (or decrease) enabling OpenCL will give you.

In the mean time, don't hold your breath for any real headway with your requests/tests. Capture One is an old ship and it seems to move slow. Performance increases with new releases comes in the single percentage digits unfortunately. The people are great and I've had extremely quick replies to my support tickets but once they've acknowledged your feature request/bug report it seems to just disappear into another department and there's never any feedback beyond that.

Ah, yeah, thanks... I haven't got to exporting yet, so will try that out and see what happens.

I'm sad to hear that performance improvements are few and far between, but not surprised.

I think Phase One has a big opportunity to capture business from departing Aperture users like myself, but they are competing with Lightroom which has a larger presence and is more affordable (at least on a perpetual license basis) so they need to offers something compelling. I like the initial RAW render in C1, but the NR is poor compared to LR and the rest is pretty much a wash. Performance is one area where C1 could really stand out if they choose.

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VirtualRain

February 11, 2015 18:48

[quote="SFA" wrote:
[quote="VirtualRain" wrote:
Aperture runs very smooth on 4K displays so it's something that definitely CAN be fixed.

I would agree that it is something that can be DEVELOPED.

Bear in mind that Apple have a a head start (or should have) with hardware since they know what they are introducing and clearly must support it or they have no market. Adobe, most likely being a monolith of the repro graphics market that will adopt anything Apple throws to them, will also want to be very much up with the game and preferably ahead of it.

Phase is a somewhat small company and really needs to assess demand for larger display performance support along with everything else that people are asking for. Things may take a little longer to develop to the point at which they are seen as fit for purpose and can be released.

Grant

I think Phase One is doing an awesome job in competing with Adobe. A lot of Apple fans like myself, are turned off by the Lightroom interface, so C1 has that working in their favour along with great image quality. If they can steal the performance crown on Macs with large displays like the hot selling iMac with 5K display and the growing number of people with 2013 Mac Pros with 4K displays, they have another significant competitive advantage.

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Grant Hodgeon

February 11, 2015 18:55

[quote="VirtualRain" wrote:
[quote="photoGrant" wrote:
[quote="VirtualRain" wrote:

I'm still not convinced that OpenCL acceleration does anything. Is it possibly just a placebo? Has anyone confirmed it does something? If so, how? I'd like someone to give me a way to verify it. What is a task I can do with OpenCL enabled/disabled that will actually show a difference? So far, nothing I've done indicates it has any impact on performance.

As I already stated previously it helps tremendously with exporting images. It's easy to benchmark something like that but Phase-One haven't been very receptive/communicative with regards to other ways of benchmarking performance (rendering previews for example).

You can easily batch process the images with and without OpenCL enabled and check the time-stamps of the first and last file, split the difference and you should be able to work out what performance increase (or decrease) enabling OpenCL will give you.

In the mean time, don't hold your breath for any real headway with your requests/tests. Capture One is an old ship and it seems to move slow. Performance increases with new releases comes in the single percentage digits unfortunately. The people are great and I've had extremely quick replies to my support tickets but once they've acknowledged your feature request/bug report it seems to just disappear into another department and there's never any feedback beyond that.

Ah, yeah, thanks... I haven't got to exporting yet, so will try that out and see what happens.

I'm sad to hear that performance improvements are few and far between, but not surprised.

I think Phase One has a big opportunity to capture business from departing Aperture users like myself, but they are competing with Lightroom which has a larger presence and is more affordable (at least on a perpetual license basis) so they need to offers something compelling. I like the initial RAW render in C1, but the NR is poor compared to LR and the rest is pretty much a wash. Performance is one area where C1 could really stand out if they choose.

To be honest I've never used Capture One beyond an ingest tool for Photographers on set. It's beneficial for single jobs (sessions) but their catalog system isn't quite there, yet. I'd personally either store my photos on an individual job by job basis using a Session or toss everything in Lightroom post-shoot.

Even Apple's new Photos app is screaming fast when it comes to browsing images in the library. And that's holding (albeit JPG's) about 12,000 images. I've yet to receive a satisfactory technical explanation as to why UI performance is so bad with Capture One. I'm not entitled to an explanation but as an advanced user and abuser of the software on a daily basis, it's a little disheartening.

There were significant improvements with performance from V7 to V8 but it's still akin to putting a band-aid on a shotgun wound. There's plenty of room still for improvement.

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Grant Hodgeon

February 11, 2015 19:01

[quote="SFA" wrote:

Phase is a somewhat small company and really needs to assess demand for larger display performance support along with everything else that people are asking for. Things may take a little longer to develop to the point at which they are seen as fit for purpose and can be released.

Grant

There's nothing to 'assess' with regards to demand. We've been rocking Retina Macbook Pro's for a while. Way prior to a 4K/UHD Display beyond 15". Large, high-resolution displays are becoming more and more popular every day. I've even got non-technical clients asking me for my 4K Display on set.

Performance should always be priority No. 1. And we've had high-resolution displays long-enough now that this shouldn't really be a problem, or at the very least should be officially acknowledged with steps to improve performance (that doesn't include the insane idea of shrinking your window down on your screen.)

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Christian Gruner

February 12, 2015 08:12

Rest assured that we of course will deal with the display-performance issues people can experience when using UHD/4k/5k monitors.
We are currently looking into the issues, and how to fix them.

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Andrew Mumford

February 12, 2015 23:19

Christian - in "looking into the issues" could you please make sure you demo C1 vs Aperture in the area of cropping and rotation as well - Aperture seems to consistently be able to achieve absolutely "smooth" and instantaneous results without any lag, C1 has always been laggy / slow regardless of what size screen you are looking at !

I also know that Aperture never drops back to the RAW file unless it absolutely has too - the same general scheme as in C1 so it's hard too understand why we should not to be able to enjoy similar performance on the same hardware.

Maybe it's and issue with Trolltech and QT in general but if so I wish support would be more open about it.

Thx

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hifimacianer

November 02, 2015 10:40

Are there any news regarding this Topic?
I'm going to buy a 5k iMac soon, and want to be sure that C1 performs good on it.

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Eric Nepean

November 02, 2015 11:41

Before you make up your mind on just the speed of image editing, be sure you also check the speed of catalog management as well. Some of us are seeing some significant performance issue with catalogs over 10,000 images, involving any functions which span the entire catalog.

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hifimacianer

November 02, 2015 13:01

Tanks for your hint.

But I'll work with sessions anyway.
I use C1 only for certain "projects" like travelling trips, weddings or stuff like that.
Everything where I shoot RAW. Then I export to jpg and organize all of my pictures in Apples Photos App.
The RAW sessions are saved on a NAS as my "negatives Images" after the editing.

For my everyday/random pictures I keep on shooting in JPG, because my Fuji X-t1 has a really good jpg engine, and Apples Photos is just fine for some minor adjustments.

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Permanently deleted user

November 02, 2015 14:19

Do you run your Mac Pro in a scaled display resolution or native? Check it in OS X System settings and check 'default for display'. Shouldn't you run it in native resolution then that's your problem with C1P. As soon as you scale (so that fonts, etc. in OS X overall look bigger) the display settings in OS X you get C1P running laggy. You need the OS X system settings to be set to 'default for display'. That's the trick. I had this figured out together with C1 support a couple of month ago.

I don't have any performance issues on the very same system except that I have a NEC 4k UHD display (OpenCL turned on in C1P, but no difference when turned off either).

In C1P I choose the preview image size to be identical to the max display resolution of my NEC display which is 3840x. I keep my C1P database on the 1TB internal drive and have my 46k+ mostly RAW files (Nikon D810, Leica Q, etc.) on a Thunderbolt attached Promise Pegasus R4.

I am very happy with running C1P with that setup and it performs nicely.

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hifimacianer

November 02, 2015 14:34

[quote="AndyE" wrote:
Do you run your Mac Pro in a scaled display resolution or native? Check it in OS X System settings and check 'default for display'. Shouldn't you run it in native resolution then that's your problem with C1P. As soon as you scale (so that fonts, etc. in OS X overall look bigger) the display settings in OS X you get C1P running laggy. You need the OS X system settings to be set to 'default for display'. That's the trick. I had this figured out together with C1 support a couple of month ago.

What do you mean with "native Resolution"? The full 5k resolution, or the default setting in OSX?
I don't have a 5k iMac yet, but I've seen that it doesn't Display the native 5k resolution, because it would be impossible to read any App menus then. So OSX scales by default to a good mix between sharpness and readability. Is it that what you mean? The default OSX setting?

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