Performance Capture One 21 folder change
Hello together
I am considering switching from Adobe Lightroom 6 to Capture One 21 Pro. What I like is that Capture One offers a non-subscription version, personalization options and editing results. Less I like the performance and price adjustment as of 11/01/2021.
But now to my question.
To manage family images (.RAW (.RAF) & .JPG) I work with a large catalog and mainly year and vacation folders. I don't consider Sessions a successful alternative for my needs, as I like to have all my images managed in one catalog.
But now I have noticed that Capture One 21 (Windows 10 Pro) is sometimes extremely slow.
In particular, a switch between "my year folders (2020)" in the "library" is extremely slow compared to Lightroom. It takes what feels like forever until the images are loaded in the preview, even though preview images were initially created. I notice the same behavior in the filters.
Comparison
Lightroom 6 <1 second vs. Capture One 21 <6 seconds to >60seconds
In Lightroom 6 I manage about 13,000 images / 1000 video.
Change year folder and update filters <1 second.
Test Capture One 21 I manage about 3,000 images / 1000 video.
Initial change per year folder and update of the filters after first opening of Capture One after restart >60 second.
Further change per year folder and update of filters <6 second
I have also uninstalled Capture One several times and created a new Catalog. Initially CO even crashed constantly
Finally, it should be noted that the comparison was made with Lightroom version 6.14 from 2015 and with the latest version of Capture One.
Under the current circumstances, I would probably want to stick with Adobe, but I can't explain this performance as usual.
- Can you explain this performance and do you have any tips on how I can improve that?
- Is this a general Capture One Windows issue that does not occur on Mac?
Thanks for your support!
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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Mikael,
Am I right to understand that you have 1000 videos in the catalog?
As an experiment, if you remove the videos from the catalog (whether inside the catalog or referenced externally) does that change anything for you performance measurements?
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Hello SFA
Thank you for your quick query.Yes, that is correct. About 1'000 smaller videos (130GB), the majority of which are not sorted out yet. I haven't looked for/found a simple video management tool yet, or haven't bothered with it yet. In the foreground were the pictures, which already make enough work. :-)
I have now removed the videos once completely from the catalog and restarted CO.
Result: no improvement
After that I optimized the catalog.
Result: no improvementThis is really sobering. Basically I like CO very much, but I can't work like this.
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I assume when you say "per year folder" that this is a dynamic smart album? Or a physical folder on your HD?
Regardless, unlikely that we can figure this out here without going to town about your computer config etc. I do notice that C21 is currently a bit slower/unstable in relation to hardware acceleration with the GPU involved - but athat probably has no effect on your scenario. And I am a session person, so i mostly work in session, so i have no good idea about catalogue performance. Happy to try though - tell me about smart vs hard paths, and i just suck 20K pictures in and see what happes. Sessions with 3-5K of pictures though work fine with me.
I would recommend to open a support ticket. There might be a bug, there might a workaround.
Frank
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Hello Frank
Thank you very much for your answer. It is indeed physical folders on my hard drive and not smart albums. I would be very curious about your attempt. Thanks for the offer!
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Ok, so i created a new catalog, and i am importing around 13K images into it. The first thing i noticed is how "resource starved" this process is. The CPU is barely sitting at 15%, the disks are at 0-1% usage. I wish that could be tweaked, this could go a lot faster by giving this a higher priority.
I started with a catalog of ~3000 images and it felt fine, so I thought, I do have one of the fastest windows PCs Money can assemble, so let's bump this up. Added another 4K images, and browsing after a restart still seemed fine. So i added another 40K images.
What i noticed is that importing images from a supported RAW file format (Fuji XT3) was really fast, where importing the around 3K DNG files from the Nikon Z7II took pretty much as long as the other 40K.... Interesting side observation. Importing supported raw files also used a lot more CPU (up to 50%) - so i assume what is happening is that CaptureOne calls out to AdobeDNG processor for the DNG files, and that is just taken longer (cross process and all that jazz).
I ended up with a catalogue with 44K pictures. Worked fine after the import, so i close CaptureOne and restart it. Right click on "In Catalog" and expand the folder hierarchy.
No matter what folder i click on, it's prettty much instant, beside the folders that contain DNG files, there the browser bar takes ~1sec to show me the previews.
When i click on "All images" it takes a bit (1min?2min) to update all the rating and colortag etc fields. But finding the 7 crocodile pictures from Krueger Nationalpark (yes, there were times we could travel, how I miss that), is instant again.
So i am happy to say, that it's not a generic problem. As i said above, i have a fast system: AMD Threadripper with 24cores, PCI 4.0 SSD cards, 64GB of Ram. But, if i see instant and your system is 3x as slow (as an example) - that should not be 60sec wait times then.
The question is to figure out what in your system might make capture one stall. When you are waiting for 60sec, what is going on Taskmanager? (i am suspecting some stupid antivirus software or similar).
Frank
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Capture One has severe performance issues with catalogs and larger folders. I've reported it back in the C1 v10 beta days and again 5 months ago but aside from getting messages about how busy their support people are, nothing has happened.
I have my catalog on a NAS drive and when I traced what requests the NAS is getting, it looked like C1 was trying to open every file in the folder which takes increasing amounts of time as the folder gets larger. I have no clue why they choose to do this as they do have a database they could query to get the answers from which would be much faster.
Martin
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Martin,
i don’t think your statement is true in general (as long as large is not substantially larger than 40K images).
The files in a catalogue are normally external, so if you move to a folder in your catalogue, the software needs to verify that what it has stored in the database matches what is in the folder. That is most likely the reason for what you are observing on your NAS.
I use a NAS as well, but only as a backup. The speed (I only have a 1gb network here) is just not fast enough. Consider this: the data transfer of the NAS with 1GB is around 100MB a second. On my local SSD it is 4GB a sec, that’s 40x faster. The latency (time to get to the file) is probably on the order of 100x or more faster (pending what’s going on your network). So just iterating over all the files in that folder on the NAS vs local can result in a big difference.
I had a support ticket about this once, and using a NAS as your primary source is not recommended if you care about a speedy workflow.
Frank
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Hi Frank,
Thanks for your response. My NAS is on a 10GB link and while the latency is higher than on a local SSD, the reality is that the 50,000 or so images in my catalog won’t fit on an internal SSD. I’m not even complaining about the actual size of the catalog, but rather that a folder within that catalog of 900-1000 images can take 30 seconds to open, never mind a folder with 3000 images where you can get a coffee while you wait. Once C1 has done its housekeeping, it is certainly fast enough for editing. I understand C1 may want to synchronize what’s in the folder with what’s in its catalog, but once I’ve imported images from the folder I’m generally not changing the the contents of that folder so there isn’t a need to spend time on expensive operations that aren’t necessary. I’m certainly not changing the RAW files, so there really isn’t much point in opening each of them to see if they have changed. If C1 wants to see what’s new, do a directory scan and deal with files you haven’t seen before or delete the ones that are no longer there. I believe there is already a synchronize folder operation than I could invoke if I wanted to ensure things are in sync.
Martin
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Thank you for your answers.
I'll come back to my comparison, which took place at the same time and under identical conditions.
I currently do not have the images on the internal SSD, but on a 4TB internal HDD.
Yes, I know that the SSD would be faster. The reason is that I sync my images and Lightroom catalog with Dropbox. However, I'll refrain from elaborating on the subject.
Comparison
Lightroom 6 <1 second vs. Capture One 21 <6 seconds to >60secondsIn Lightroom 6 I manage about 13,000 images / 1000 video.
Change year folder and update filters <1 second.Test Capture One 21 I manage about 3,000 images / 1000 video.
Initial change per year folder and update of the filters after first opening of Capture One after restart >60 second. Further change per year folder and update of filters <6 secondCPU: 14-17%
RAM: 19-22%
HDD: 18-21%
GPU 5%
So I can confirm the problems described by Martin Renters.
Conclusion on Windows: Lightroom 6 (version of 2015) to cope with the conditions, which Capture One 21 (from 2021 vers. 14.0.2.36) does not.
Too bad... I hope Capture One puts the extra revenue after the recent price adjustment into improving such performance issues. That could then finally pay off. Bye CO my trial version expires in 9 days. We may find ourselves in 2022.
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I have a catalog that contains 26000 images. The catalog is on a local ssd disk, the images are on my NAS. It takes CO about 1 hour to load it and be completely searchable. I also have a MediaPro catalog, which has the same configuration, the database on the local ssd disk and the images are the same images on my NAS, It loads an is completely searchable in about 2 minutes. The difference I see is that CO verifies that each individual file is present on the NAS, which is competely useless. It should just load the previews and only access the original image when you want to do some editing or viewing that can't be done off-line. Just like MediaPro, you always view the preview untill you want to show it full screen, than it shows the preview first and load the original image in the background
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C1 opens the catalog very, very slowly compared to any other program I have or have tried. For me the next version will be worth 0 euros unless they fix that.
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I think I have a similar problem. I wanted to switch from Lightroom to CO, but I can't load the data from NAS. I want to add the structure to the catalog in CO, but when I confirm sync nothing happens. No photo from folders or subfolders will load.
I noticed that in the folder sync dialog a wheel is spinning. It looks like CO is going through the entire NAS and gradually adding new photos to import. But still when I confirm the sync nothing happens.
I probably have to wait a few hours for everything to load and then confirm the sync, I don't know.
Currently, switching to CO is impossible if CO can't load photos from NAS.
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