Thoughts on best Mac OS for Capture One 21
Hi
Curious on anyone's thoughts to the best Mac OS to run the newest 14.3.1 of Capture One 21. Is it Big Sur, Catalina, or Mojave?
Very recently, I upgraded from Capture One 12 and I think High Sierra, to Capture One 21 and Catalina on my old Mac Pro desktop 2013 model and (I am trying Mojave and C21 on my laptop). I was worried to go straight to Big Sur as I read something on the forums or tech page that Big Sur wasn't fully compatible with C21, but I think that info is old now.
However, the transition to C21 hasn't really been smooth. I shoot tethered and very fast with sometimes 100mp files from Fuji GFX. I can do 2000-3000 a day. So I am really pushing the limits and have been for years. Also, I have my fashion clients are right at the computer and noticing more lag than before. But I am also getting freezes now, where I can't even open force quit. That didn't happen before. This was during tethering and shooting fast. Also, I got freezes while exporting. I turned off Hardware Acceleration as I think I read that on Capture One's technical page and that seemed to help with most of the freezes, but I think I would like to be able to turn that back on to get faster output. One of my tests showed exporting with Hardware Acceleration on was like twice as fast. I didn't test if Hardware Acceleration speeds up my tethering lag. Anyone know if that helps? In preferences I see Hardware Acceleration for Display and processing. Not sure if Display helps generate previews faster when tethering.
I have been trying to experiment and take shots as fast as I can and check loading times, but I am not really confident. My Mac Pro is pretty old but 3.5 Ghz. I see on my activity monitor that when I am tethering and shooting, I am getting 400-600% CPU usage. My Mac Pro is only 6 cores, so that is all the power it has and I sometimes can't press my shutter button for a moment as it catches up. I know a solution is to shoot slower, but my work only allows that sometimes. I also plan to buy a new system, but I believe I should invest in the new M chip systems and want to wait for a more pro version, maybe the M1x or M2 as one might come out by the end of this year with more cores than 8, and more RAM than 16. I am concerned that while the new Intel macs are great, I want to get a new system that will work for several years and I don't trust Mac or the programs to support Intel Macs for more than 2+ years. I have watched a dozen Youtue videos on bench marks and speed.
I am interested in anyone's experience or thoughts. Don't worry if you are not super technical (or are!). I am just hoping to find the best combo, solid performance and smoother sailing.
Thanks!
Michael
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I'm not an expert, neither in latest hardware of Mac and Fuji, nor in best fitting software. Capture One is in various parts not a very solid, convincing, well made app to me. But if I'd be depending in a reliable connection of Mac and camera, I think I would run some tests for myself and try to shop at trusted sellers providing kind of backup solutions if things go terribly wrong. Bare in mind Capture One once was made for Phase One and your GFX is a direct competition. In terms of Intel vs. M1 I only can say, my new MacBook Air M1 was a huge step up from my maybe only 3 years old MBA intel.
How about that suggestion: Keep your old MacPro as trusted backup system (3.5 GHz doesn't mean a lot in comparison to a completely new concept which appears to need less RAM as it's processing faster). Get a MacMini, do some endurance testing and later on sell that once you found out how well (or bad) it's performing with your GFX. At that time Apple might have updated their cheese-grater and I suspect the Mini already will make look your Mac Pro even more dated as the new Mini is better optimized to Big Sur and C1 than your older machine ever will be.
Also, as you only can find out how well a new Mac Pro will work by working with it, you'd already have the next backup system (the Mini) ready. One can simply not foresee the future and guesswork is guessing - not "working".
And I even didn't ask "who needs 450GB of pictures per day?". Apparently at least one person/company does.
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I can give you two answers.
The former, as an amateur photographer, won't be much useful. I don't use tethering, which excludes a bunch of potential troubles, and so far I didn't experience any particular software problem with C1 since late 2017, when I started using it. At the moment I'm running macOS Big Sur 11.5.1.
The latter answer, as software engineer with 25+ years of experience (after the degree, longer including my earlier experience), is that o.s. upgrades are getting more and more troublesome. Often they break some function with the applications I use (I'm talking of the ones I use for my job). So since a few years I took the habit of keeping the previous laptop so I can test macOS upgrades on it before applying to the main laptop. This is somewhat expensive (in terms of time - that is money - and I can't sell my previous laptop; furthermore in some way I have to still pay for maintenance), but I believe it's the only effective way to reasonably reduce surprises and mitigate risks.
Indeed recent macOSes have features that allow stepping back from an update, but in some way they still introduce a risk. So working with two laptops for me is the best approach.
Another approach, trying to live with a single laptop, could be using Virtual Machines (VMWare Fusion allows to virtualise macOS), but it's complex, troublesome, less effective and you can't be sure that at some point it stops working.
PS Honestly I keep the previous laptop also to have an immediately available spare in case of hardware failure, or equipment theft, or such; but this is another story.
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