For Professionals: Using a Macbook Pro as workstation + Discussion on photo back-up and redundancy

[Wayne]

Jackie,
I have the new 2011 MBP, and the new Thunderbolt port (Intel lightspeed) is the answer to some of these issues and the main reason for me upgrading from my 3 month old 2010 MBP. Just waiting on Lacie to release their little big disk product which should be anytime now.
Check it out..

[JM Tran]

Jackie,
I have the new 2011 MBP, and the new Thunderbolt port (Intel lightspeed) is the answer to some of these issues and the main reason for me upgrading from my 3 month old 2010 MBP. Just waiting on Lacie to release their little big disk product which should be anytime now.
Check it out..

oh I know all about Thunderbolt and the opportunities and doors it can open, but currently there are no cameras or many devices that has Thunderbolt so its just a matter of waiting and waiting I guess.

Would have loved to used the Pentax 645D with a major commercial shoot last week shooting tethered, but after using one for work untethered, a 10 shot sequence on location took over 3 minutes to finish on the card, that was with one of the fastest SD cards around too. The stupid thing about the Pentax is that it has only USB2.0 for shooting tethered, I cant imagine making the magazine editor, designer, make up artist and hair stylist sit in front of the comp and wait god knows how long for at over half a gig from 10 shots to finish loading onto Lightroom! But in the future, high end cameras with Thunderbolt data transfer would be a godsend for pros and amateurs alike, hopefully filter down onto lesser models too.

[arthurking83]

..... a 10 shot sequence on location took over 3 minutes to finish on the card, that was with one of the fastest SD cards around too. The stupid thing about the Pentax is that it has only USB2.0 for shooting tethered....

* The card transfer speed is an issue with the card type, not the camera itself.
if the card specs only allow for a slower(than CF card) transfer rate, then the camera really only need to comply with that rate of data exchange.. and not really any faster(although a faster camera transfer rate would be an advantage from a future proofing standpoint)
* To me this is perfectly understandable from an engineering standpoint.
ALSO!! You really need to take the amount of data available in each file into consideration as well! A 645D DNG file is over 60Meg large!! Even the jpg files it generates are nearly 20Meg, so this notion that it took over 3mins to transfer 10 images and that it seems to be slow(jpg shooting or raw?).. put that into perspective.. that's 600Megs of images being transferred via SD card transfer rate technology.

* While we know that a D3s or a 1DMk4 will always have an advantage in terms of transfer speeds, this is not only attributed to the camera alone. The use of SD card is the real culprit.
* Maybe Pentax should have used a CF and SD card slot format? Makes the most sense to me, as any professional currently using a large sensor DSLR and thinking of migrating to an even larger sensor format at a reasonable cost, woudl have many CF cards at their disposal. Pentax's reasoning is introverted and convoluted! They should have been also marketing themselves to the CaNikon pros as well!

* As far as I'm aware, there are no cameras with any port type that is significantly faster than USB2.
That is, I know of no camera, video nor still, that uses either eSATA or USB3 port types. And look at firewire and what happened to that! What joke that was.

* The Thunderbolt has to also be taken into context as well. While it sounds really uber chic and cool to read the specs and think of a better/brighter future, I'm sure the reality will be more like halve it and then halve it again for real world use.
The real way it works is:
Manufacturers keep adding needless and uneccessary pixels onto their camera's sensors at the design stage, with the end result that each image carries far more data than the previous generation technology did.
So by the time this Thunderbolt IO port becomes a reality, and mature enough to actually work at this half and half again transfer rate, a camera's image file is going to be upwards of 100Meg anyhow, thus offsetting the shorter time requirement in transferring to the PC, with more data being transferred.
If it takes 3mins to transfer a single 30Meg file at 1Gb/s, then transferring a 100Meg file at 3Gb/s will still take 3mins!

I'm afraid that your editor, MUA, hairstylist, designer and barista are all going to still require some level of patience for the files to transfer across to the PC.

[JM Tran]

* The card transfer speed is an issue with the card type, not the camera itself.
if the card specs only allow for a slower(than CF card) transfer rate, then the camera really only need to comply with that rate of data exchange.. and not really any faster(although a faster camera transfer rate would be an advantage from a future proofing standpoint)
* To me this is perfectly understandable from an engineering standpoint.
ALSO!! You really need to take the amount of data available in each file into consideration as well! A 645D DNG file is over 60Meg large!! Even the jpg files it generates are nearly 20Meg, so this notion that it took over 3mins to transfer 10 images and that it seems to be slow(jpg shooting or raw?).. put that into perspective.. that's 600Megs of images being transferred via SD card transfer rate technology.

you forgot to mention the size/speed of the camera buffer as well Arthur, the Pentax has an abysmal buffer and also hampers the data write speed.

Maybe Pentax should have used a CF and SD card slot format? Makes the most sense to me, as any professional currently using a large sensor DSLR and thinking of migrating to an even larger sensor format at a reasonable cost, woudl have many CF cards at their disposal. Pentax's reasoning is introverted and convoluted! They should have been also marketing themselves to the CaNikon pros as well!

I definitely agree 200% with you on that, I saw no reason why Pentax limited itself to dual SD card slots when the camera is for pros, and we all know that CF card is way faster. Shot themselves in the foot with that one.

As far as I'm aware, there are no cameras with any port type that is significantly faster than USB2.
That is, I know of no camera, video nor still, that uses either eSATA or USB3 port types. And look at firewire and what happened to that! What joke that was.

a lot of the older higher end DSLRs such as 1D bodies and some recent medium formats have firewire capability and is greatly appreciated by users and myself.

BUT, the best thing about your post - is that it finally has dot points/proper paragraphs, and is more concise and easier to read! YAYYYYYYY! hahahaha

[arthurking83]

you forgot to mention the size/speed of the camera buffer as well Arthur, the Pentax has an abysmal buffer and also hampers the data write speed.

Memory buffer is trivial compared to the max speed of the card interface.

That is, if the card supported maximum speeds are only 10Mb/s, then having a larger buffer still means that the card will take those 3mins to write too!
Buffer is only a factor for when shooting quickly, not writing to card. Buffer has no impact on card writing performance.

That's why I didn't mention the buffer size and speed.

The buffer only has to handle as much bandwidth as the sensor can push out for a given timeframe.
Again, while the specs may read 'abysmal' sounding from a marketing guff point of view, the reality is all that really counts.
If the camera can only sustain 1fps then the buffer really only needs to be capable of clearing 60Mb/s(which is actually quite a lot of data really!)
Silly Pentax should have gone with a SD + CF card format, migrating to this new CFast format as it eventually evolves.

Anyhow.. simple maths shows up that even with an even slower than 60Mb/s buffer bandwidth, the SD card's current max write speed is still a major bottleneck, not the buffer itself.

.....
BUT, the best thing about your post - is that it finally has dot points/proper paragraphs ......

who me? .. now why would I do such an obviously silly thing like that?