Improve C1P's exporting performance as it does not use all CPU powers. Merged

I checked the Windows Task Manager and figured out the GPU 3D and Computer_0 utilization. Then I updated to the latest display card driver. I exported another batch of 150 RAW to JPG and it took less than 7 min, it was much faster (and should be normal speed). My current display driver was not so old actually, it was around 6 months ago. Don't know why I can't upload two png/jpg here, the individual and total sizes are just 150kb, it always prompted me the limit are 2MB.....

BTW, I noticed that after I updated the display driver and restarted Windows and launched C1 22 Pro. I saw the progress bar to notify me sth related to "hardware acceleration" for around 10 min.

15698819621405 - I wonder whether it makes any difference if you export those 120 images a few at a time (perhaps in 6 batches of 20)? Also where are you exporting them to? A location on an internal drive or on an external drive?

Ian

I have the same issue with my AMD Ryzen 7 3700x 8-core CPU with 32GB RAM, GeForce GTX 950/2GB, Windows 10. It takes 1 hour 20 min to export 120 Sony A74 RAW files to JPG with 300 dpi/inch. Hardware acceleration is already in use.

I came to the forum to make a feature request of optimising C1 for the various Apple Silicon chips, so more cores means better performance but I guess this request post is the same, albeit is mainly around exporting.

Firstly I have no idea how the technicalities work, or restrictions for that matter, but I believe more cores on a chip means software can run faster if it is optimised for the particular chip? I understand. A is not optimised for M* by standard, Pro, Max, Ultra etc but if it’s technically possible to do so then could that be done please? It would be likely to speed up everything from import and culling through editing to export. Currently M1 Max on Mac Studio with 5k studio display, love to be able to take advantage of that Max with m main software!

368893178297

Just for the record, Brian is not affiliated with C1, he is so kind to moderate this forum in his spare time.

Bye.

Alright, David.  I tried to offer come constructive help but you seem more interested in tossing outrage than trying to fix your export time problem.  Best of luck to you.

Brian Jordan/

LrC.  You see all those boxes shaded gray?  You can't select those. 

That's because it's a LR presets that you are NOT gonna use it forever. You need to make your own presets or recipe. Did you even try it? Clearly, you did not.

Some advice from someone who's been doing photography **and** software for a long, long time?  Stop using compressed RAW files (.raf).  Apple doesn't support them so Capture One has to fall back on internal processing instead of offloading that onto the OS.  That could be part of your problem and that's not on Capture One.  Fuss at Apple about that one.

Doesn't solve the problem as others proved it. If not, how come YouTube I showed from above proves that LR Classic is still faster than C1P with Nikon RAW? 

Some more advice?  Who cares what some author says?  Two ways to get eyeballs on articles and videos - outrage and quality.  Quality is hard.  Who cares what someone writes?  Instead of leaning into the outrage, try to solve the problem.  If I'm getting the performance I am out of a base MBP, I'll go way out on a limb and say there's something in your setup causing your performance issues.  Seriously, if Capture One were 5 times slower than LrC, don't you think every YouTuber and blogger out there would be posting banners for the clicks?  Seriously, think about it.  What a headline that would be!  I bet Adobe would love to sponsor those videos.

Wow, seriously wow. He is a professional digitechs for a long time and we have our own community in terms of PA and digitech. If this is how C1P treats users, then I'm heavily disappointed. The reason why people dont know about this is because nobody but few tested it. Beside, the performance is just a tip of the iceberg. Did C1P even fixed bugs and issues? How about features we asked? Did they even listen instead of ignoring? Btw, he wrote a letter after C1P started to disappoint a lot of people in a large scale and you seem to be very stubborn with the current situation.If the quality is hard, how come the quality is bad? This is such a toxic community and I'm seeing a lot of users complaining and yet you and others staffs aren't really listening after all. 

Seriously, this thread only proves how bad C1P is as they aren't serious about what they are doing. At this point, I'm out of this conversation and I'm not taking your poor advices. 

Files were a mix of Sony and Fuji files.  24 - 40 meg.  I wasn't particularly choosy about how many of which one.  Call it 40/60 smaller files to larger files.

LrC.  You see all those boxes shaded gray?  You can't select those.  Your choices are limited whereas in Capture One you can pick and mix recipes to your heart's content.  Now, granted, I use LrC because someone forces me to so maybe I'm missing something.  I'll happily admit I much prefer Capture One and I'd delete LrC if I could.  Don't even get me started on how unstable the whole Lr/LrC catalog is.

Some advice from someone who's been doing photography **and** software for a long, long time?  Stop using compressed RAW files (.raf).  Apple doesn't support them so Capture One has to fall back on internal processing instead of offloading that onto the OS.  That could be part of your problem and that's not on Capture One.  Fuss at Apple about that one.

Some more advice?  Who cares what some author says?  Two ways to get eyeballs on articles and videos - outrage and quality.  Quality is hard.  Who cares what someone writes?  Instead of leaning into the outrage, try to solve the problem.  If I'm getting the performance I am out of a base MBP, I'll go way out on a limb and say there's something in your setup causing your performance issues.  Seriously, if Capture One were 5 times slower than LrC, don't you think every YouTuber and blogger out there would be posting banners for the clicks?  Seriously, think about it.  What a headline that would be!  I bet Adobe would love to sponsor those videos.

Finally, I use Capture One because it does the job I need done.  Every software out there comes with good and bad.  Strengths and weaknesses.  That's just the facts of constrained resources - which every company has.  If export speed is your gig, cool.  Make that your deciding factor.  I use Capture One because I get the images I need processed to the point where I can export them in sooooo much less time and sooooooooooooooooo much easier and, frankly, I like the images better.  Then I hit the export button and, if needed, I go grab a coffee.

Brian Jordan/

I used M1 Max MBP with full specs and the camera was GFX100S but used compressed RAW file. The total amount of images was almost 3000. Approx Web JPEG: 1MB, Full size JPEG: 80MB, TIFF: 300MB but depends on each clients as they have different requirements. I dont know which camera you used but still, that would be almost 150 min or more depends on the camera's RAW size. I mentioned the longest so it does not represent real results but still, it takes longer to export files compared to LR and for production, faster is better.

Personally, I feel this is good performance.  If I were doing this in LrC (I do use LrC frequently, unfortunately), I would have to run 3 separate exports

False, LR can also export multiple presets or recipes at once just like C1P but it's pointless for what I'm claiming but still way faster. 

I'm saying that C1P's exporting performance is clearly slower than LR by 2~5 times. If I can finish the task faster, then I have more free time to do something else while minimize the crash or being unstable. Oh, I guess I didnt mention how unstable C1P is. The author also mentioned that as well. 

379706665017, can you be specific about these exports?  I see nothing like the export times you claim.  As a test, I just exported 1000 RAWs against 3 separate recipes (web JPEG, full size JPEG, TIFF).  The full set (3000 exported files total/130.27 GB total export size) completed in 49 minutes.  2020 MBP M1 Pro 16 gig ram.  RAW files live on and were exported to an external SSD.  Personally, I feel this is good performance.  If I were doing this in LrC (I do use LrC frequently, unfortunately), I would have to run 3 separate exports.  Total time would, I believe, be materially similar.  I'm not going to test to confirm any benchmarks but frequent usage informs may impressions.  I did not check core usage, resource utilization, GPU cycles or anything else.  Frankly, I don't care.  

Specifically, what steps are you taking when you experience these 20 minute export cycles?  How many images?  How many recipes?  Any info you can give might be helpful.  I think people here generally want to help where and how they can.  Even as a long-time Capture One user, I often learn new things through the posts here.  However, I do agree with 369260519517 that more flies are to be caught with sugar than with salt.

Wouldn't it be better if no one blamed no one? What a relaxing prospect. There is really something which I don't understand, and that is not what you believe I don't. I don't understand how people cannot understand that they gain more when being polite. I actually do agree with many points even in the open letter, but it is the tone which puts me off. Hard to understand? So be it.

BeO/

If C1P is well optimized and faster, it will save a lot of free time and reduce overloading from the computer which clearly you miss the point. 5~10 min is twice faster than 10~20 min so why nothing gained? LR is 2~5 times faster than C1P. So if you said nothing gained, then you did NOT understand the point after all. 

I'm totally mad because C1P didn't even try dealing with a lot issues for a long time instead of ignoring feedbacks as the author mentioned from the link. Is that a problem? Deal with it cause I'm not the only one being mad about how C1P treated us. I know this well cause I meet a lot of pros and digitechs in person for several years expressing their angers toward C1P for a while. Literally, they are NOT happy with the current situation which is far from enough. It's better to express anger instead of being silent. 

Beside, since you failed to understand the point from the beginning, who blame who?

The point is

even if C1 was twice as fast you'd have to do that.

So, nothing gained.

Hence, and because your tone against me (and against C1) is rude, no upvote. I suggest you go back to school and learn the rules of etiquette.

BeO/

Believe it or not, that's my point, even if C1 was twice as fast you'd have to do that.

I already explained the process from the beginning and now claiming that it's your point? Gosh...

David,

You DONT export them all at the end

Believe it or not, that's my point, even if C1 was twice as fast you'd have to do that.

prepping for the next look or setup which takes 1~10 min. Since C1P takes 10~20min per folder

Good point, it takes longer to export than to prepare and eventually take and edit the captures (if you edit), which is not ideal.

Finally I understand how export works, thanks so much.

Raymond,

I think you feel you're reporting a bug here and that people are arguing against it. People are not. They're just trying to understand your specific scenario so they can add their support to the request.

Thank you Raymond. 

“Our” ……meeting my expectations pretty well so you might want to rephrase that.

And the letter is interesting, by the way. They should advertise it more since there's not as many signatories as I'd have expected. If the 600+ people who signed it came here and upvoted this feature request, it'd definitely get the company's attention. 

379706665017

OK - I'll leave you to approach problem solving in your own way. Good luck with the open letter (assuming Capture One have read it)!

Raymond Harrison/

As others have indicated, since LrC and C1 are completely different programs, with different code bases and different developers, the bottlenecks may be (will be) in different places.

That's such a poor excuse when LR or Adobe is well known for terrible optimization while Capture One Pro already fundamentally redesign their software after M1 released on May 27th, 2021. Beside, Capture One Pro is way more expensive and yet, their optimization is extremely poor. Exporting requires heavily on CPU cores but C1P barely used 2~3 cores based on my testing. Using GPU didn't really improve the performance and still, LR was way faster. Other YouTuber I mentioned already proven that in terms of actual results. 

https://openletter.earth/open-letter-from-a-digital-technician-to-capture-one-6cca76e8

Believe it or not, C1P heavily criticized especially after 2022 or 2023 from many professionals as they kept failing to satisfied C1P users. We've been requesting many features and improvements for a long time and yet, C1P literally ignored them. Software optimization is just a tip of the iceberg of Capture One Pro's problem and this is not the first time we disappointed toward C1P. I am not the only one complaining about how and what C1P is doing so far. Fixing and improving C1P is already failed and ignored instead of wasting their time on meaningless mobile apps. Is this how they treat professionals? You better read the context from the link above cause quite a lot of digitechs extremely worried about C1P since version 23. 

At this point, it's just a poor excuse as they keep failing to meet our expectations. 

379706665017

You don't have to explain your pain. Everyone gets it. I'm not a digitech and except for knowing it must be very stressful, I don't know what your day is like. Similarly, you won't know what most everyone else's day is like either. I don't think anyone here would disagree with you that Capture One can always use performance improvements, sometimes major. Full stop. Like LrC, too, by the way, and probably in ways you don't encounter in your particular role.

As this is a feature request forum, requests are not time-bound. It doesn't matter that it was 8 months ago that it was requested (or whatever it was) and I think you feel you're reporting a bug here and that people are arguing against it. People are not. They're just trying to understand your specific scenario so they can add their support to the request. I'm sure YouTubers are interesting, sometimes, but it's your numbers on your machine(s) that are important. It's your difference in export times that are important to the discussion. It's understanding how you're measuring apple-apples that are important.

As others have indicated, since LrC and C1 are completely different programs, with different code bases and different developers, the bottlenecks may be (will be) in different places. Spending time here trying to tell people you've never met what they do or don't know isn't a winning formula for getting upvotes, to me. I always find that just being fact-based and outcome-centric, without the drama, is a great approach to getting people on board. This request has 16 or so upvotes. It will possibly need more. That said, I also know that Capture One are always working on performance (e.g. the recent improved preview generation) so maybe just discussion on this thread is enough, who knows? Preview generation has been a long-standing bottleneck and maybe with major work done on that, they can focus more on export timings (which themselves have improved a lot over the last couple of years).

If you feel you have a bug or want to represent this as such, you should file a bug report with as much detauil as you can manage. 

Note that a 100% CPU or GPU usage regime is great in that when a process needs it, it gets the work cycles, but it isn't a measure of efficiency of use of those cycles or a measure (necessarily) of when a process gets done. I can write a process right now that throttles every core (CPU & GPU) but is highly inefficient :-).

Improving the efficiency of exporting is a great feature request. Truly. Let the Capture One team figure out the "how". They're the ones who know the code base. No one here does. 

For what it's worth, LrC is somewhat faster on my machines across a range of export types and camera bodies, and it's down to mostly GPU utilization, other efficiencies and differences in the applications themselves. If there's little to no GPU utilization, but all CPUs are throttled (100%), LrC is appallingly slow. CPU utilization isn't adding much. C1 seems to heavily utilize the efficiency CPU cores but doesn't do much with the performance ones, at least on my machine. If it doesn't really need CPU, then it probably doesn't matter much. No need to use it if you don't need it. I don't have insight into their code base though.  

By eye on Apple's monitoring, Capture One's GPU usage on export sits around 80-85%, LrC probably at 90-95%. I have no idea if that's a bad or good thing or whether that's affecting performance. Capture One's GPU usage earlier in the M1 Max regime for me was around 40-50%, so it has definitely improved on the utilization front.