Are Ultrabooks Fast enough?

[sb]

I do all my post-processing with my MacBook Pro, 16gb RAM, and 512gb SSD.  It's super fast for anything that I throw at it.  The key is getting at least 8gb RAM and the SSD.  The SSD makes a world of difference.

I am sure your Mac runs great but I find on all these forums everyone immediately goes the Mac Route. I think ultrabooks like the Asus UX31A with it's 1080p ips antiglare screen prove that windows still has it's place. Also a lot of people who post these are looking at cost and I am sorry but you can get way more for your money on the windows side of the fence plus a much larger selection. Blu-ray Drives are another plus in laptops/desktops that are not on the Mac Camp. Don't get me wrong I have IPADS,IPHONES but when it comes to computers in general I find Windows allows me to do more frequent hardware refreshes and it's cheaper.

As much as you say that, I only have the one Mac and that is my Air...asides from that I am windows on everything else. I recently (ie in the past week) picked up a Dell Ultrabook so will be installing my usual software on that to see how it performs....but there is part of me that like the fact I keep the Mac for travel use only (as it collects dust the rest of the time) and it forms part of my travel work flow.

Yup exactly same here. I am all windows 7 +LR with 2 notable exceptions:

- 27" Mac display (hooked up to a custom PC on win 7)
- Macbook air

Macbook air will runs LR just fine. I've done lots of tethered shooting to it. Also remember that LR performance largely depends on the size of your catalogue. I used to only start a new catalogue every calendar year, but I stopped that nonsense because my performance was taking a serious beating.

And as somebody mentioned, with laptops it's all about the SSD. I'd rather get a slower processor and less RAM than have a classic hard drive (and they put 5400RPM drives in laptops for power savings which makes it even more unbearable. Same goes for those drives they advertise as "green"). SSD makes everything load fast.

[Jamesy]

Also remember that LR performance largely depends on the size of your catalogue. I used to only start a new catalogue every calendar year, but I stopped that nonsense because my performance was taking a serious beating.

I don't follow. Do you only use one catalog now? Or do you do a new catalog for every new job?

[sb]

Well I now start a new catalogue every quarter (Q1-Q4). I mean it depends on how much you shoot but quarterly happens to work out perfectly for me because of the volume of pictures that I shoot. Just around the time when my LR starts slowing down, I create a new catalogue and start fresh.

Starting a new one for every job would be an excessive and unnecessary I think.

[Jamesy]

Well I now start a new catalogue every quarter (Q1-Q4). I mean it depends on how much you shoot but quarterly happens to work out perfectly for me because of the volume of pictures that I shoot. Just around the time when my LR starts slowing down, I create a new catalogue and start fresh.

Starting a new one for every job would be an excessive and unnecessary I think.

I watched the Jared Platt LR seminar on CreativeLIVE and he does a new one for every job - definetly not my workflow.

How many images do you shoot in a quarter? Do you import and work on the native CR2's or convert to DNG? If the later, you can select to Embed Fast Load Data and it keeps med/lrg Jpeg in the DNG file for the Develop module to use which I have heard can really speed up a workflow.

[sb]

Mine neither, seems like an overkill. Not to mention that i always work on multiple things at the same time, opening and closing catalogues all the tine would drive me nuts.

I'd have to do some digging to be able to tell you how many files i go through quarterly, i have no idea to be honest. I didn't have a scientific, measurable reason for going with quarterly catalogues, i just eye balled it cause it seemed like a good compromise between performance and convenience, and i'm happy with it ( for now :-))

[Jamesy]

The reason I was asking about number of images is because my catalog has about 18,000 images and things are definitely slower than before however I am running on WinXP with 3GB RAM on LR 3.6. Hence the shopping for a new box.

I can still process my 5D3 files but things are getting sluggish for sure.

[sb]

Yeah it sounds like it's time for a new catalogue. More powerful box will maybe allow you to push catalogue size a little further, but no matter what hardware you get, eventually you will hit the wall because the resource consumption can go up indefinitely as your catalogue grows.

I did a little bit of digging and in 2011 alone, I had a total of about 52,000 RAW files in my catalogue (I don't keep any JPEGs in there) , so about 13,000 per quarter roughly. At times, I found even this to be too much for comfortable work, but I'm too lazy to start a new catalogue each month.

[Chewy734]

Chewy734, what file sizes do you throw at your machine? And which PP app do you use?
I'm considering going the MacBook pro route, so I'm curious about what it can handle...

I use LR4 most of the time.  Sometimes Photoshop, sometimes Illustrator (not for PP, but other stuff).  I actually use my laptop for complex computational scientific research, so any PP stuff I throw at it is not a problem at all.