Nikon D800 and Capture NX 2

<p> With well known slowness of Capture NX 2 even on some well endowed systems and supposedly large files from proposed Nikon D800, will the Current version be able to handle RAWs from the new camera?</p>

<p>YES, go and get the 2.3.0 installer and the 2.3.1 updater - also get the 64 bit version if your OS is 64 bit</p>

<p>My system is already 64 bit. The new version 2.3.1 is only upgraded to "recognize" D800 RAWs. Unless they come out with NX 3, I have some reservations about NX 2 being able to handle D800.</p>

<p>I don't think there will be a problem, I can edit 16 bit TIFF files from a film scanner that are 9000 x 6000 pixels (that is 54 MegaPixels) without any issues.</p>

<p>I do this on an iMac, so I don't anticipate any issues with a dinky little 36 MegaPixel image</p>

<p>Capture NX2 handles stitched images on my computer with larger file sizes than the D800. NX2 will handle the D800 NEF's fine if you have a suitable computer.</p>

 

<p>Capture NX is not slow anymore..... Same as View NX, Both are even faster than LR and Aperture if they are being used in a decent computer....<br /> But why are you worrying about? You are not interested on a D800 or are you now???</p>

<p>It may (or may not) be a math issue. If you take a D90 .NEF file, and convert it to .TIF, the size on a hard drive is no longer the 12 Mpixel that the D90 generated. It goes to somewhere in the 34.9 Mpixel size. So if one takes a 38 Mpixel .NEF file and it expands the same amount...you will need a great deal of hard drive space to edit your files. And until the D800 is on the store shelves, no one knows for certain what Nikon Capture NX 2 will handle.</p>

<p> </p>

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<p>no one knows for certain what Nikon Capture NX 2 will handle</p>

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<p>Nikon do and lots of favoured photographers are processing D800 images in NX2 already.</p>

<p>Rene, I might change my mind!</p>

<p>Jerry, I think you may be confusing pixels with bytes.</p>

<p>I know for sure that if I do get a D800, that is going to mean a new computer too, so I still haven't made up my mind.</p>

<p>I think it would be useful to get some data about how people have succeeded in getting fast raw conversion and transfer from NX2 to Photoshop times with their computers and what setups they use. I currently have a i7-2600 system with 8GB of RAM, one internal 1TB drive (lots of slow external drives), and one internal 128GB SSD which I use when editing projects. The 1TB drive is boot because that's the way the computer came set up; I know things would speed up by installing the OS and programs on the SSD but I haven't had time to do this (it takes several days as I have dozens of software packages installed). People tell me it's possible to install the OS from the recovery partition to the SSD but it hasn't sounded like it's a trivial operation and a separate license is quite pricey considering that I already paid for a Win 7 license for the computer. Still it remains that my SSD is quite small and if I put OS and programs on it there won't be as much space for the image files I'm working on. I know the overall performance would be better though since I had this kind of configuration in my old PC whose motherboard broke (after killing several hard drives ...) Because of the inherent fallibility of computer hardware (or my recent bad luck with it) I am reluctant to pay a lot for it. Especially for a licence to software which is tied to the motherboard, which could, die any day and take the license with it.</p>

<p>Anyway, since now the situation is that a camera that takes moderate resolution NEF files (D4) is priced high at 5500€ while a high resolution camera is priced moderately at 2700€, that gap in the prices (even if they're not comparable without the cost of the rather expensive vertical grip and D4 battery and charger that have to be purchased separately if you want them) may be considered to justify further investment in computer hardware. I would like to have about 5-10TB of quickly accessible, backed up storage that I can access randomly and where opening times to NX2 and transfer to PS would be in the 1s ball park or better (with D800 or D3X files). Could some of you computer experts who don't consider 36MP at all a problem tell me what kind of storage I should purchase for that to work. Because at the moment I believe I would be in the 5-10 s ball park with the D800 NEFs (haven't tried, but extrapolating from 24MP files suggest this).To me this is highly impractical as I shoot quite a lot of images of events. After I get the desktop PC fast enough I will be requiring a laptop which has only slightly lower performance for editing when I'm traveling. On the laptop I could live with about 4s of opening / transfer times per image. The performance should not be significantly adversely affected other processes such as printing and copying files in the background - I will always be doing these things while I edit and I still need fast response times for all interactive ops.</p>

<p>And please don't tell me not to use NX2 - even if it is slightly slower than Adobe software it still saves me time as I can control how the file is first converted by using in-camera settings so I have the files very close to the I want them before I do any interactive tweaks. And I've found it easier to get the "look" of the images just right using it, especially for high ISO images. (I use all three software, NX2 for first operations and raw conversion, LR for batch processing and printing, PS for refinements and making large prints).</p>

<p>"Unless they come out with NX 3, I have some reservations about NX 2 being able to handle D800."<br /> <strong><br /></strong>Oh please. Mine handles <strong>TWO 550 MB files</strong> (Nikon Coolscan 9000, 16bit, 4000dpi scans of 6x7 medium format film scans) simultaneously "Open in Editor" for comparison purposes. (System: NX2 2.3 installed on Quad Core 2.2 GHZ, 64bit Windows, 8GB RAM PC system.)</p>

<p>Most of my friends that have had "problems" with running NX or NX2 have solved the problems by getting rid of the junk programs that were slowing down their pcs or adding RAM or following directions on setting up cache properly. Now I hear more about problems running PS to process all of those large files with mlayers, etc. If I were buying or building a new pc today, it would have 16GB RAM and the video card would have more than adequate RAM too. The current versions of NX2 and View NX are now both 64 bit if you want 64 bit. Joe Smith </p>

<p>Anyone who is posted on this topic who has not downloaded the 64 bit version of NX2 is not up to date. The new 32 bit version is much faster too. There has been a lot of discussion on the web, Nikonians, Nikongear, and many other sites reflecting the faster speed. It appears to be stable as well</p>

<p>Just the other day, Jason Odell indicated in an interview that the 64 bit version of NX2 was issued in anticipation of the larger files the D4 and D800 would generate, and commented that the update was needed quite a while ago regardless. Jason posted some speed measurement on his site. Digital Lloyd noted that it was about 200 [sic] times faster on his machine than earlier versions.</p>

<p>I use NX2 frequently, and I can say that the 64 bit version is much faster than all other previous versions. And, it integrates with the 64bit upgrade to NIK Color Efex 3 plugin. And, it does have a three level Moire option in the camera and lens correction portion of the develop module.</p>

<p>So, what rational fact is out in the environment to raise this question now?</p>

<p>I am running NX2 2.3.1 in 3 different Mac laptops. All of them running OS 10.7.3 <br>

One is a 2010 MacBook Air and one is 2007 MacBook. After I did a clean install of OS 10 Captured runs really fast on them but my main computer is 2010 17' MacBook Pro 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 8 GB RAM. I removed the DVD drive and installed an Optydrive adaptor with 128 GB SSD where I run all my softwares including the OS. Then it has an internal 1 TB HDD where I keep all types of media (music, movies and pictures).<br>

After I was done with this set up and it is really nice to work with NX2. It is lighting fast.</p>