Burn by Faith

Tonight wrapped up our annual missions conference at church I was to have an Animoto video of shots I had taken on Sunday which was the start of the conference. I had take 199 shots on sunday of the event and pared it down to 101 of which I used 97 in the video. As I was hand holding with the 5D Mk2 most of the time I was on burst so as to increase my sharpness average. Obviously there were a lot of duplicates that were either blurred or just dupes that I did not need.

Yesterday I was busy on other items and had delegated today to get this done in an hour or two. Well that did not go according to plan at all. Figuring I was not going to be working with the local adjustment brush very much, I thought I would dump the images onto the Drobo and import them into Lightroom. Nice plan!

iMac

My desktop is an iMac first gen... Here just take a look. Ok? Seen enough. The killer in this computer is the 2 BG of memory that tries to keep up with the number crunching in Lightroom's database system. It is not pretty at all. 

Click... Beach Ball... Wait... Drag... Wait... Release - Beach Ball. 

Sorry, for the WinPeople, the spinning beach ball of death as it is known in Mac speak is the same as the twirling hourglass in Windows. It means the system is being jacked by your memory and the hard drive is trying to pretend it is RAM. When I bought the iMac it could not address more than three GB and Apple sold either 2 or 4 GB. I didn't want to pop the extra cash for four gig when I would only get one more. Besides it would not have helped.

MacBook Pro

Compare that to my MacBook Pro and there is a significant different. Yes the processor is faster but the logjam on the iMac was the virtual ram the hard drive was trying to play. The MBP has 8 GB and fly's with Lightroom.

All that to say that it took waaaay longer than I expected and the service was to start at 6:30. Animoto took it's sweet time tendering the hi-res version but finally did. Got the DVD files downloaded, burned the DVD and stuck it in the DVD player to see if it would run. Now our normal DVD player is in a box as we are refinishing the family room/studio and the VCR/DVD player-burner is real finicky when it comes to DVD's. So not knowing if the video was going to work or not, I hopped on the Harley and off was off to church at 6:45.

I got it up to the techTeam and they dropped it into the DVD player, pressed play and the opening screen came up. YES!!! It was going to work for the end of the program.

So two things came out of today. The first being to trust your work when your workflow is sound. The second is that I will be ordering a 27" iMac next week with 8 BG. Why not 16, two expensive right now. Two 4 GB chips leave two slots open for another set of 4 GB later if need be.

Anyhow, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Cya... Doug