underestimated K-1 editing requirements - upgrade required?

pixelvandal · 04-04-2017, 11:53 PM

So my newly purchased (used) K-1 has been getting a good workout in my spare time. hauling it around with the 24-70 and a sigma 70-200.... well, i can feel it after a day of shooting but those files are gorgeous.......however.....loading up the files on my PC and making edits in lightroom take foreverrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I didn't have any issues editing lowly 16mp files from older cameras, but i guess i need to upgrade my PC for editing these larger files, perhaps even a video card?

currently running an i5 with only 4gb of ram (yes a dinosaur by todays standards) and not even an SSD. no video card etc.

trying to figure out what sort of pc requirements would be required to get the best out of this camera?

will i need to drop about 1k-2k in computing power to get the best out of this?

starting to think i should have stuck the initial plan of buying a K3 to keep the minister of finance a little happier, and then i could make the most of all those tiny limiteds that are out there.

so my options are either....

spend an additional 1.5k on pc
which makes my investment in gear approx 5000AUD all up

orrrrrr. sell up the lot and

keep current PC, + buy dads pentax k-3 and 50-135 and a couple limiteds for a great price.
making my investment in gear at only 1200.

I'm no pro, just a hobbiest, and i make zero dollars from my hobby haha. so to me the choice seems like an obvious one....i don't think i can justify holding onto the K1 since i don't have a boatload of FF glass... damn that gear lust...

thoughts?

I realize i'm just searching for confirmation for what i already know, i just need someone to tell me i'm not crazy!

dbs · 04-05-2017, 12:12 AM

Originally posted by pixelvandal

So my newly purchased (used) K-1 has been getting a good workout in my spare time. hauling it around with the 24-70 and a sigma 70-200.... well, i can feel it after a day of shooting but those files are gorgeous.......however.....loading up the files on my PC and making edits in lightroom take foreverrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I didn't have any issues editing lowly 16mp files from older cameras, but i guess i need to upgrade my PC for editing these larger files, perhaps even a video card?

currently running an i5 with only 4gb of ram (yes a dinosaur by todays standards) and not even an SSD. no video card etc.

trying to figure out what sort of pc requirements would be required to get the best out of this camera?

will i need to drop about 1k-2k in computing power to get the best out of this?

starting to think i should have stuck the initial plan of buying a K3 to keep the minister of finance a little happier, and then i could make the most of all those tiny limiteds that are out there.

so my options are either....

spend an additional 1.5k on pc
which makes my investment in gear approx 5000AUD all up

orrrrrr. sell up the lot and

keep current PC, + buy dads pentax k-3 and 50-135 and a couple limiteds for a great price.
making my investment in gear at only 1200.

I'm no pro, just a hobbiest, and i make zero dollars from my hobby haha. so to me the choice seems like an obvious one....i don't think i can justify holding onto the K1 since i don't have a boatload of FF glass... damn that gear lust...

thoughts?

I realize i'm just searching for confirmation for what i already know, i just need someone to tell me i'm not crazy!

Hi PixelVandal

If you buy Dads gear what is he going to use .
Maybe a deal with dad swapping the K 1 for the K 3 ,It is all still in the family ( you know wills and all ) and you don't have to up grade your computer YET.
Isn't gear lust a pain.

Just an idea. Dave

victormeldrew · 04-05-2017, 12:13 AM

The GPU is not involved with static images, so save your money there. The processor you have should be perfectly adequate too.

The number one priority is RAM...get as much as you can (or rather as much as your current motherboard can support)

Igor123 · 04-05-2017, 12:40 AM

Originally posted by victormeldrew

The GPU is not involved with static images, so save your money there.

That used to be the case but nowadays the GPU is indeed used, and even a cheap one will be a large step up from CPU processing power only.

Adobe Lightroom GPU Troubleshooting and FAQ

That said, GPUs draw a lot of power, produce heat and make a lot of noise (in addition to actually helping performance), which are a few factors often overlooked while just looking at spec:s, so if that is a concern, make sure to get one based on 16nm process (released after last summer mostly) which helps reduce those parts a lot, for the same performance, compared to the previous 5 years of 28nm products. Nvidia are typically better when it comes to efficiency like that, but often a bit more pricey as well, so choose what suits you.

Edit: But I'll vote for an SSD as well! The order of importance of the other components can be discussed, but using an ssd over an hdd will probably be one of the largest factors while editing (while exporting can be considered to be coffee time and not included in "your" time), but there are differences between ssd:s as well, the fastest ones are perhaps 4times fast faster than the slower ones (varies a lot with type of workload and read vs write etc) but Samsungs EVO series is usually a great combination when considering performance, quality and price.

Last edited by Igor123; 04-05-2017 at 12:46 AM.

LightBug · 04-05-2017, 12:55 AM

I personally only buy laptops, some used one with good performance are quite affordable these days. I would go for Lenovo Thinkpad T430 (has faster USB3.0) with i7 processor and 16 GB Ram. Should be doable for $500 USD.

Keith23 · 04-05-2017, 01:03 AM

Why not set the camera to take smaller files for a while until you work out what to do. This ultimately depends on what you are going to do with the images. I lower the size of the images if I don't need to full resolution.

**JensE** · 04-05-2017, 01:11 AM

Processing requirements between K-3 and K-1 wouldn't be dramatically different, unless you're at the edge of available RAM - good suggestion to start with that. With respect to SSD, for me it is enough to have the caching/catalog functions on SSD, the bulk of data, i.e. the DNG files, reside on a magnetic disk and things feel totally responsive.

One additional suggestion, which may help a lot with the scale of the problem: Check your workflow. Don't import everything into Lightroom just to delete most of it again. Use a quick raw viewer to weed out your images first.

pinholecam · 04-05-2017, 01:23 AM

Mine runs fine on i5

Acer R7 upgraded to 16GB RAM, SSD (2 on board - one for OS and programs, one for RAW files), i5 processor.

**Joetitch** · 04-05-2017, 01:54 AM

Check your OS will support more than 4GB
Download CCleaner from piriform.com THE FREE VERSION if you don't have it already.
Set a restore point
Clean the registry
Stop programs from starting up at startup that you don't need to.
reboot and see if that helps free up ram and speed up lightroom.
Download speccy from same site and it will give you all the internal details so you can get correct RAM etc to boost your speed if still needed.

Most older computers slow down because of all the junk we leave in the registry and programs that load when we don't need or use them at start up.
An SSD will help for your programs.
My i3 8GB win 10 takes 20sec to boot from shutdown.

D1N0 · 04-05-2017, 02:19 AM

4GB is not so much nowadays. Upgrade to 8 or 16. Do you have a discrete Graphics card? If not get one. Also upgrade your software so that it can use hardwarematic graphics acceleration. Make sure your operating system is 64 bits so you can use more than 4GB of ram. An SSD for your OS/programs disc is always a good Idea for faster and more silent operation.

robthebloke · 04-05-2017, 06:03 AM - **1 Like**

how old an i5 are we talking here? (If you're running Windows, hit the Windows key, then type 'system'. What model of cpu is listed?). If it's an old nehalim version, maybe it's worth it. If it's sandy/ivy bridge, it's not worth upgrading yet (it lacks performance in some areas, but none that would affect photo editing). If it's a haswell or newer cpu, then the upgrade won't give you much more performance, but might use slightly less power (the latest skylake CPUs perform divisions a bit quicker than they used to, but that's about it)

I should probably mention at this point that I'm a graphics optimisation engineer working in film VFX, so tend to know a little about hardware set ups! I use an i3 (haswell) to edit my k-1 photos, and it's more than enough.

Image processing is basically IO and memory bound (feeding the image data to the cpu is what takes the most time, the processing isn't all that relevant). An i3 with fast ram and a good SSD (or even raid0 if you're feeling kinky) will outperform an i7 with slow ram and a not so good hard drive.

Do you know the speed of the ram you have installed? Quite often when you buy an off the shelf PC, you can end up with a 'good' cpu, but often at the expense of other components (ram and SSD being the main ones). Even the very oldest i5 with the cheapest DDR3 (usually 1066mhz), will get a 50% speed boost from upgrading to 1600mhz DDR3 (or higher speeds if you have a 'K' series CPU).

There are limits obviously, but for most people, buying 16gb of the fastest RAM their CPU supports, and adding to that a nice new SSD, is usually the best way to get a decent performance boost.

Then of course you get to graphics cards. *if* your photo editing software supports the gpu (my older version 5 of Lightroom does not, and even newer versions I'm slightly skeptical that you can take a legacy code base and port all of it to the gpu this quickly - meaning there will probably be some tools that are still CPU based, despite what Adobe says!!), then that is an option. RAM speeds on the latest GPUs are in the region of 5000mhz to 6000mhz, which are perfect for graphics workloads. I've yet to see any image processing software that fully utilises the gpu yet, but they are getting better (and if you have an onboard gpu, make sure you set the other one to come to life for that software package!)

A new SSD, faster ram (and more of it), and then a GPU if your software supports it (and the other two haven't given you what you want - there will be a faster gpu along next year!)

mechmike10 · 04-05-2017, 09:16 AM

Does your computer have on board Intel Graphics, and what version of Lightroom do you have? I have an Intel i7 that uses Intel Graphics. Under the Performance tab of the Edit Menu item Preferences, you can choose to have the program use the graphics processor, and it offers the Intel on board graphics system as an option, so you don't need a separate graphics card to take advantage of this feature, at least not on LR6.

pixelvandal · 04-05-2017, 01:20 PM

Thank you for the massive amount of feedback

all very very helpful. Time to have a think

**rgknief60** · 04-05-2017, 01:45 PM

I had no problems with my K20D with my now 10+ year old laptop. K-5 things slowed down a bit. With the K-1, even previewing was time consuming enough that many shots were left for later when a computer upgrade would reduce the time needed to preview and process.

Don't count out a used computer. On Ebay I found an almost 3 year old Dell M4800 workstation, former corporate lease in excellent condition, warranty transfer and upgrade possible. It was the same price as a new HP I returned 8 months prior with twice the capability. It probably was not necessary, but I extended the warranty one year.

Depreciation on computers is like cars. You can get some real bang for the buck if you buy used.

amoringello · 04-05-2017, 02:38 PM

Cheapest upgrade you can do vs bang-for-the-buck is up your RAM to 16GB.
If your video card is so old it doesn't have a GPU, upgrading your video card would be your second best option.
Even a $75 video card today is probably as good or better than a $400 card from five years ago.

Sure, an i5 isn't the best, but it will do the job. Probably not worth the upgrade unless you can fid a good, fast i7 for cheap and your motherboard will handle it. (don't spend the $$ for a new motherboard just for an i7 upgrade)

And of course SSD will boost your disk cache speed, but if you're not working on HUUGE (K1 sized imaged with many layers full sized using 32bit color) 16GB will be fine and you won't notice much in the way of hard drive performance. (well, at least not until you save. :-) ) That would be the last thing I upgrade. It is also the most expensive and least bang for the buck as far as most editing requirements go.

04-04-2017, 11:53 PM	#1
pixelvandal Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2012 Location: Gold Coast Posts: 209	underestimated K-1 editing requirements - upgrade required? So my newly purchased (used) K-1 has been getting a good workout in my spare time. hauling it around with the 24-70 and a sigma 70-200.... well, i can feel it after a day of shooting but those files are gorgeous.......however.....loading up the files on my PC and making edits in lightroom take foreverrrrrrrrrrrrr. I didn't have any issues editing lowly 16mp files from older cameras, but i guess i need to upgrade my PC for editing these larger files, perhaps even a video card? currently running an i5 with only 4gb of ram (yes a dinosaur by todays standards) and not even an SSD. no video card etc. trying to figure out what sort of pc requirements would be required to get the best out of this camera? will i need to drop about 1k-2k in computing power to get the best out of this? starting to think i should have stuck the initial plan of buying a K3 to keep the minister of finance a little happier, and then i could make the most of all those tiny limiteds that are out there. so my options are either.... spend an additional 1.5k on pc which makes my investment in gear approx 5000AUD all up orrrrrr. sell up the lot and keep current PC, + buy dads pentax k-3 and 50-135 and a couple limiteds for a great price. making my investment in gear at only 1200. I'm no pro, just a hobbiest, and i make zero dollars from my hobby haha. so to me the choice seems like an obvious one....i don't think i can justify holding onto the K1 since i don't have a boatload of FF glass... damn that gear lust... thoughts? I realize i'm just searching for confirmation for what i already know, i just need someone to tell me i'm not crazy!

04-05-2017, 01:54 AM	#9
Joetitch Site Supporter Join Date: Aug 2016 Location: Leura NSW Posts: 502	Don't spend anything YET Check your OS will support more than 4GB Download CCleaner from piriform.com THE FREE VERSION if you don't have it already. Set a restore point Clean the registry Stop programs from starting up at startup that you don't need to. reboot and see if that helps free up ram and speed up lightroom. Download speccy from same site and it will give you all the internal details so you can get correct RAM etc to boost your speed if still needed. Most older computers slow down because of all the junk we leave in the registry and programs that load when we don't need or use them at start up. An SSD will help for your programs. My i3 8GB win 10 takes 20sec to boot from shutdown.

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
67 power requirements question	smigol	Pentax Medium Format	7	02-03-2017 08:01 PM
Looking into new laptop, investigating memory and storage requirements.	pathdoc	Digital Processing, Software, and Printing	17	03-26-2016 02:32 PM
Pls Suggest Camera for my requirements	amazing_universe	Troubleshooting and Beginner Help	39	10-13-2015 07:24 PM
advice required on which filter required for an effect im after	romster	Troubleshooting and Beginner Help	20	03-30-2014 04:31 PM
People Tonight's editing progress/How to finish editing?	Buschmaster	Photo Critique	29	10-14-2012 09:26 AM

04-05-2017, 12:12 AM	#2
dbs Pentaxian Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Clare Valley S A Photos: Albums Posts: 7,564	Originally posted by pixelvandal So my newly purchased (used) K-1 has been getting a good workout in my spare time. hauling it around with the 24-70 and a sigma 70-200.... well, i can feel it after a day of shooting but those files are gorgeous.......however.....loading up the files on my PC and making edits in lightroom take foreverrrrrrrrrrrrr. I didn't have any issues editing lowly 16mp files from older cameras, but i guess i need to upgrade my PC for editing these larger files, perhaps even a video card? currently running an i5 with only 4gb of ram (yes a dinosaur by todays standards) and not even an SSD. no video card etc. trying to figure out what sort of pc requirements would be required to get the best out of this camera? will i need to drop about 1k-2k in computing power to get the best out of this? starting to think i should have stuck the initial plan of buying a K3 to keep the minister of finance a little happier, and then i could make the most of all those tiny limiteds that are out there. so my options are either.... spend an additional 1.5k on pc which makes my investment in gear approx 5000AUD all up orrrrrr. sell up the lot and keep current PC, + buy dads pentax k-3 and 50-135 and a couple limiteds for a great price. making my investment in gear at only 1200. I'm no pro, just a hobbiest, and i make zero dollars from my hobby haha. so to me the choice seems like an obvious one....i don't think i can justify holding onto the K1 since i don't have a boatload of FF glass... damn that gear lust... thoughts? I realize i'm just searching for confirmation for what i already know, i just need someone to tell me i'm not crazy! Hi PixelVandal If you buy Dads gear what is he going to use . Maybe a deal with dad swapping the K 1 for the K 3 ,It is all still in the family ( you know wills and all ) and you don't have to up grade your computer YET. Isn't gear lust a pain. Just an idea. Dave

04-05-2017, 12:13 AM	#3
victormeldrew Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2015 Location: South West UK Photos: Albums Posts: 1,493	The GPU is not involved with static images, so save your money there. The processor you have should be perfectly adequate too. The number one priority is RAM...get as much as you can (or rather as much as your current motherboard can support)

04-05-2017, 12:40 AM	#4
Igor123 Senior Member Join Date: May 2009 Location: Sweden Photos: Gallery Posts: 183	Originally posted by victormeldrew The GPU is not involved with static images, so save your money there. That used to be the case but nowadays the GPU is indeed used, and even a cheap one will be a large step up from CPU processing power only. Adobe Lightroom GPU Troubleshooting and FAQ That said, GPUs draw a lot of power, produce heat and make a lot of noise (in addition to actually helping performance), which are a few factors often overlooked while just looking at spec:s, so if that is a concern, make sure to get one based on 16nm process (released after last summer mostly) which helps reduce those parts a lot, for the same performance, compared to the previous 5 years of 28nm products. Nvidia are typically better when it comes to efficiency like that, but often a bit more pricey as well, so choose what suits you. Edit: But I'll vote for an SSD as well! The order of importance of the other components can be discussed, but using an ssd over an hdd will probably be one of the largest factors while editing (while exporting can be considered to be coffee time and not included in "your" time), but there are differences between ssd:s as well, the fastest ones are perhaps 4times fast faster than the slower ones (varies a lot with type of workload and read vs write etc) but Samsungs EVO series is usually a great combination when considering performance, quality and price. Last edited by Igor123; 04-05-2017 at 12:46 AM.

04-05-2017, 12:55 AM	#5
LightBug Veteran Member Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: OC, CA, USA Posts: 506	I personally only buy laptops, some used one with good performance are quite affordable these days. I would go for Lenovo Thinkpad T430 (has faster USB3.0) with i7 processor and 16 GB Ram. Should be doable for $500 USD.

04-05-2017, 01:03 AM	#6
Keith23 Forum Member Join Date: Sep 2016 Photos: Gallery Posts: 69	Why not set the camera to take smaller files for a while until you work out what to do. This ultimately depends on what you are going to do with the images. I lower the size of the images if I don't need to full resolution.

04-05-2017, 01:11 AM	#7
JensE Site Supporter Join Date: Dec 2015 Location: Leipzig Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,969	Processing requirements between K-3 and K-1 wouldn't be dramatically different, unless you're at the edge of available RAM - good suggestion to start with that. With respect to SSD, for me it is enough to have the caching/catalog functions on SSD, the bulk of data, i.e. the DNG files, reside on a magnetic disk and things feel totally responsive. One additional suggestion, which may help a lot with the scale of the problem: Check your workflow. Don't import everything into Lightroom just to delete most of it again. Use a quick raw viewer to weed out your images first.

04-05-2017, 01:23 AM	#8
pinholecam Pentaxian Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: North Photos: Gallery Posts: 4,706	Mine runs fine on i5 Acer R7 upgraded to 16GB RAM, SSD (2 on board - one for OS and programs, one for RAW files), i5 processor.

04-05-2017, 02:19 AM	#10
D1N0 Pentaxian Join Date: May 2012 Location: --- Photos: Gallery Posts: 6,802	4GB is not so much nowadays. Upgrade to 8 or 16. Do you have a discrete Graphics card? If not get one. Also upgrade your software so that it can use hardwarematic graphics acceleration. Make sure your operating system is 64 bits so you can use more than 4GB of ram. An SSD for your OS/programs disc is always a good Idea for faster and more silent operation.

04-05-2017, 06:03 AM - 1 Like	#11
robthebloke Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2013 Location: Sydney Photos: Albums Posts: 844	how old an i5 are we talking here? (If you're running Windows, hit the Windows key, then type 'system'. What model of cpu is listed?). If it's an old nehalim version, maybe it's worth it. If it's sandy/ivy bridge, it's not worth upgrading yet (it lacks performance in some areas, but none that would affect photo editing). If it's a haswell or newer cpu, then the upgrade won't give you much more performance, but might use slightly less power (the latest skylake CPUs perform divisions a bit quicker than they used to, but that's about it) I should probably mention at this point that I'm a graphics optimisation engineer working in film VFX, so tend to know a little about hardware set ups! I use an i3 (haswell) to edit my k-1 photos, and it's more than enough. Image processing is basically IO and memory bound (feeding the image data to the cpu is what takes the most time, the processing isn't all that relevant). An i3 with fast ram and a good SSD (or even raid0 if you're feeling kinky) will outperform an i7 with slow ram and a not so good hard drive. Do you know the speed of the ram you have installed? Quite often when you buy an off the shelf PC, you can end up with a 'good' cpu, but often at the expense of other components (ram and SSD being the main ones). Even the very oldest i5 with the cheapest DDR3 (usually 1066mhz), will get a 50% speed boost from upgrading to 1600mhz DDR3 (or higher speeds if you have a 'K' series CPU). There are limits obviously, but for most people, buying 16gb of the fastest RAM their CPU supports, and adding to that a nice new SSD, is usually the best way to get a decent performance boost. Then of course you get to graphics cards. if your photo editing software supports the gpu (my older version 5 of Lightroom does not, and even newer versions I'm slightly skeptical that you can take a legacy code base and port all of it to the gpu this quickly - meaning there will probably be some tools that are still CPU based, despite what Adobe says!!), then that is an option. RAM speeds on the latest GPUs are in the region of 5000mhz to 6000mhz, which are perfect for graphics workloads. I've yet to see any image processing software that fully utilises the gpu yet, but they are getting better (and if you have an onboard gpu, make sure you set the other one to come to life for that software package!) A new SSD, faster ram (and more of it), and then a GPU if your software supports it (and the other two haven't given you what you want - there will be a faster gpu along next year!)

04-05-2017, 09:16 AM	#12
mechmike10 Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: Mechanicsburg, PA Posts: 176	Does your computer have on board Intel Graphics, and what version of Lightroom do you have? I have an Intel i7 that uses Intel Graphics. Under the Performance tab of the Edit Menu item Preferences, you can choose to have the program use the graphics processor, and it offers the Intel on board graphics system as an option, so you don't need a separate graphics card to take advantage of this feature, at least not on LR6.

04-05-2017, 01:20 PM	#13
pixelvandal Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2012 Location: Gold Coast Posts: 209 Original Poster	Thank you for the massive amount of feedback all very very helpful. Time to have a think

04-05-2017, 01:45 PM	#14
rgknief60 Site Supporter Join Date: Oct 2009 Photos: Gallery Posts: 980	I had no problems with my K20D with my now 10+ year old laptop. K-5 things slowed down a bit. With the K-1, even previewing was time consuming enough that many shots were left for later when a computer upgrade would reduce the time needed to preview and process. Don't count out a used computer. On Ebay I found an almost 3 year old Dell M4800 workstation, former corporate lease in excellent condition, warranty transfer and upgrade possible. It was the same price as a new HP I returned 8 months prior with twice the capability. It probably was not necessary, but I extended the warranty one year. Depreciation on computers is like cars. You can get some real bang for the buck if you buy used.

04-05-2017, 02:38 PM	#15
amoringello Veteran Member Join Date: May 2008 Location: Virginia, USA Photos: Gallery Posts: 1,562	Cheapest upgrade you can do vs bang-for-the-buck is up your RAM to 16GB. If your video card is so old it doesn't have a GPU, upgrading your video card would be your second best option. Even a $75 video card today is probably as good or better than a $400 card from five years ago. Sure, an i5 isn't the best, but it will do the job. Probably not worth the upgrade unless you can fid a good, fast i7 for cheap and your motherboard will handle it. (don't spend the $$ for a new motherboard just for an i7 upgrade) And of course SSD will boost your disk cache speed, but if you're not working on HUUGE (K1 sized imaged with many layers full sized using 32bit color) 16GB will be fine and you won't notice much in the way of hard drive performance. (well, at least not until you save. :-) ) That would be the last thing I upgrade. It is also the most expensive and least bang for the buck as far as most editing requirements go.