John Burdett wrote:And I was pretty bummed to see an 8-core released less than a year after I upgraded to the 6. Bad timing for me, if I had waited another 10 months I could now have the 8-core for what I spent on the 6. Oh well.
Preach. I've found myself in the exact same boat this year.
That said, I don't think the change from 6 to 8 cores is going to make a particularly huge difference for most Capture One workflows. C1 does use all available cores on the system, but it doesn't appear to be particularly efficient about how it uses them. I also shoot 5D MkIV tethered, and in my experience,
each frame takes about two seconds to transfer and fully render (usually just white balance, simple contrast/saturation, lens distortion correction, and metadata adjustments). My MBPs are the Core i9 models. I run up against strobe recycle times long before the tethered setup is a bottleneck.
Question for the OP: Are you completely sure your camera is talking via USB3? Check out the USB section of System Profiler and double-check the connection. It should be communicating at 5 Gb/s. 20-30 seconds seems like WAY too long for a 5DIV RAW file, and I'm wondering if your transfer is somehow being slowed-down to USB2 speeds (or worse?). Also, have you tried a new/different USB cable? I'm using ones from TetherTools and Amazon Basics, and they have both been solid.
John Burdett wrote:One thing that I did learn was that perhaps the "automatic graphics switching" in OS Power saving settings can sometimes slow down import? My understanding is that if you turn that feature off it forces the computer to use the more powerful PCIe GPU rather than switching between that and the on-board GPU?
Yes and no. Automatic Graphics Switching is a binary thing – either you're on the low-power Intel chipset, or you're on the dedicated AMD GPU, but it's never a mix. If any single application tries to use the dedicated graphics processor, then everything uses it (i.e., it's not per-application). And I've never seen Capture One
not use the dedicated card. There are several tools out there that let you see what graphics system is currently active – I use iStat Menus so that it's always visible in the menu bar. But yes, disabling Automatic Graphics Switching does force the system to use the dedicated GPU exclusively, but you shouldn't see any difference once Capture One is running.
Also, regarding reducing the preview size... You don't want to reduce it
too much, because that will actually make the problem worse. You need your previews to be at least as large as the Viewer window, otherwise C1 will decide that the preview is insufficient and will re-render the RAW from scratch each time, which is significantly slower. The sweet spot is to have a preview that is exactly as large as, or just slightly larger than, your Viewer frame.