Apple Silicon Support

[Craig_S44]

Hi

Just wondering how long before we see support for Apple Silicon.

I just upgraded to the Mac Studio Ultra and was able to export 5044 raw files in 6 min. 24 seconds from Lightroom. (same export was 152 min on my 2018 Mac mini)

The next step was to size them for a different version of the file that I need and always do that in PM.  It took 10 min 50 secs. 

Can't help but feel that PM should be faster then LR given the tasks they are performing and that PM sitting on Rosetta 2 is the reason

Cheers

Craig

[Kirk Baker]

Craig,

Just wondering how long before we see support for Apple Silicon.

I just upgraded to the Mac Studio Ultra and was able to export 5044 raw files in 6 min. 24 seconds from Lightroom. (same export was 152 min on my 2018 Mac mini)

The next step was to size them for a different version of the file that I need and always do that in PM.  It took 10 min 50 secs. 

Can't help but feel that PM should be faster then LR given the tasks they are performing and that PM sitting on Rosetta 2 is the reason

The next major release of Photo Mechanic will be native for both 64-bit Intel and Arm processors.  I am expecting it to be out in about a year from now.

We have not found PM6 on Rosetta 2 to be hindered any further than PM6 on Intel by CPU speed.  The main bottleneck for PM6 is the speed of the disk that the images are being read/written.  PM is almost always waiting for I/O to finish before it can move on to other tasks.

Did you check to see how fast your 2018 Mac mini completed the same task as you did in PM6 (the sizing step) for a true apples to apples comparison of PM6's speed on the two platforms?

-Kirk

[Kevin M. Cox]

Working as a sports photojournalist on deadline (mostly culling and captioning), I have found PM 6 on an M1 MacBook Air w/ 8 GB of RAM to be much faster than it was on my eight-core i7 with 16 GB of RAM.

The Intel machine could not keep up with the 50MP Sony A1 files while the M1 doesn't break a sweat.

[tolgaakmen]

Working with Mac Studio here too but with Mac OS Ventura beta and PM6 build 6552 is seriously slow.

I need to wait couple seconds for it jump to the next picture when going through R5 cRAW files.

You might have more issues coming your way when Mac OS Ventura goes out in few weeks and most people will have very very slow PMs.

Hope you can resolve it soon.

[ahoward]

Working with Mac Studio here too but with Mac OS Ventura beta and PM6 build 6552 is seriously slow.

I need to wait couple seconds for it jump to the next picture when going through R5 cRAW files.

You might have more issues coming your way when Mac OS Ventura goes out in few weeks and most people will have very very slow PMs.

Hope you can resolve it soon.

I am fairly confident that whatever the issue, it is unrelated to the one-time translation of the program through Rosetta, and there is likely a resolution that can be found for you in the current iteration of Photo Mechanic 6/Plus. We have several Apple Silicon devices in use at Camera Bits (all of which are less powerful than your Mac Studio, including my M1 Macbook Pro which is where we are currently testing Ventura), and none are able to replicate the speed issue as it has been described. Most customers, like Kevin, report great performance with Photo Mechanic on these computers, and like our Lead Developer Kirk said above, much of Photo Mechanic is IO bound, not CPU bound, and these computers have very fast SSDs.

I invite you to open a ticket with our Tech Support team by emailing support@camerabits.com or calling our office at 503-547-2888. We can do a screensharing session so you can give me a real time demo of this issue and I can provide whatever suggestions I can think of at that time.

[AllGold]

Working as a sports photojournalist on deadline (mostly culling and captioning), I have found PM 6 on an M1 MacBook Air w/ 8 GB of RAM to be much faster than it was on my eight-core i7 with 16 GB of RAM.

The Intel machine could not keep up with the 50MP Sony A1 files while the M1 doesn't break a sweat.

I would really like to know your secret. I also have an M1 MacBook Air 8/512 running PM 6. It is fine for ~20Mpix files, but when I try to get anything done with 45Mpix jpeg files from a Canon R5 it becomes painful. The problem is when I check at 100% the render can take too long to be practical. I don't have this problem on Intel machines;  the Intel machines just fly right through 100% renders.*

* I have always had a problem with Photo Mechanic on 100% previews. Some times it gets "stuck" and doesn't get beyond the low-res render and the only way to get it to fully render is to back up an image and then go forward again.

[ahoward]

Working as a sports photojournalist on deadline (mostly culling and captioning), I have found PM 6 on an M1 MacBook Air w/ 8 GB of RAM to be much faster than it was on my eight-core i7 with 16 GB of RAM.

The Intel machine could not keep up with the 50MP Sony A1 files while the M1 doesn't break a sweat.

I would really like to know your secret. I also have an M1 MacBook Air 8/512 running PM 6. It is fine for ~20Mpix files, but when I try to get anything done with 45Mpix jpeg files from a Canon R5 it becomes painful. The problem is when I check at 100% the render can take too long to be practical. I don't have this problem on Intel machines;  the Intel machines just fly right through 100% renders.*

* I have always had a problem with Photo Mechanic on 100% previews. Some times it gets "stuck" and doesn't get beyond the low-res render and the only way to get it to fully render is to back up an image and then go forward again.

I just tested this with that exact model of MacBook Air and folder of 400 CR3's from the Canon R5. I could not reproduce this issue. Just as I have invited the other folks who are experiencing an issue, I also invite you to open up a ticket so that we can troubleshoot this issue with you directly.

[Kevin M. Cox]

I would really like to know your secret.

I bet we just have very different use cases/workflows. I'm rarely looking at photos 100%.

For baseball I'm dumping cards all game long, for football it is halftime and post game. In both cases I'm scrolling through bursts of action, at the default 26% on this M1 Air screen, trying to quickly grab the peak moment. If I think a photo has questionable sharpness I'll zoom in to 100%, but I'm rarely advancing between images while zoomed in.

Trying that right now at 100% results in very slow performance, with me having to pause every five or so frames to let the rendering catch up. In the 26% view I almost never have that problem at the rate I am manually advancing, about one frame per second. If I hold down the arrow key to make PM advance as quickly as possible it can't keep up the rendering after ten or so frames even when zoomed out.

[Dominik Pluess]

Same Problem here, working with Mac Studio Ultra, with Mac OS Ventura 13.0 and PM6 build 6552 is really slow. Slower than on my (old) MBP 2019 with intel 9.

[ahoward]

Same Problem here, working with Mac Studio Ultra, with Mac OS Ventura 13.0 and PM6 build 6552 is really slow. Slower than on my (old) MBP 2019 with intel 9.

Did this issue begin for you immediately after updating to MacOS Ventura?

[Dominik Pluess]

Yes. Before on OS Monterey, it did fine and fast.

[Dominik Pluess]

Just to confirm, on a Intel i9 MacBookPro with Ventura, PM is doing great as usual. The Problem is on the Apple Silicon Computers with Ventura installed.

[threiner]

as i a am on a event we tried it with the same cards (backup angelbird 512 GB) on a 2019 16" 32 GB I9 and a 2020 16" M1 Pro with 64 GB it tokk about three times longer on the M1 Pro this is a absolute joke. as the Machine is about 3 times faster... browsing through images is also slower on the M1 then on the Intel...

[ahoward]

Yes. Before on OS Monterey, it did fine and fast.

Thank you, so that tells us that while there may be some as-of-yet-unidentified issue with Ventura, the fact that it is not native to Apple Silicon likely isn't the source of the problem.

I'd like to troubleshoot this with you directly. Please contact us at support@camerabits.com or give us a call during business hours (9am to 5pm Pacific Time, Monday through Friday) at +1-503-547-2800

[willievass]

I also experience the issues with slow scrolling on Apple Silicon Ventura v Intel Ventura.

A folder of 1000 Canon R3 CR3 files takes 2 minutes 20 seconds to scroll through previews on MacBook Air M2 versus 1min 18 seconds on an Intel mac.

No difference experienced before MacOS Ventura.