Burning as a separate thread?

[TGeist]

It would be great if PM could burn disks and still let the user continue work in PM. With the current computers with up to 8 processor cores this shouldn't be hard?

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Cheers!
Thomas

[Kirk Baker]

Thomas,

It would be great if PM could burn disks and still let the user continue work in PM. With the current computers with up to 8 processor cores this shouldn't be hard?

It's not a matter of processing power.  It is a matter of needing the files that are in progress to be left alone until they are burned to disc.  While we cannot keep you from switching out of PM and using your favorite pixel editor to open those files and modify them during the burn, we can and do keep you from doing that with Photo Mechanic.  Otherwise, we would have to make a complete copy of your images to some other location on your system and then burn from there.  This would not only be wasteful of hard drive space (temporarily at least) but it would also make the process take a lot longer.

-Kirk

[TGeist]

Ok, I understand that.

How about a switch for the power user that can turn this blockade off? I never want to browse the directory I am burning, but an entirely different one. Then it's my responsibility to make PM fail while burning

Or maybe even better: PM could block me from opening the directory (+ the subdirectories) it's burning. I don't know whether such a function would be makeable.

With the state of now I have to take a break and wait until PM has finished burning. Which is a waste of my time.

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Cheers!
Thomas

[jjtiziou]

Hi Kirk and Thomas-

I definitely agree that it would be great to be able to continue to work while burning-> but I figured that this was the issue on hand.

How about just a warning instead? If PM could remember which files were in use by the burn, and then bring up a warning/dialog before you did anything that would affect the files that were being burned? Then you could continue to do things like work in other contact sheets, or even do read-only operations like exporting a photo gallery or emailing images while the burn is in progress. If you tried to rank a photo that was going to be burned, or move it, then PM could just pop a thing saying "you can't modify this image until the burn is complete" -

And, I do actually think that there could be a use for a separate burn mode that swapped the files out into a separate folder... I'd really like to see an advanced burn mode that included all of the image resampling options-> sometimes I might want to burn someone a disk of 800px wide watermarked sRGB images with crops applied... currently I have to do a "save as", then open that contact sheet and burn it- so I'm moving things to a separate folder anyways.

I do realize that the status quo allows for a faster burn... but this isn't necessarily a time saver, if as Thomas pointed out, we can't keep on working...

thanks!
-jj

[Kirk Baker]

JJ and Thomas,

I definitely agree that it would be great to be able to continue to work while burning-> but I figured that this was the issue on hand.

How about just a warning instead? If PM could remember which files were in use by the burn, and then bring up a warning/dialog before you did anything that would affect the files that were being burned? Then you could continue to do things like work in other contact sheets, or even do read-only operations like exporting a photo gallery or emailing images while the burn is in progress. If you tried to rank a photo that was going to be burned, or move it, then PM could just pop a thing saying "you can't modify this image until the burn is complete" -

And, I do actually think that there could be a use for a separate burn mode that swapped the files out into a separate folder... I'd really like to see an advanced burn mode that included all of the image resampling options-> sometimes I might want to burn someone a disk of 800px wide watermarked sRGB images with crops applied... currently I have to do a "save as", then open that contact sheet and burn it- so I'm moving things to a separate folder anyways.

I do realize that the status quo allows for a faster burn... but this isn't necessarily a time saver, if as Thomas pointed out, we can't keep on working...

It isn't about speed of the burn.  It's about not making high-tech coasters for your beverages. 

The only way I can really think of to make this happen is to create a separate disc-burning application that PM tells to burn discs.  Because it would run as a separate application it would no longer encumber Photo Mechanic.  But it wouldn't keep you from continuing to browse the contact sheet or making changes in PM, but then this is really all futile since we cannot keep you from making edits in some other application anyway or even keep you from using your OS to move files around or delete them during the burn.

-Kirk

[jjtiziou]

Hey again Kirk-

totally understood about the coasters... but there are also many times when we'd love to be able to be working in separate contact sheets... PM4 is super speedy and efficient for our tasks with any given sets of images, but unfortunately sometimes it's not just about running one set of pictures through a workflow...

often times we're faced with situations where it's burning a disk of project A while editing down pictures from project B while running a big batch save-as of another series of images combined from contact sheets of projects C, D and E...  and then a client calls and they *urgently* need a file from project F emailed to them.

so if things like disk burning, "save-as", html export, etc etc could operate as separate processes without locking up the whole app, it would be very helpful.

Again, I think this could be possible if you developed a mechanism whereby PM4 kept a checklist of which files it had queued up for such activities as burning and what not, and presented you with a warning along the lines of "this file is in use by this process- are you *sure* you want to modify it now? this may result in a failure of your burn/export/saveas/ftp/whatever task" -

Having such a mechanism would prevent people from stupidly creating coasters, and yet allow users more flexibility in multitasking within photomechanic. The question is whether this is feasible, and worth the hastle, and useful to enough other people besides the two of us mentioning it here..

thanks!
-jj

[Kirk Baker]

jj,

so if things like disk burning, "save-as", html export, etc etc could operate as separate processes without locking up the whole app, it would be very helpful.

Again, I think this could be possible if you developed a mechanism whereby PM4 kept a checklist of which files it had queued up for such activities as burning and what not, and presented you with a warning along the lines of "this file is in use by this process- are you *sure* you want to modify it now? this may result in a failure of your burn/export/saveas/ftp/whatever task" -

Having such a mechanism would prevent people from stupidly creating coasters, and yet allow users more flexibility in multitasking within photomechanic. The question is whether this is feasible, and worth the hastle, and useful to enough other people besides the two of us mentioning it here..

That can be done, but it would take a major architectural change to Photo Mechanic to do that sort of thing.

-Kirk

[TGeist]

I thought of a different solution that should be easy to implement and would really help:

Let PM either write images onto a hrad disk (which is much faster than the actual burning & verifying). They could either be image files or the 1:1 image/folder structure.

Then the CDs/DVDs could be burned with another application while PM is free for work again.

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Cheers!
Thomas

[jjtiziou]

Hi Kirk,

I just wanted to chime in on this thread again... I've got time to post right now, because I can't work on the contact sheet that I want to be editing through because PM4's totally locked up while burning a disk of another totally unrelated contact sheet in a separate tab.

How about just giving us an option or preference to override that disc burning lockdown, wherein it gives us a big warning that if we proceed during the burn, we shouldn't modify any of the files that are being burned otherwise the burn will result in an error... but then allow us to cary on working if we want to risk it? In my current case, I'm burning a dvd of stuff that I shot a few weeks ago, while simultaneously sorting through some stuff from a year back that's stored on a totally different drive- there's no way in which these would interfere with each other, so it's frustrating to be locked out of photo mechanic, even if it's only for ten minutes.

Granted, I should use that ten minutes to get away from the computer and stretch a bit, but that's a whole other issue.

hope all's well,
-jj