Nikon NX studio

[Birna Rørslett]

I've run the same basic setup for 30+ years.

[David H. Hartman]

Is it my imagination or is Capture NX-D 1.6.5 faster at creating thumbnails of D850, NEF(s) on a 2013 iMac i7 running Catalina 10.15.7 than NX Studio 1.7.1, same task, on a 2021 iMac M1 running Sonoma 14.8.2? Shouldn't newer be faster? Better?

Dave

[Birna Rørslett]

"Shouldn't newer be faster? Better?"

Such assumptions may be false. In particular, the latter one.

[SchorschGaggo]

NX Studio 1.70 & 1.80 are very slow fetching files across a network, and on Win11 just useless for anything not on the local computer.

I'll do a test install of 1.90 on Win11 to learn whether Nikon (or Microsoft) have got their act together, such that remote storage can be use. My hopes are not very high, though. Win11 is very buggy under its slick surface. Perhaps Win12 will clean up all the bugs?

NX Studio not only constantly scans all files in the current working folder, but also folders previously accessed by other applications. I caught NX Studio reading my accounting folder on the NAS even though I was opening a picture folder on the SSD.

Microsoft Sysinternals' ProcMon (to be found on microsoft.com) can be used to log NX Studio's activity. Then you understand why it's so slow. With only a few files on a fast SSD, this isn't noticeable. But when a folder containing several hundred images on a NAS is constantly being scanned, NX Studio can't do anything else.

To increase the speed of NAS access, Nikon wouldn't have to do anything—on the contrary, they would have to do less. It's sufficient to generate thumbnails of the images currently displayed in the browser window. Loading an entire 45MB NEF file into RAM takes less than a second over a gigabit network. Therefore, it can take a maximum of one second longer than from an SSD. The problem arises when the program attempts to generate previews of thousands of images. A thousand seconds is an incredibly long wait for someone who only wants to edit a single image...

[David H. Hartman]

I'm finding on a MacBook Pro M1 that never closing NX Studio cuts down on the lengthy scanning and the spinning wheel of death. Drop NXS to the dock with the yellow button but never click the red button.

When first starting NX Studio if it doesn't start promptly walk away and do something else. As watched water never boils: NX Studio never starts.

Hope this helps,

Dave

[Ilkka Nissilä]

I'm finding on a MacBook Pro M1 that never closing NX Studio cuts down on the lengthy scanning and the spinning wheel of death. Drop NXS to the dock with the yellow button but never click the red button.

When first starting NX Studio if it doesn't start promptly walk away and do something else. As watched water never boils, NX Studio never starts.

Hope this helps,

Dave

I can see how it would speed up use if it is allowed to be on the background all the time, but it'll consume resources while it is going through the files. In my opinion the software has no business looking into other directories when asked to view a specific directory, and Nikon should change this behavior.

Currently I'm using LRC as my main editing tool mainly because of the enormous waiting times NX Studio sometimes asks me to wait for, and I only use NX Studio when I need a specific feature which is not available elsewhere. This wouldn't have to be so, as I prefer Nikon's raw processing style.

Anyway, thanks for the tip on leaving the software running while not being used, to make waiting times shorter when being used. I use Windows but I suspect it'll be a similar story there. I recently got 32-> 48 GB RAM upgrade as one of my RAM circuits developed errors and causes software crashes, and I ended up increasing the amount of total memory in the process, which strangely enough has made editing smoother even though it is never even close to using all the memory available.