Xara Speed

[Nicolae Trifu]

Availor,

Don't say 'too large.' ( see drawings.)

I just tried Xara Pro ( which really moves faster, impressive ) but saving files is only marginaly beter.

It's not the writing to disk in itself - Xara is doing some processing, that's what takes longer.

Maybe Xara is just finally doing all the processing, while
during work it is displaying proxies ?

Anyways, I was hoping to be able to 'give' Xara something like a RAM disk cache.

But thanks for the suggestion.

Nicolae

[Nicolae Trifu]

Note : My final product is a 40" - 48" wide print @ 300 dpi,
which gives you more than 12,000 pixels accross.

Imported images are 300dpi, generated bitmaps the same.

I am looking not for suggestions on how to employ the software, which I have been using every day since before CorelXara.

I was curious if Xara is caching anything to disk in the process of saving a file, and then ofer it a RAM disk to work with instead of a physical drive. By the way, SCSI is not faster.

But thank you.

Nicoae

[minimiro]

If this will printed to wide format digital printer then resolution over 150-200dpi by my opinion is absolutely unneeded.. this will give you over 30% smaller file and over 30% speed up

[Nicolae Trifu]

Minimiro,

You are not wrong, but I have clients who require tiff images 36" and wider @300dpi delivered on CD.

They pay for it.

So I still want to see if there is a way to speed up saving a large file.

Nicolae

[pauland]

Try going for a lower DPI as per minimiro and then rescale the image back to 300DPI - see if you can really notice any problems. I know a lot of people using 3D will do this rather than render (pointlessly?) larger images.

[Charles Moir]

We do very little processing and so the main time will be just the time it takes to write large files. In fact images are stored in PNG format, but the time overhead for that should be negligable.

There is one way to make a very subtantial imporvement and that's to encode the images as JPEG. I know for quality reasons you may not like the idea, but Xara does not re-encode JPGs, so Xara does a lossless save. (i.e. there will be some small loss in quality encoding into JPG the first time, but at least Xara does not make it any worse). When saving files Xara just saves the original JPG image, and since they are typically 10x small than raw images, that means a 5 to 10 times speed up saving files.

(At least be thankful you're not using AI - that takes minutes, literally, every timeyou save a file with even modest bitmaps in - last time I timed it we were more than 10 times faster than Illustrator)

[Nicolae Trifu]

All : Thanks for suggestions.

Charles : I use only png - both when creating bitmap copies and when importing 'stick-ons'.

I need 300dpi for the 'human element' in the foreground and clients love the level of detail, so drawings grew larger over the last 10 years or so since I have exclusively used Xara for all my work. Of course there is no other software to even come close to Xara, if you needed this testimonial.

And Pro moves really faster, during work.

My way to deal with the 'impediment' of often-saving-large-files is to be working simoultaneously on two computers, side by side.

Again, I was trying to see if there was anything on the system / technical side that could be done to still speed things up.

I respect your prompt, as always, response.

Nicolae Trifu / NTI, Inc. / Atlanta, GA

[AJPatel]

Hi Nicolae,

I wanted to contact you about possibly doing a rendering for a new construction project. How can I reach you?

[Availor]

Availor,

Don't say 'too large.' ( see drawings.)

I just tried Xara Pro ( which really moves faster, impressive ) but saving files is only marginaly beter.

It's not the writing to disk in itself - Xara is doing some processing, that's what takes longer.

Maybe Xara is just finally doing all the processing, while
during work it is displaying proxies ?

Anyways, I was hoping to be able to 'give' Xara something like a RAM disk cache.

But thanks for the suggestion.

Nicolae

Nicolae, in that case I don't think I have more suggestion for you.
By the way, very impressive work, nice drawings.