Xara Speed

[Nicolae Trifu]

I work with large 'xar' files, 50 -100 MB.

They contain many large bitmaps, both imported and created.

It takes a long time to save these large files, which I do very often for protection.

Computer, RAM or video card do not seem to make a big difference. ( P4 2.8, 3GB, ATI 9800 256MB ) vs. ( Dual Xeon 2.8, ATI PCI-E 512, 4GB plus 2GB PCI RAM card. )

Is there anything to do about it ? ... Pagefile ?

Thank you,

[Availor]

Hello,

50-100MB files are sure very large. Too large I might say. If I may make a suggestion: Delete some of your bitmaps and put them on a different file. It's onviously not vector drawings that take so much space.

[minimiro]

If you work for print this big files - One propose

if some of your bitmaps are over 350-400dpi - reconvert it and downsample to this resolution.

there was one formula to calculate halftone point which shows that after 350-400dpi is without sense, nevermind what res you use output and linearization will downasample all to needed res

[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.

[Availor]

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

[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)