Macbook Air Thoughts

Crikey, I think judging by this thread if me asking some advice on if I should get the MBA or MBP for my needs then certain posters may have passed out and/or had a fit at the decision I've made.

OP, get the air. Most certainly if it's going to be used frequently for travel.
 
Clearly the OP isn't buying the MBA as a main machine therefore it doesn't need to be an all powerful MBP with 16GB of RAM for batch editing huge RAW files.

If 2GB is the minimum spec you can be pretty confident 8GB is going to be adequate.

Bottom line; It just needs to be able to do what he want's it to do, comfortably. Which it will.
 
The iPad is perfect for travelling with but once filled with media for flights and apps and other stuff, there is hardly any room left for photographs from my camera. Even on the 64Gb model.
 
rctneil said:
The iPad is perfect for travelling with but once filled with media for flights and apps and other stuff, there is hardly any room left for photographs from my camera. Even on the 64Gb model.
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A 64G Sandisk SD card is like £38.

If you want it for photo storage whilst on holiday, just get more cards.

If you want to get a MBA, just get the MBA.
 
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rctneil said:
The iPad is perfect for travelling with but once filled with media for flights and apps and other stuff, there is hardly any room left for photographs from my camera. Even on the 64Gb model.
Click to expand...

Once you've watched a film/programme you could delete it, which would free up space.
 
LR4 do love RAM, it is getting a bit silly. lol

wUyf6.png
 
I often have LR4 open with a catalog of about 15,000 photos, editing about 8 or so 50mb .tiff scans in Photoshop (16-bit neg scans with around 4 layers of masks/adjustments), plus iTunes, Chrome with around 4-5 tabs and all the other crap that runs on Windows. RAM usage on my 8GB machine tops out at around 7.5GB and I don't even need to manage how it's used (hence the 8 scans at once bit). 8GB is enough, even more so if it isn't his main machine.

In fact, right now I have 4x49MP scans sitting in Photoshop and I'm processing an X-Pro 1 file (which is pretty RAM hungry since the colour filter layout on the XP1 is very different from a normal bayer sensor camera so it requires extra CPU/RAM power) and this is the current RAM usage (linked because it's a 1600px screenshot):
http://i.imgur.com/cmx4i.png

5.51GB out of 8GB (69%), I could probably run Illustrator or InDesign at the same time and still have enough RAM left over. My Mac is pretty much the same too. Not saying your RAM usage is faked or anything, but are you doing an import + batch process + batch export + using the develop module at the same time too? That could explain it.
 
All I was doing is culling a set of photos. That's it.

Hit P on the one I like, move to the next. Wasn't even in the developing module, it's not even a CPU intensive process.
 
The air is a lot more powerful than people think. I had an iMac that I traded for the latest 13" air and its fantastic!

The performance is excellent and it handles everything perfectly! I have my aperture library on an external USB2.0 hard drive and it works without any lag. I also use CS5 without issue.

Its a lightning quick little thing!
 
I have an 11" 2010 Macbook Air that I use as my travel buddy - coupled up to an external USB drive. Copes perfectly well with video/photos (RAW/JPG) from my 7D using Aperture.

I do most of my editing when I get home though, but as a travel unit they're great devices.
 
Another quick question here. When I go on my trip to Japan in a few months, I need to figure out what format to shoot in. I am not really up on the post editing part just yet, just concentrating on taking the best shots first of all and this is my first DSLR so up to this point I have taken only jpgs.

Just want peoples thoughts really.
 
I have 4GB of ram in my machine, and it's fine :p

CPU and HDD are the main bottlenecks when editing images.
 
Google Chrome seems to be running away with itself on OS X! 100MB here, 200MB there and 300MB somewhere else for starters.
 
rctneil said:
Another quick question here. When I go on my trip to Japan in a few months, I need to figure out what format to shoot in. I am not really up on the post editing part just yet, just concentrating on taking the best shots first of all and this is my first DSLR so up to this point I have taken only jpgs.

Just want peoples thoughts really.
Click to expand...

If your camera supports it maybe shoot in RAW and JPG? That way if you're happy with the JPG result you don't have to post-process, and if you're not you have the raw to play around with? Takes room though of course.
 
Read a great description between the difference of RAW and Jpeg.

Jpeg is like drawing with a box of crayons.
Raw is like drawing with a factory full of crayons.

Jpeg doesn't have enough data to capture everything you see, when you look at the sunset and the sky and you see the blue fading into the distance and how you see a band of blue and then a "step" into another shade of blue? That is Jpeg struggling to provide that information. It is 8-bit colour, not 16-bit. Jpeg just doesn't have the data.
 
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