Green dots on "ready" pictures in Film Strip

[supam.viennot]

I loved that green dot giving a sense of user control over the readiness of pictures in the film strip. I am still sad to have it gone. We'd love it back ...

[Mario]

As I explained in your original post, the background pre-loader works very different in IMatch 5. And typical image loads times are less than one second for a 24 to 36 MP cache file. Adding the green dot makes no sense, because they would flash on very quickly anyway.

[supam.viennot]

From the behavior that I see right now, I believe they would actually flash on at very moderate speed, say 1 second per file on average, and not flash at all beyond the 10 nearest files. But you are right : green dots by themselves do not matter really. Green dots would only help see how ready the viewer is. If the viewer is not fluid, for whatever reason, then the green dots would just show so and not help. The real thing is to understand why the viewer is not fluid. Woudl there be something wrong on my side?

[supam.viennot]

Mario,

I just tested 5.6.14 release for the navigation fluidity of the viewer, especially in multifile mode with large raw pictures and still hoping for some feature developement here so that the navigation feel catches up with older 5.4 version while preserving the current benefits of faster individual file zoom in.

Also, it seems strange to necessarily reload all files when we navigate just one file in the viewer in multiple file mode. Could it be possible to avoid that lag?

The best to you.

Ph

[supam.viennot]

I just tested the version 5.6.18 for navigation fluidity in the viewer, especially in 8 files layout. No improvement there. 5.6.18 (and any 5.5 and later version) remains far behind 5.4 and its fantastic preloading abilities. Once you waited to get the pictures loaded 5.6 offers immediate zoming while 5.4 offers no waiting time for laoding but has slower zooming functionnalities. I am still hoping to get the best of both worlds one day... An improvement might already be to not reload all 8 files each time we call the next one. Shifting 7 and loading one should be feasible?

Anyway, as I navigate and sort much more than I zoom, I remain stuck with  my now old 5.4...   

mario, please... 

ph

[Mario]

Don't use 8 files at once. You are maxing out everything, and I doubt that many users expect to display a) 8 files simultaneously and b) get all the Direct 3D hardware support. There are limits, sorry.

These are limits I cannot overcome, they are hardware bound. If you try to display 8 large images at the same time, DirectX will need to shovel hundred of megabytes of data from the disk into the graphic card RAM. IMatch 4 used a trick by loading only a small preview into the Viewer until you tried to zoom. Since the typical load time for a 24-36 MP RAW file with DirectX is about one second, this of course no longer needed. IMatch can always pre-load a couple of files in the background until the graphic card memory is full.

But you are running the system at it's maximum, with 8 files in parallel and you also want to preload. This is probably impossible because holding 8 large files in graphic card memory and loading another set of 8 files will require several gigabytes of memory. If your graphic card does not have that much memory or DirectX is unable to load hundreds of megabytes of data from the disk into memory before you want to move to the next page you will have to wait.

Try showing 4 files to give Windows, DirectX and your graphic card some slack.

[supam.viennot]

thank you for your answer Mario

IMatch 4 used a trick by loading only a small preview into the Viewer until you tried to zoom.

I would love to have that "trick" back in future versions! It worked great for me and provided ultimate fluidity in navigating files, not only with 8 large files but also with just one.

Until then I find version 5.4 still more fluid than newer ones (except for zooming of course, but I need zooming less than navigation)

[Mario]

Then I guess you are an exception. From my experience and user feedback, the local user groups, IMatch 5.5 is considered to have the fastest viewer and quick view panel ever.
I will not add the two-phase load again. Much to hard to implement with WIC and DirectX, and typical load times for full-size cache files (24 MP) is less than 1 second with the current implementation - including color management.