For those of you that shoot RAW (and I shoot a lot), what sort of equipment do you recommend for:
1) downloading cards - obviously something fast, but what is your specific recommendation?
2) laptop - I have a core duo laptop with 1GB RAM, I probably need to upgrade the RAM? Would a seperate drive for the files make the programs run faster?
3) software - I am thinking Lightroom for a few quick corrections and slideshow. Possibly another program to choose the images, because LR wants to apply the default settings to everything, making it slower than some for weening out a few winners. Illuminate me if I'm wrong!
4) anything else I'm missing?

Thanks for the help!

Thanks Eric. Do you have a quick way to pull off just the JPG's? I can do it in windows explorer, but that doesn't automatically rename the images to avoid duplicate file names like the programs I have used in the past. Downloader Pro and LR are those programs and neither seems to be able to pull off just the JPG's.
Thanks!
Cory

Hi corey,

Ever since Swan showed me Lightroom, I've been hooked on it -- even for wedding receptions.

We download our cards throughout the day. We can usually find an outlet for the laptop power... plus I've got a power converter that we can plug the computer into during the drive.

Matt (I think) reccoemended a SanDisk USBII card reader before the crash. SDDR-92 is the one I've got. Others are probably faster, but since my assistant does it as we fill up the 2 gig cards (raw files) we only need to do one or two cards once we get to the reception.

Lightroom rocks for slideshows... just go through the thumbnails ... highlight a few and hit P for the "Picked" flag. Scroll down and repeat. Set the flag filter to show only the P Flagged ones... hit D to go to develop mod

Look at the images full screen, if they need a preset applied, do it (BW or Sepia, or contrast bump, etc)

Goto slideshow mod... template is already set up and saved. hit play.

Hey Troy,
Thanks for the ideas. That sounds like a good workflow. How is your laptop equipped? Does it run LR and be stable with a couple thousand RAW files?
Thanks,

MacBook Pro core 2 duo with 2 gig ram. I only get up to 1k or a bit more # of images by the time I get to the reception.

Right now it's the fastest computer I own, and do all of my editing on it.

Search through posts by Kevin Swan. He's got great info on using lightroom. Or check out what he's written on New School Photo -- Plus Matt Antonino has some tips up for LR.

I also shoot RAW. I hace been using both, Lightroom and Aperture to downloead, quick select maybe do some qucik correction if needed and to run the slide show. I use the Thunderbolt CF Card Reader (USB2) and works very fast. I also use a Firewire Card reader. I have a MACBOOKPRO with 1 Gig but I am planning to go to full 2Gig soon.

In both software is very easy.

In Lightroom I do a "Pick", then filter by "Pick" and then create a collection from those "Picked" images. From there I go the the Slide Show panel and do the slide show.

Lightroom allows you to start correcting and select images while still importing images while keeping a good speed.

A nice thing about LR's Slide Shows is the ability to create a nameplate, like studio name, shadows and borders lus the couples names to add to your images. I create a preset before going to the wedding and just apply it on the fly.


Apple Aperture also does a great job and maybe is even a bit easier to select images. I just create a project before going to the wedding where I setup a smart folder in which all the images which I give a "one star rating" are group. Then, onece I am done and ready, I just have to select the smart foler and click on slide show and go. Pretty simple and straight forward.

One nice thing about Aperture is the ability to export projects, so after you have done work on those images on selecting, correcting, etc, you can export all that into your desktop and not have to do it again from scratch. Adobe has to bring back the Photobinder feature.

So both tools you can do some very nice basic slide shows.

The Sandisk extreme IV card reader seems to be the fastest available.

Here's an overview of its speed with different cards, and the differences between some cards
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/...ies/cards.shtml

with the new firewire 800 card reader and extreme IV cards, you can download in no time.

Lightroom definetly looks promising for this. Our laptop hit the bricks before saturday's wedding so we didn't get to try it out, but I set up a folder on the desktop for my wife to download the S JPEGS into, and set up Lightroom to autoo import anything that goes into the folder and apply a global preset. The you just have a preset made for the slideshow for sizing, text, logo, background etc and it good to go. Should be very easy if you don't get to heavy into on site editing.