I have been using trial version of Capture One for a few weeks, and I like it. Only problem is that when I want to process a batch of RAW files to TIFF or JPEG, it doesn't utilize 100% of CPU (I have i7 960 - 4 cores, 8 with hyper threading) . It looks like it processes one image after another, and when I open manager in windows, I can see that for every image the CPU usage starts from 10-20%, climbs to 100% and then immediately falls back to 10-20% (the same for all 8 cores). I thought that C1 needs to read RAW file from HDD first, and after processing save output file to HDD, and these delays are the cause of CPU utilization drop. But even when I put my raw files and output folder on a SSD instead of slower HDD (WD green 2TB) nothing has changed. I have tried to process the same 50 RAW files to jpeg and tiff, and I got the exact same time for SSD and HDD.
Do you have similar experience with C1?
From CPU usage graph I estimate that my PC does nothing for more then 50% of batch processing time - and this time I would like to save. Any ideas?
Processing raw files is not uniformly difficult. The CPU time used varies with the computational difficulty of the task at hand, and what you're seeing is perfectly normal.
Your PC isn't "doing nothing" at the lower usage periods. It's just not working as hard.
IOs are typically not multithreaded, so the %CPU drops there and for certain other parts of the processing that are not multithreaded or have thread limits. I have not used C1 in the modern incarnations, but DPP and PS, etc. exhibit the same during various activities. You may be able to increase overall throughput by running multiple instances of the app. For example I run 3 copies of DPP during some bulk conversions.
