Have a Canon dSLR? Have 64-bit Windows? READ THIS.

[feren]

Ladies and gentlemen of the LazyWeb, I am about to give back to you.

I shoot in RAW format on my Canon 40D. I have grown weary of the fine folks at Canon dicking around and being utterly unable to provide a codec for 64-bit versions of Windows. All I want to do is be able to see thumbnails of my photos in RAW format that are on my CF card or hard

Comments

[doomsey]

Since you're transforming one disk file to another disk file, as long as you have enough RAM to store a few scan lines and hide the seek latency between the two files (or, better, separate disks for input and output), there's no real advantage to storing the entire image in RAM. You need some amount of context, but your filtering isn't going to look more than a a few pixels (probably in the range of 10-30) in any direction. As a result, there's no reason the RAW conversion would need to take more than, say, a few tens of megabytes of RAM.

Which is not to say that Canon's code isn't shit (it almost certainly is). Plus using the SSE instructions would be a big win, and often 64-bit gets you a performance advantage just because it's got more registers.

But there's nothing intrinsic about RAW processing that requires or even really benefits from 64 bit addressing space.