MBP remorse, should I have gotten MP instead in my case?

[rawdawg]

This past summer I bought a 17" MBP to finally replace my Dual 1.25 G4. A HUGE upgrade! I went for the 17" because I wanted eSATA expansion capability and thought the 512MB video card would be useful for my purposes (I do video editing and learned after I purchased it really doesn't help much-- even with my 24" Dell hooked up I see no performance difference in any capacity with the discreet processor turned on.)

Well it seems my needs have grown significantly. I now do things I never dreamed of on my G4. A current project for example is a 6 month timelapse of a building being built. Every 2 weeks I have 32Gb of new photos. I'm at 15,000 right now, which I use Lightroom to export out bracketed exposures. It takes about 24 hours per exposure value. 3 days for a full set.

I bought a RAID0 eSATA to speed things up, it is now almost full but I'm dealing with it. The most time consuming part is dealing with the individual photos. After Effects is another nightmare. But I can deal with the few hours it takes compressor to do something. Video I imagine isn't an issue, it's these huge still photos.

After I got the MBP I was thinking about getting a Mac Mini to use as a sort of render farm. I don't have a lot of money. Now I'm wondering if I should take the hit and just sell my MBP and get a MP, or wait until the i7-9xx comes out (would that help?).

For what I'm doing would I even see improvements? I liked the mobility of my MBP but I don't travel much these days and literally every port on the side is in use, it's basically a desktop.

 

[lbodnar]

My first thought was that you are probably using the wrong tools. Have you considered writing Automator scripts or using heavily batch-processing oriented software like ImageMagick?

 

[rawdawg]

I've "thought" about creating an Automator script, but truth is the bottleneck is the actual programs I would be automating. So I'm not sure if that's worth it. It take a Loooong time to export 15,000 jpegs from RAW files.

I'll look into ImageMagick -- to be honest I've never heard of it.

 

[goMac]

A Mac Pro could have processed those images in parallel, so you'd likely be better with a Mac Pro.

 

[nanofrog]

A Mac Pro could have processed those images in parallel, so you'd likely be better with a Mac Pro.

This is how I see it.

And there's the ability to address system bottlenecks too, such as HDD throughput to keep the CPU's fed with data (lowers the wasted clock cycles the system waits for data). Then there's the ability to upgrade graphics over time, and memory can go beyond what a laptop can as well.