Kuuvik Capture 2 Beta 2: Performance

As Beta 2 of Kuuvik Capture 2 is nearing completion, I felt it’s time to talk about the incredible performance improvements of the product.

Beta 2 switches away from Canon’s EOS SDK in favor of my EOS Extensions library. EOS Extensions powers ShutterCount since its first day, and now Kuuvik Capture uses a heavily expanded version.

This change brings several improvements to the app. It is now 64-bit, sports a more fluid WiFi pairing experience, and occupies less than 10% of the disk space needed for Beta 1. But the most prominent improvements are in the energy consumption and processing speed areas.

Let’s jump right in. The following chart shows the relative energy consumption of the Beta 1 and the Beta 2 (as well as Canon’s EOS Utility for reference) while running live view. The Beta 1 figure is roughly the same as Kuuvik Capture 1 was.

All performance figures are calculated from measurements done on my 2012 15″ Retina MacBook Pro, and may change in the final product – but I think they are pretty much indicative of what you could expect.

kc2b2-energyimpact

Even the previous Kuuvik Capture incarnations were no slouch, but the improvement in Beta 2 is huge. It’s energy impact (which is a number OS X calculates mostly based on CPU utilization) is a tad less than 40% of EOS Utility! Actual energy consumption may be a little different as other parts of the system also draw power, but I would realistically expect 2x longer battery life on my MacBook than what’s possible with EOS Utility.

Also take into account that Beta 2 does a lot more number chrunching during live view than even the pervious beta: it’s output is visually better and now always color manages the live view stream. Because of the latter, the color management section has been removed from Preferences.

I mentioned that Kuuvik Capture 2 ditched libraw (an open-source RAW processing library), and now uses my own code. I cited some 2.2x processing speed improvements then. I’ve hand-optimized the RAW decoder in EOS Extensions, and image processing is now up to 5x faster than Kuuvik Capture 1.

kc2b2-processingtime

In other words, the Beta 2 loads and processes a huge 5DS R file on my MacBook Pro in about 1.6 seconds.

Yes, Kuuvik Capture 2 will support the 5DS and 5DS R. Raw decoding support is complete, and the cameras will be characterized and enabled as soon as my 5DS R arrives.

We have a few places left in the Kuuvik Capture 2 beta program. If you would like to participate, please download and complete the Beta Application and NDA form, and send it back to beta@direstudio.com. If your application is accepted, you will receive download instructions within a couple of days.