Further Adventures in Pushing Hardware for the Sake of Art

I’m pulling out all the stops on this piece. When it’s fin­ished I may have to title it «Swap Space» or «Scratch Disk».

It may not be as bad as that. Right now I’m try­ing a fin­er line­screen than the one I start­ed work­ing with. That means increas­ing the image res­o­lu­tion for each chan­nel as I screen it. The final res­o­lu­tion will be the same (which is twice the res­o­lu­tion of any of my pre­vi­ous large-for­mat lux­o­graph­ic prints) but the inter­im steps are using images much larg­er than I had before.

In addi­tion to the high­er res­o­lu­tion I’m work­ing with, since I don’t have a con­ve­nient way to cre­ate tileable pat­terns of par­al­lel lines on angles, I’m rotat­ing the images in Pho­to­shop before I apply the screens, then rotat­ing them back. Each rota­tion increas­es the size of the image, because the height and the width of the rec­tan­gle need­ed is mea­sured by the diag­o­nal of the rec­tan­gle pri­or to the rota­tion. I can crop the image down when it’s done, and you can bet that I will, but in the mean­time I have files to work with larg­er than any I ever have before.

So the file I have open now is approx­i­mate­ly 132,000 pix­els square. In order to rotate it back I’ll be cre­at­ing an image near­ly 200,000 pix­els by 200,000 pix­els, or around forty gigabytes.

I thought I was run­ning out of space before! I’ve been busy burn­ing back­up files to DVD so that I can clear off space on the hard dri­ve, just to give myself the swap space I need to work on these files. I’m cur­rent­ly at about 110 gigs of free space when Pho­to­shop is not run­ning, 40 gigs when I’ve got the yel­low chan­nel file open, and zero when I do a sim­ple Fill com­mand, which has yet to succeed.

The sad fact is that even if I had the twen­ty-two thou­sand dol­lars to buy the sys­tem I want, the one with eight proces­sors, 32GB of RAM and a cou­ple of 15,000 RPM hard dri­ves, this project would still take a long time. It would like­ly cut the wait time in half, but we’d still be talk­ing about ten min­utes instead of twen­ty to do an image rotation.

It’s pos­si­ble that the out­come of this chan­nel won’t be to my lik­ing, in which case I’ll go back to the coars­er screen. But if this looks bet­ter, I’m going to be in for some more long nights.

One upside of all this is that I’ve got most of my music back. I’d moved most of my music to an exter­nal hard dri­ve which crashed ear­ly in Jan­u­ary. Well, it turns out that I for­got to delete most of those files from the inter­nal hard dri­ve. This accounts for some of the lack of space I’ve been seeing.

I’ve already delet­ed sev­er­al appli­ca­tions I rarely use. I feel a lit­tle guilty for delet­ing GIMP, for exam­ple, but when was the last time I used GIMP? (On the oth­er hand, per­haps I should rein­stall it and see how it per­forms). Eclipse and NeoOf­fice may be the next to go. I hate to think that I’m purg­ing all the open source soft­ware from my sys­tem, but all these are still on my lap­top so I can keep on test­ing them. NeoOf­fice has shown itself not to per­form well on long doc­u­ments for me, and as much as I like some aspects of Eclipse, it’s been caus­ing me more prob­lems than it has solved late­ly. So maybe in both cas­es I’ll sim­ply rein­stall when­ev­er the next ver­sions come along.

So here’s one of the tough ques­tions: should I keep Quark XPress on my machine? I don’t know when the last time I used XPress was. InDe­sign opens up XPress files flaw­less­ly so far as I can tell and I haven’t seen XPress on any job post­ings in a while. It seems like the end of an era, but three-quar­ters of a giga­byte is three-quar­ters of a giga­byte and right now it seems like every bit counts.