OK, I am back with some new images and some additional research...this has been a great learning experience! And thanks again for all the inputs. You all were right about re-reading/re-loading the already existing cache files. On Thursday we shot about 3000 pictures, and starting the whole process from scratch using the SSD connected via USB 3.0 port, Bridge took about 1.5 hours to generate all the previews etc...not less than a minute, but still much better than what I had before. I will check my settings and also look into the other software suggestions, but the SSD does seem to be helping here.
As I said before, I go through all the image previews once in Bridge and find all the images that are usable. As far as the number of keepers, our goal is to get at least one picture of each player, and as many action shots of each player as possible, so with approximately 70 kids on just the JV team, we need a lot of images! So the definition of keeper here is a little different than the Sports Illustrated definition! I will typically process about 800 per game, by reading the image into ACR to increase exposure, contrast, shadow etc, then opening it, applying the Topaz Denoise, and saving out a jpeg, all done via batch processing.
I have taken the suggestion of using the Resource Monitor within Windows Task Manager to watch what is happening. Let me preface all this by saying I am a damn user, not a PC admin, so please be merciful to my ignorance! Looking at the CPU tag in the Resource Monitor, I was surprised to see that Topaz uses about 44% of the CPU as it is running. There does not appear to be anything else significant running, as the overall CPU level at this same time is less than 55%. Looking at the Memory tab, it says there is 20 MB reserved for hardware, 5800 MB in use, 10410 MB in standby, and 78 MB free for any given image when Topaz is processing; so it seems like Topaz is not using all of the memory (16 GB) either. At the bottom of the memory table is this:
Available 10547 MB
Cached 10411 MB
Total 16364 MB
Installed 16384 MB
I don't understand what the "Cached" term here means.
And then watching the Disks tab, I am surprised to see as much internal drive activity as I seem to be seeing. CS6 is installed on my internal 7200 rpm hard drive, all of my data is on the external SSD, and I think/hope I have all of my scratch disk etc on the external drive. Every time Topaz kicks off on a new image in batch, I see a huge write occur to my C drive for a file called AppData\Local\Temp\...\_topazDenoise_rgb . The Resource Monitor says this is a disk Write at sometimes up to 5,000,000 B/sec when it first kicks off, and then settles down to about 600,000 B/sec as it nears the end of the 2 minute Topaz process, and then it goes away when Topaz has finished that image. Could this be some kind of Topaz internal scratch file, and if this is being written to my C drive, could this be why my Topaz processing times seem to be pretty much unaffected by my addition of the SSD? To my untrained eye, it does not seem like CPU or memory are the limiting factors here. Does a plug-in like Topaz use where you specify the scratch disk to be in the Preferences, or does it go off and find wherever it wants to, and in this case possibly the internal C drive? Or should I just quit worrying about it, there is nothing I can do (short of buying a newer faster computer, and then I will need suggestions on how to run that by the Significant Other and survive!), and just live with the time it takes and enjoy my SSD for all other applications? Thanks again for your help!
Jim