Jason,

Yeah it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I suppose the good news is always that processors are getting faster and cheaper, so hopefully as long as you’re willing to upgrade your computer as you upgrade your camera, things should stay in line. But yes, faster is always welcome, no matter what ;-)

Jason,

No, Aperture doesn’t have a proxy that you can edit and reapply that to the main image. It does have a proxy-type feature called Previews, but the only edits you can make to that and have them translate to the master is metadata (keywords, captions, etc.).

When you’re in preview mode or looking at preview images (because the masters are not available), none of the image adjustments are available either.

The idea being that an image adjustment made on a smaller version of the file will likely translate differently to the big file. Admittedly most global adjustments would probably be fine, but certainly localized adjustments like brushes or retouching would not.

That’s not to say you can’t do it yourself, however.

You could manually create a smaller version of an image, do your adjustments on there, then lift/stamp the adjustments onto the larger file. However you’d have to do the lift/stamp individually, per image.

You could make the proxy images using the AppleScript we sell here called “convert master file format” with a little tweaking. What it basically does is create a JPG of your image (at whatever size you want) and import that back into Aperture. It then marks the original as a reject so it can be discarded, but modifying the script to not do that should be easy enough.

If you want to go down that route, but aren’t familiar with scripting, I can ask our resident AppleScript guru to chime in on this.