Amped FIVE now available in 64bit

This great news just came from Amped Software: "Today [Amped Software] just released a new major update to Five. As always all of our customers who have an active update/support plan, or who purchased Five within the past 12 months, can freely download the update. (If you haven’t tried it, go to Help>Check for Updates Online)

There are several new improvement that will be highlighted in the coming days, but the major one is that Five is now available in both 32 and 64 bit flavors.

The good thing is that when you install Five you will get both the version at the same time if you have a 64 bit operating system. By default the installer will create a link to the 32 bit version, but you can easily modify the link or create a new one changing the path from bin32 to bin64.

[Amped Software] preferred to leave the 32 bit version as default because of codec compatibility. Most of the codec packages that users install by default on systems are in 32 bit version and if you don’t install the codecs specifically for 64 bit you won’t be able to decode some file formats. This is just an issue inherent with all the proprietary formats, so we designed things this way so no loss of compatibility is risked with this new version.

So, what are the benefits of a 64-bit version? Mainly an improvement in performance and the possibility to use more than 3 GB of RAM (limitation in Windows for 32-bit OS). You may have noticed with previous version of Five that when you were working at big images (like the ones coming from modern digital cameras) after adding a few filters the memory could get full, thus limiting new processing steps and filters. This was especially true with memory intensive filters like the ones for image deblurring.

Now, with the 64 bit version, Five is able to use as much memory as is available on your system. So huge files aren’t a problem.

Both the 32 and 64 versions should work fine in most of the cases but the general advice could be the following:

• Use 32 bit version to work on CCTV videos, where support for same exotic codec available only for 32 bit operating systems may be required and where memory is not usually an issue. The quality is generally poor to begin with, so that is why we’re trying to clarify it, right?
• Use 64 bit version to work on digital camera and high definition images, where there is the risk of needing more than 3 GB of RAM. This is very useful for latent prints, crime scene photos, high quality images, etc. Now there is no limitation of memory size, so go as big as you need to go.

That’s NOT all folks… there are also some other improvements under the hood and in ease of use. Update Five and see for yourself."