JPEG 2000 and LARGE files - slow

I just acquired the RAW plugin yesterday and so far have only used the JPEG 2000 portion (I also will be using it on Olympus ORF files).

I have a Nikon Coolscan 8000 and plan to use JPEG 2000 for archival storage, since it provides excellent lossless compression, and stores ICC profiles and metadata (I record the scan settings).

The problem is that the files are HUGE (up to 200 megabytes for a 16 bit grayscale scan from 6x7cm negative) and the plug-in takes a VERY long time to actually write the file (I estimate about 20 minutes on my 1.7Gighz Pentium 4 with 512 Megs of RAM). Reading them back is also slow (I would guess about 5 minutes). THis is exacerbated by the fact that PS provides no means to abort an operation once you have started it! If you change your mind, you either have to wait or tell Windows to abort PS (not a recommended procedure).

I do have other programs that can read and write these files and they do not take anywhere near that amount of time.

Is there anything that can be done (any settings I'm overlooking) to speed this up? I would be willing to trade slightly less compression for more speed.

Michael Bate

Michael - the escape key works just fine to cancel....

Yes, it IS very slow also on my Nikon 4000 produced 64MB/128 MB files.
Lurawave's JP2 photoshop plugin (they also have a standalone converter) is faster, but also nowhere near what I find acceptable.
We'll have to wait for someone to write an optimized assembler version...
Edwin