Canon 1Ds Mark III in Palm Springs
Recently I had the pleasure of working with the very talented Sydney-based photographer Hugh Stewart on a Palm Springs-based shoot for Marshall’s spring looks. With a final tally of 14,146 21-megapixel frames over four days, an immediate delivery schedule, and other above-and-beyond requests, this shoot proved to be a good test for our 35mm capture workflow capabilities using the new Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III.
Hugh Stewart shooting away.
Here is everything that was called for on this job:
- Full eight-core Mac Pro capture setup for primary shooting location
- Secondary MacBook Pro laptop for separate remote location setups
- On-set prints from each shoot setup for hard proofing
- Delivery of RAWs and processed full-res TIFF selects mere hours after the last shot
Did I mention I was the only tech on this job?
Who cares about beautiful models? Give me color balance!
As I mentioned, for this project we provided Hugh with the new 21 megapixel Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III. Originally, the advertising agency requested that medium format be used in order to meet their high-resolution file size requirements. Hugh however preferred the convenience and familiarity of 35mm. The new Mark III provided the perfect solution for both camps: 35mm ease with a megapixel count that (until now) could only be found in medium format digital backs.
With a shoot-to-card workflow, the Mark III is unstoppable. Even with files that large, at no point did Hugh complain about hitting any sort of buffer. And Hugh liked to hammer it. While the camera performed flawlessly, it gave me reason to be concerned: every click of that shutter meant another image roughly 25 megabytes in size to deal with. And at Hugh’s rate, we were dealing with three to four thousand images each day.
Thankfully, both our hardware and workflow solutions were up to the task of tackling this enormous project. On the hardware end, we had a Mac Pro tower equipped with a one terabyte RAID set up in a 0+1 configuration. For those unfamiliar, this means that the drives are both redundant for safety, and work in tandem to increase access speeds. On the software end, our unique Adobe Lightroom-centric workflow enabled us to stay efficiently organized, and allowed the agency clients to continuously edit as the shoot happened.
Julia, the project manager, Lisa, the marketing manager, and Melody, the designer, looking through selects and signing off on shots, all while Hugh continues to shoot.
Keeping on top of editing and choosing selects was the key to being able to process out TIFFs in a timely fashion immediately following the shoot. Thankfully, Melody, the layout designer, was diligent in doing so over the course of each day. She would also pick out her one or two favorite shots from each setup which I would queue up and create prints of right through Lightroom, using an Epson R340. Lightroom even has a nifty feature of letting you choose what file info to include on the print to help you keep those in order as well.
Lightroom allows you to select what file info to dynamically caption each print with.
As far as backing up the data safely and efficiently: at the end of each day, I would copy that day’s folder of RAWs on to a 500GB hard drive connected via SATA within a FirmTek enclosure. I would then remove the drive and take it with me back to my hotel room. This made for the quickest and easiest backup solution, thanks to it being incremental. SATA is the fastest hard drive interface available; I didn’t want to be sitting around for hours while the rest of the crew swarmed the hotel bar! Plus, I could sleep peacefully at night knowing the entire shoot resided at two different physical locations.
Melody makes selects.
When it was necessary to shoot in a remote location that lacked any power, I brought along a compact capture solution: a 17″ MacBook Pro with a collapsible laptop stand. Once we returned to the primary location, I imported the captures from the laptop in to the main Lightroom catalog via a CAT5 cable.
Lightroom proved vital in staying organized and allowing us to simultaneously import CF cards and edit previous shots. We retained organization by adhering to a specific folder naming scheme, as you can see off to the left. This yielded many benefits. By selecting one or more folders, and utilizing Lightroom’s powerful view filtering tools, it was possible to show the client only what they needed to see, even while files were importing in the background. For example, it was simple to show all the selects from the first day simply by selecting the Day1 folder and adjusting the Lightroom view filter. The clients would then quickly sort through them and narrow down their choices.
Lightroom’s powerful view filtering tools.
On the last day of shooting, final rounds of selects had been made for each different shoot setup, and TIFFs had to be processed from those choices. In Lightroom, I would queue up several exports at once, one for each folder. (Since Lightroom does not allow you to retain a folder structure when exporting, it’s necessary to run a seperate export for each folder, and designate a matching subfolder name. It’s a little tedious, and is definitely high on my list of features to improve for the next version of Lightroom, but not extremely time consuming.) As soon as I was able, I also began transfering the RAW files on to the external delivery hard drive which would go home with the client.
The end result: approximately 60 proof prints, over 14,000 RAW images, and around 1,600 TIFF selects adding up to 435 gigabytes of meticulously organized data delivered to the client within five hours of the last frame being shot. All with only one capture station/technician. And had the selects been finalized earlier, that time would have been reduced to an even smaller amount.
Not too shabby, eh?
Huh.. wha… I gotta drive back to LA now? Oh…
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2 Responses to “Canon 1Ds Mark III in Palm Springs”
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March 6th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Fantastic and informative post. Please do more, loved it.
Cheers
Stikman
http://www.stiksandstones.com
March 16th, 2008 at 12:22 am
I’m such a nerd. I love reading how you guys do this stuff. Details, details, details.
Thanks for sharing!