However, in that time we have also finessed certain aspects of the system, and figured that it has matured to the point where it would be a good idea to revisit and show exactly how we currently make it work.

One important aspect of the system that we didn’t cover in much detail last time around is the A/B archive set concept. This is the redundancy part of our system. Every archive disk has a B counterpart containing the exact same data. We make it simple by labeling each archive set, for example, “Archive Disk 30A” and “Archive Disk 30B”. Every time we dump a new shoot on to Archive 30A, we also put it on 30B. The B disk provides a safety net in case the A disk fails, and once that archive set is full, we move the B disk off-site for additional safety (we’ll get to that in a second).

The newest and most useful addition to our system is FirmTek’s recently released SeriTek 5PM five-bay SATA enclosure. Since we already use FirmTek’s two-bay models for backing up data while on set, it made perfect sense to invest in this five-bay monster. This way, we can have the two most recent archive sets live, along with an extra bay available which enables us to quickly slap in the set backup disk after a long day of shooting, start the files copying over, and leave. All without even unpacking the computer we shot to.

Also in our previous entry we mentioned using Extensis Portfolio to track which disk each image is on. This is a step we did away with because even though it was relatively simple, it still wasn’t worth the extra time (again, in our case. This step might prove invaluable to some people). What we now do instead is simply keep a plain text document accessible on a network shared drive containing a list of all the job folder names and which disk they are on. Looking up a job is a simple matter of hitting Cmd-F. And, our standard job folder naming scheme tells us the most important info about a shoot right away: date, photographer’s name, and client or subject.

For those that are curious, the “ImageServerNAS” share that you see in the background is the vestige of a failed archiving experiment. For a few months, we decided to try adding a NAS appliance in to the mix in order to keep the last 90 days worth of shoots live on a server. We quickly determined that the NAS was not suitable for our purposes. First of all, it was slow as molasses. It would take on average one to two hours to copy over the typical shoot. Second of all, and this was the big one for us, Lightroom can’t open a catalog if it’s stored on a network share. We would have to copy the entire shoot over to the machine we were working on if we wanted to browse through it, which just wasn’t practical given how long it would take. The beauty of our current system is how fast we can get to an image in order to process it and have it available for the client to download in mere minutes. We now use the NAS to hold printing and retouching jobs, a task it is much better suited for.

When it comes time to pull out an old job, all that one has to do is open the file list document, find which drive the shoot is residing on, then pull that drive from our customized antistatic pink foam storage drawer. Slap the drive in, and the shoot is live and looking just like it did the day it was shot.

Remember I mentioned taking the “B” disks offsite? We came up with a convenient process for that as well. Pink foam inserts custom cut to fit in a Pelican 1520 case. This case gets stored in a safe place miles away.

   

We also slip in a printed copy of the Archive Disk File List text document so we have a hard reference for what is on each disk in case of disaster.

Addendum- funnily enough, as I was writing this article, we got an image delivery request from a shoot we tech’d on over three years ago. The shoot resided on Archive Disk 1 (no kidding). But sure enough, the disk mounted without issue, the files (DNGs) opened exactly as they should, and we had the images processed and ready to be downloaded within 15 minutes.

No fooling around, the system works!

Register now at www.apa-la.org
Breakfast and Lunch will be provided

Early Registration: (on or before May 1, 2008)
Free for APA/LA Assistant ($125 Annual Fee)
Student Members ($55 Annual Fee)
$60 Non-members

Late Registration:
$10 APA/LA Assistant and Student Members
$70 Non-members

* Black Book Raffle
Details Below

Course Details:

With so many photographers seeking work, how can a photography student gain an edge? Until you can build a stellar portfolio and use it to market your photos, learn the business behind the business. Whether your goals include gaining more commercial experience or learning about being an assistant, this moderated panel of leading photography apprentices will provide the knowledge and confidence to send you in the right direction. We’ll cover career opportunities and the ins and outs of getting hired in the industry. A good resource for film assistants, prop work and film crews.

In this course, you can expect to learn:

Insight into industry expectations
Identifying potential markets
Effective communication and marketing strategies
Whom you should know and how to develop a professional relationship
Whom to contact to get hired
What is expected of you when you are hired, & how to get paid for your work
Managing self-income taxes
What not to do, and things to look out for
Demos of various lighting, camera and grip equipment

In addition each participant will receive a copy of the APA/LA Assistant Handbook

* The Black Book will be raffling off a FREE 10 Image Online Portfolio. Our
Blackbook.com website focuses on the work of the artist. This is your chance
to showcase your portfolio to the industry’s best.

APA - LOS ANGELES
5455 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 1709 Los Angeles, CA 90036
p 323-933-1631 f 323-933-9209 e office@apa- la.org

Being out in the middle of snowy nowhere meant a lot of downloading cards to laptop. Some tips for coping with the cold and snow:

- Bring a heavy duty laptop stand.
- You NEED a good laptop shade in order to see anything with the insane amount of snow-glare.
- Speaking of glare, give yourself a liberal coating of sunblock 20 minutes before going out in the snow. One of the PAs on the shoot didn’t heed this advice, and on the next day of shooting it looked like he’d spent all morning with his head stuck in a microwave. He complained that even his eyeballs were burned.
- Bring a portable hard drive that doesn’t require a power adapter to back up to.
- Have an extra fully-charged laptop battery or two.
- Snow boots are your friend.
- Sunglasses are as well!
- Gallon-sized plastic baggies are good for carrying around the camera(s) in if/when it’s snowing.
- The Canon Mark III can get a little wet without any issues.
- Camera batteries don’t last as long if they’re cold; keep the charged extras in your pockets.
- Bring plenty of CF cards in case the shooter goes somewhere you can’t bring the laptop.

One location required piling in to a Snowcat to make it.

On some of the shoot days, all of the locations were outside and it was impossible to bring along the full Magliner/Tower/Monitor rig. On those occasions, I left that set up in the hotel and just brought the laptop. When I’d get back at the end of the day, I’d import that day’s captures in to the main Lightroom catalog over a CAT5 cable. Then, if he wanted, I would just roll the capture cart over to the art director’s room so he could edit on a calibrated 30″ monitor in the comfort of his own hotel room.

The view from the hotel. Can all jobs be like this? Please?

On the third day we shot in Woody Creek, former hometown of Hunter S. Thompson. Every blog needs a little HST, don’t you think?

One notable occasion: the Canon Wireless File Transmitter accessory got a chance to shine. The opportunity arose when it became necessary to shoot several still-life shots. In this scenario, speed and versatility were not as important as layout and cropping. Matt, the art director, wanted to able to quickly get the shots straight in to the design template he’d created on his laptop in order to verify that the layout would work. Enter WFT.

Shooting with the Canon WFT beaming images right to the laptop.

I had the WFT transmitting the RAW files straight to a Lightroom watched folder on my laptop. Roughly 10-15 seconds after taking a shot, the image would pop up in LR. I would then export that frame to a separate folder as a JPEG which Matt would pull on to his laptop via an ad-hoc wireless network I created between our two Macbooks. So, there we were, able to make adjustments to the scene and see the finished result right in the layout in under a minute without any wires. Pretty cool.

Another successful shoot wrapped up! From left to right: Photographer Hugh Stewart, Charlotte (the stylist), Matt (AD), Annabel (the producer), Scotty (1st assistant), and yours truly.

Ahh, Greggy

Westside!

I float.

Remember Busta Rhymes?

Baldessari…Newton…Burton.

Chef du jour.

Nobody puts Frankie in the corner.

My new Asian family.

Rawrrr!

He’s super tall.

He’s super taller!

Gotta love the Kretschmer.

Smoking is bad but looks so cool.

Dead guys rock.

This is how we treat our photographers. Or maybe just Alison Dyer.

The Rock said I looked fat, thanks dude.

I should be a model.

My very competent successor.

I’ve got a present for you. I don’t have pants on!

Thanks Atiba!

Please keep in touch, I will still be around (for you to heckle) and can always be reached at
frank@imagemechanics.com

Woo!

P.S. If anyone would be so generous as to come and speak to my students and teach them a thing or two, you’re always welcome and I’m sure they’d love it!

Sun Screen, Water Bottle, Chap Stick and Jack Johnson.
The above video and my awesome grey card pretty much sum up the day.

We just thought we’d post a quick little article, in response to a recent shoot, about how much better Lightroom is at processing files than Capture One Pro. As always, the proof is in the images, so we took the same file, ran it through each program spending a similar amount of time on color corrections etc., and here are the results.

1,2,3,4…Tell me which one you love more.

Image #1 was processed through Lightroom and images #2 and #3 through Capture One 3.7.7. The first Capture One image was set to keep the hair tint neutral and the second was set to keep the skin tint neutral. It was not possible to acheive a neutral tint throughout the whole image similar to the Lightroom processing.

Remember, we don’t just do this for fun. As a company, Image Mechanics strives to give our clients the best possible image in the least amount of time and Lightroom has been the backbone of our workflow for the past year. So what do you think? Which image would you rather deliver to a client at the end of a long day? In addition to the fact that each Lightroom-processed TIFF took a mere 6 seconds to output as opposed to 45 seconds apiece for Capture One! Needless to say, I think it’s pretty obvious.

It all boils down to the fact that you can save yourself countless hours of retouching, tweaking and processing by using the best tool for the job from the start. That isn’t to say that Capture One isn’t an idiot proof program.. um, I mean… keep using it everyone! It sure does make us look good!

The next page includes the settings which we applied to the file in each program.

Lightroom

Phase #1 Green-tinted, Color Balance Panel

Phase #1 Green-tinted, Exposure Panel

Phase #2 Magenta-tinted, Color Balance Panel

Phase #2 Magenta-tinted, Exposure Panel

ADDENDUM

Now, here are the images again. The first one is the same Lightroom file, and the second is a new C1 file rendered with the correct color profile (Phase One P 45+ Portrait Natural.icm).

We stand by our original conclusion. Even with the appropriate profile selected, the results do not differ substantially. Did we mention that we spent over 20 minutes tweaking the image in C1 to get a good result? (Compared to 20 seconds in Lightroom). Even ignoring the visual results of this test, the bottom line, as we see it, is this:

- Lightroom gives you far more (and far more intuitive) control over achieving the visual look that you want to obtain. A color profile is just a starting point; some people think some profiles look better than others by default, but you’re inexorably going to want to make changes from there. How easy and efficient is it to make those changes in C1 compared to Lightroom? (Compare the two programs’ adjustment tools).

- Lightroom reads and processes Phase, Canon and Leaf files. As digital techs, we regularly need to deal with all three systems depending on the photographer’s preferences. Rather than constantly cope with each system’s proprietary quirks and flaws, we have a tool that can reliably do it all. This equates to a more efficient workflow which means a better experience for our clients, and that is, in our opinion, the most important quality.

I CAN HAVES USB

At Image Mechanics, we deal in high volume commercial digital capture. We mainly shoot tethered to a computer then we process and deliver thousands of images every day. When we write reviews, they are slanted towards how the equipment hinders or aids us in this task. With a few minor exceptions, the Canon 1Ds Mark III definitely falls into the later category.

For a list price of eight grand, the 1Ds Mark III gives you a megapixel count that rivals medium format in a sturdy, easy to use camera with amazing image quality. The chip size is 21.1 megapixel (5616 x 3744) which is 26% larger than in the previous 1Ds Mark II and the LCD viewscreen is a whopping 3″. The camera also adds a second internal processor to speed up image capture and rendering. As for the sturdiness of this camera, I had first hand experience of how rugged it is on a recent Pfizer shoot in NY with Karen Morgan (http://www.kmorganphoto.com/) - shooting cats dogs. Someone knocked the camera off of the Magliner cart and it fell about 3 feet to the concrete floor. Ouch! The only lasting damage was a small ding on the bottom corner. Everything still worked 100% after a good chip cleaning. Wow! I thought it would at least be knocked out of alignment or need to go in for repair, but it tested fine and has stayed in production. This is a very sturdy camera that can take a beating.

Minor Damage

CARD SHOOTING
The MarkIII supports the new UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) CF cards which allow twice the data transfer rate of conventional cards. For a brief explanation of UDMA, read the FAQ at the bottom of this page. What the acronyms add up to is that the write speed while shooting is noticeably different between the Sandisk Ultra III (without UDMA capabilities) and the Sandisk Ultra IV’s which are UDMA capable cards. In a real world shooting situation, you will rarely hit the buffer using the Sandisk Ultra IV or other UDMA CF cards. The write time is under 1 second per image for up to 19 frames then it hits the buffer. Clearing the buffer only takes 10 seconds.

Here is a quote from a previous blog article about using the 1Ds Mark III while shooting to cards:

“With a shoot-to-card workflow, the Mark III is unstoppable. Even with files that large, at no point did [the Photographer] complain about hitting any sort of buffer. And he liked to hammer it……..we were dealing with three to four thousand images each day.”

TETHERED SHOOTING
When I first read the specs for the Mark III, I was disappointed in the choice Canon made to switch from Firewire to USB. The first problem for most professional photographers is the fact that Apple USB drivers are slower than Windows drivers and the majority of pros use Macs. Even if you just compare the specs by reading the fine print, USB is only as fast for small files and short bursts. Firewire is faster for larger file transfers like 25 megabyte raw files and sustained copying. Try copying a 5 gig folder of images onto an empty external USB hard drive and then repeat the test on an external firewire drive (make sure the hard drives are the same RPM speed). The firewire transfer will be faster than when using USB. I hate even having this conversation because we should be talking about how screaming fast tethered shooting is when connected via eSATA or even firewire 800! Don’t give us bigger files and then slow down the transfer rate. This is the same decision making that made the new WFT-E2a wireless transmitter use 802.11 B/G specs instead of N (we will get to that in a minute). Now here is the reality check. Most people buying a high end DSLR are not professionals. They are doctors and lawyers and other photo enthusiasts with money to burn. Those users will never shoot tethered nor will they have eSATA cards in their computers. Hardware and software companies say they make pro photo tools but they know that the pro slice of the buying public is much smaller than the advanced amateur market. I realize that there are always compromises in life but that doesn’t mean that I like it.

Tethered shooting speed tests on an Apple 3 Ghz 8-core w/8GB RAM and a hardware RAID 0+1:

Time from shutter release to first quick preview appearing: 4-5 seconds
Additional queued photos: 3 seconds between each photo transferring
Maximum frames per minute 33
Time before buffer clears: 3 seconds between shots - 12 shots = 36 seconds
Frames to hit buffer: 12

Lets talk about what Canon did right for tethered shooting. They greatly improved the shooting experience by providing a cable clamp. Long time readers know the lengths we have gone to in order to secure the cable to the camera during a shoot. Canon came up with a brilliant idea to use the electronic cable release port to secure the cable clamp. It is a very nice design that works well. I still think that the cable going into the camera should be right angled not straight to help relieve tension, but the new system is much better than the old one. One thing you might want to consider is getting a short usb cable and using a longer cable with a repeater built into it. Attaching the short cable to the camera and using the clamp will give you the sturdy connection you need and plugging into the repeater provides a break away point. If someone trips on the cable, the repeater junction will disconnect instead of taking the camera down with it or ruining your camera’s USB port.

Brilliant but easy to lose cable clamp

SOFTWARE
The EOS Capture software has evolved nicely. Because we capture into Lightroom or use Adobe CS3 Bridge, all I want camera software to do is get the image from the camera to the computer.

The new streamlined EOS Capture has an improved interface.

WIRELESS SHOOTING WITH THE WFT-e2A
The software for the new WFT-E2A is much more intuitive and easier to use than the previous WFT-E1 Utility. The device now sits on the side of the camera instead of screwing into the bottom like before like we suggested. The big problem with this wireless implementation is the bandwidth choice. Again, Canon chose to go with 802.11 B/G implementation which is older and slower technology as compared to 802.11 N. This choice makes even less sense to me than the USB cable choice. Anyone needing wireless connectivity who is willing to pay $800 can afford to upgrade their wireless router.

Canon Wireless File Transmitter accessory

The wireless transfer time Ad-Hoc connection (computer to computer network) RAW: 10-12 seconds depending on RAW file size which varies from about 19 to 28 megs. The buffer works the same as tethered, once the buffer is hit, the camera needs to clear the latest transfer before you can shoot another frame. This makes for a pretty slow RAW wireless workflow. One work-around would be to shoot RAW + JPG writing the RAW file to card and sending the JPG over the wireless for client editing. JPG over wireless only takes 1 or 2 seconds. You can also use the camera tethered to import RAWs at the same time the WFT is uploading JPGs somewhere else. Doing this doesn’t seem to affect the tethered transfer too drastically; only adds a second at most. The key to getting this to work is to make sure the EOS Utility is set so that images are saved to both card and PC (since the WFT reads files from the CF card). This means that the card will have to be replaced or formatted every time it fills up, even while being tethered.

The WFT-E2A will also shoot to 10/100 ethernet. This allows you to shoot tethered for longer distances (150′ ethernet cable lengths). This method gets you up to 41 frames per minute with an average transfer time under 2 seconds per image. Still not screaming fast but pretty respectable if you need longer cable runs or your camera’s USB port blows out.

SUMMARY
The 1Ds Mark III is a jump forward as well as a step back. You can’t beat it for a card workflow but the USB transfer bottleneck keeps it from realizing it’s full potential. A recommended workflow with this camera would be to use a short pigtail USB cable fastened to the camera with the cable clamp and tethered via a longer USB repeater for the initial test shots. Then, pull the repeater and shoot to card (this saves connecting and reconnecting the cable clamp). The 1Ds Mark III is a very capable camera that should put pressure on medium format chip makers to up their game. It will be interesting to see what happens to this market segment when Sony joins the fray later this year with their 25 megapixel DSLR which is aimed squarely at the pro’s.