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1,028,000 Digital Photographs
cdneng2 writes "Rob Galbraith has an in-depth article on the digital
photo process of Sports Illustrated. The article walks through SI's digital workflow of Super Bowl XXXVIII as it sorts through the 16,183 digital pictures shot by eleven of
the magazine's staff photographers and the process all the way to the cover of the magazine. Sorry, no Janet Jackson or swimsuit pics in this article."
Warning: Camera geeks make computer geeks look tame
Sports Illustrated's digital workflow
Tuesday, March 16, 2004 | by Eamon Hickey
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Steve Fine is looking at two pictures every second. He's been keeping up that pace, with frequent short interruptions, for over four hours, and he'll keep it up for three more. Four-megapixel JPEGs of football players, coaches, fans, entertainers, and certain assets belonging to Miss Janet Jackson go flashing across his computer screen in a dizzying sequence.
Virtually the same speed is maintained even when unrotated verticals appear. Fine and colleague George Washington, who is looking over Fine's shoulder, just instantly tilt their heads 90 degrees and then instantly straighten them back up again when horizontals reappear. Their unison is perfect, as if they're practicing a little hip-hop move. (And, yes, if you suspect that the pace slowed for Miss Jackson's appearances, you might be right.)
"Think we edit fast?" Fine asks, as more images flash by. "I'd be going faster if this shitty computer wasn't so slow." That shitty computer is a dual-Xeon 2.4GHz machine with 1.5GB of RAM.
Sports Illustrated editors and photographers pore over the take from Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston on February 1, 2004, in the magazine's editing trailer outside of Reliant Stadium. Pictured, left to right: Steve Fine, Director of Photography; George Washington, Deputy Editor; Walter Iooss, Photographer; Al Tielemans, Photographer; Nate Gordon, Assistant Editor acting as an assistant to Walter Iooss; Bob Rosato, Photographer. (Photo by Eamon Hickey/Little Guy Media)
But Fine, who is Sports Illustrated's Director of Photography, has a monstrous job in front of him, and there's no such thing as too much computer. He's chewing through SI's take from Super Bowl XXXVIII, 16,183 digital pictures shot in Houston's Reliant Stadium by eleven of the magazine's staff photographers over the course of about six hours. It's 11:00pm, an hour-and-a-half after the game has ended, and Fine is stashed in SI's media trailer outside the stadium with six other SI employees. The photographers, their work done, left half an hour before.
Fine is darting through the photos in ACDSee 5.0.1's single-image view mode and lip-syncing off and on to a Southside Johnny CD playing through the tinny speakers of a nearby laptop. He's still seeing mostly shots from the game's second quarter. Frequently he will stop on one picture, enlarge it to check its sharpness, get the opinion of Washington, a Deputy Photo Editor for SI, and either skip it or copy it to a sub-folder labeled "selects". That whole process might take three seconds. Fine has copied dozens of images to the selects folder, but he's edgy and, so far, unimpressed with the work of his photographers.
Single-image viewing mode in ACDSee. Super Bowl XXXVIII photo taken with a Canon EOS-1D by Bob Rosato, Sports Illustrated staff photographer.
"I've never seen so many guys say so many good things about their own take, and there's nothing but shit on the screen," he says. Later, unable to find a good shot of a particular Patriots touchdown catch, he gestures at the screen. "Eleven guys. Eleven versions out of focus."
Fine's editing station is at one end of a long table on which SI has duplicated in miniature much of the workflow found at the magazine's New York headquarters. It's a workflow based on using JPEGs for most editing tasks and RAW files to make the highest quality images for the printing press.
Sports Illustrated "digital valets" download incoming Super Bowl XXXVIII photos to 10 IBM T40 laptops in the SI media trailer outside Houston's Reliant Stadium. (Photo by Eamon Hickey/Little Guy Media)
The process starts with the photographers, the large majority of whom are shooting this Super Bowl with Canon EOS-1D cameras, which they are instructed always to set for simultaneous RAW+JPEG shooting. The photographers began trickling into SI's trailer earlier that day, and by 4:00pm all eleven ha
6k - 10k for the canon 1d or 1ds.
From what I understand, cameras that use a RAW mode are saving all the output from the CCD, without any processing at all. You can then load it into a program and apply exposure compensation, lighting adjustments and whatnot, rather than having the camera do the image processing.
Saving as a PNG would require turning the raw CCD data into an image, which is defeating the point.
Come on now do you really need anothe picture of Janet Jackson's breast? As if you don't see it enough of the news.
Not to mention there is already 100 centazillion websites dedicated to her breast already.
You can purchase the EOS-1D (8 MegaPixels) for $4,499.99.
The EOS-1DS (11 MegaPixels) is $7,999.99.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
You need lenses too. L series telephotos are far from cheap. At least 1000 each. And each photographer probably had multiple lenses and/or multiple bodies.
...on Galbraith's site is about National Geographic's first ever all digital shoot here. My favorite part was about how the photographer exposed "only" 200 rolls worth of pictures by using digital!
Don't forget GIMP-Savvy. They have over 4GB of free as in [beer|speech] pics; plus, even if you don't have any images to donate, you can contribute to the site by categorizing existing photos.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Can you say RTFA?
...and to two HP Proliant DL380 servers with dual-Xeon 2.4GHz processors, 1.5GB of RAM, and twin Ultra-III SCSI hard drives. (One of these servers, attached to a Sony CPD-G520 21" monitor, is Steve Fine's editing machine.)
... it's significantly longer.
1) Get to the game and burn film by the end of the 1st quarter
2) Give a 'doggy bag' of the film, your paper id, to a gopher who runs the film to an onsite processing facility (if you are lucky) or takes it to a local newspaper place that has an 'agreement' with your paper to use the facilities.
3) 15 minutes, film, dry to dry (C41)
4) Proofsheet or eyeball the film
5) Scan and upload.
6) Repeat for each quarter.
Takes alot more time, alot more resources, and sadly introduces alot more errors.
I am completely floored by the workflow SI has in place. That has been obviously honed to razor sharpness- only small gains available to be had now.
Oh, and yes, I'm a photographer and (was) an editor, until I decided everyone else's photos weren't as good as mine *wink*
I own the 70-200 2.8L. It is a gorgeous work of art. Is balanced perfectly, is tack sharp, and covers nearly all portrait ranges I need, as well as bringing in the ladies...
In 1995 I think it cost me ~1200$.
Figure a typical shooter is going to want the following
16-35mm 2.8L, $1400
70-210 2.8L IS, $1700
24-70 2.8L, $1300
And if you are really lucky
400mm f2.8L IS, $6500
The 300 2.8L is cheaper by far, but you usually need that extra reach outdoors....
Maybe it was an odd post after all, but you didn't get what I was saying. I'm not dissapointed that they use standard off the shelf hardware / software, I'm just surprised. In the recesses of my crazy infantile mind I imagined a large organization like SI using stuff so advanced, so expensive, so grear that I'd never even heare of it. Now I know different. I actually *like* the fact that they use relatively inexpensive equipment. It means all I need is a ten thousand dollar digital camera!
Understand what you're talking about, at the very least. RAW images ARE compressed- they're 10-12bit per channel files. My 10D's raw files are anywhere from 5 to 6.5MB depending upon how much detail is in the image(higher ISO settings will generate bigger files due to noise in the image), and uncompress to well over 30MB in Photoshop(part of that bloat is because photoshop does 8 or 16 bit per channel, not anything inbetween). I can do extensive color and exposure correction, as well as tweak noise reduction and sharpening functions(all cameras sharpen the image to compensate for the antialiasing filter that sits over the CCD and spreads the light across the 3 color sensors).
Further, the true pro cameras(1D, 1Ds, 1D Mark II, etc) can save both a JPEG and a RAW file and even allow you to control exactly how the JPEG is saved- resolution and such. My 10D saves a preview thumbnail in the RAW file, and you get a little control over what resolution it is, so it's similar, but not quite the same. The 1D mark II can save the images onto two different media cards at the same time.
JPEGs are ideal because decompression is very, very fast- and the camera has already saved a lower-resolution preview JPEG for you so there's less data to push around. RAW files require a large amount of processing, since it's raw CCD information. That includes interpolation(the R,G,B pixels are in different places!), color balance determination, etc...all the stuff the camera has a dedicated chip to handle.
Honestly, if you read the article, the guy's problem is that he has shit for photographers- "11 guys, 11 shots of the same touchdown out of focus!" who are sloppy and too loose with their shutters simply because they can be. Digital has shifted the work from the photographer(who had to be careful since he only had so much film) to the editor, who's now swamped with the most unbelievable crap because these guys are shutter happy.
Please help metamoderate.
But it's not an image. There has been no processing done on the signals to make it an image.
a w/:
From http://blanik.colorado.edu/~rtezaur/photo/other/r
"There is a number of steps involved in converting the RAW data into an image. In no particular order, the data must be color-interpolated since most digital sensors employ color masks thereby measuring at each pixel only some of the color and light intensity information. Based on the characteristics of the color mask and the spectral sensitivity of the sensor, some mapping between the measured numbers and actual colors must be used and results must be converted into one of the commonly used color spaces, with the appropriate gamma."
You're right that you can convert from one lossless file to another, as long as you're not losing precision (GIF uses lossless compression but only handles 8 bit images, for instance) but the RAW data is just not an image yet.
It saves the thumbnails as JPEGs in either an Access compatible, or can use an SQL database, so its wicked fast. The format is open, so you can tweak it with Python, or whatever.
I've only got about 80,000 of my own photos (it's a hobby for me, not a career), but it does everything I need it to do.
--Mike--
PNG and JPEG use 24 bit color(plus 8 bits of alpha for PNG), while the cameras can produce 36 bit color.
Actually, PNG supports up to 48 bits of color.
I don't know about JPEG.