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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."
[note: this could be construed as a plug. Perhaps it even is, re-reading. You have been warned]
:-)
:-) You could do things like drag an image out of IE/Moz and drop into 'Shake', with Shake being instructed to load the real footage not the proxy version you were looking at in the browser - this image-based-project-load alone saved enormous time when you're dealing with millions of images.
My company (7 of us in total) wrote an asset management system used on a major film in a previous life (we were called 'unique-id' then). We were given the option of being paid and not disclosing the film, or not being paid and letting everyone know which one. It was a *big* film - we took the getting paid option, so you'll have to guess which
The rushes coming in totalled 40 DTF tapes per working day over several months, several hundred million images in all. The same system was used on the 'The world was not enough' trailer, where the large quantities of mostly-naked women
gyrating around with oil being poured on them suddenly made the visualisation tools *far* better than they used to be...
Every image (every frame) was accessible and searchable, notes could be made and a proxy version played back over the net. It was completely automated - logging was done by simply untarring the data-tape or playing the rfid-labelled video tape, with metadata being inferred from path names or rfid tag, all very simple and very effective. Everything was written using OSS tools, mainly PHP and MySQL (and yes, we paid for our MySQL licences
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The poster to this story is pretty funny... I think most of us nerds here cared more about that dangling tit than anything else in the game. Then again... I think most everyone cares about the dangling tit more than the actual game.
History has a funny way of remembering things. If you don't believe me, think about how many people sum up the Clinton presidency into one word: blowjob.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
All around the world
So that's are what other people look like...
What's that bright round thing in the sky in some of the pictures? It doesn't look like any fluorescent light I've ever seen!
How can I IM those cheerleaders "A/S/L?"
Is there a torrent for those million-plus pictures?
www.john316.com isnt a geek site! Who is that guy?
Trolling is a art,
I hadn't thought of that angle of it. One of the problems with old fashioned cameras was the fact that you only had so much film...You could only CARRY so much.
But with a high end digital camera it practically unlimited, as long as you can offload your chips. So you don't have to pick your shots so carefully; I've never met a photographer who wouldn't rather take 10 pictures of the same thing than just one, because it's impossible to tell which picture will end up being the best. Now they can do that and it doesn't cost them a damn dime. I bet SI is getting swamped with digital photos.
At the root of it though, it's just another facet of the same problem indemic to tech...How do you deal with the massive amount of info that you can now obtain.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I was hoping from the article name that this was going to be about a great Open Content digital photo archive, like PDPhoto, OpenPhoto, or all the great stuff at the Internet Archive or Common Content.
Instead it's about somebody else's photos I can't use. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
Forget the ???
1. Make software that does both
2. Sell to SI
3. Profit!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I'd be interested to see how pro pics taken at the Super Bowl with Nikon's D2H camera (high-frame-rate, 4MP) compare with the digital EOS, especially since the photo editor claims that most of what he's getting from the EOS users is 'shit'.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
No dual G5's yet.
Thanks to the Quark Publishing System, which is not Mac OS X compatible. (from Page 3 of the article)
- Tony
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.
Itis the property of NFL and its owners.
I suggest we user UberBowl to refer to the final playoff game of the nationwide professional football leage.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I'm surprised Sports Illustrated uses relatively cheap hardware and software to edit their photos. ACDSee (Fire!) is $50, and they use some pretty standard (and not all that impressive) IBM laptops for most of the field action. Even at the studios in New York they're using dual 450 G4's. No dual G5's yet. Anyone know how much that camera costs?
What an odd post.
First of all, what "studios in New York"? I work in New York for a creative company, and we mostly use PC's. If someone prefers to work on Mac we issue them a Mac. Same as SI. Most people, in all honesty, prefer to work on PC's at my company, so that's what we give them. And those people work no more slowly than those using Macs (dual 450 CPU's is hardly impressive these days either, so it's a little weird that you'd put that up against the IBM T40's and dual Xeons SI is using. The last Mac we issued was a dual 1.8 G5).
Secondly, what the hell does cost have to do with anything in qualitative terms? It's any company's responsibility to be efficient in budgeting, and part of that means choosing the cheapest tools you can that will reliably get the job done (key word being "reliably" - it's no use spending the least money you can if what you buy is going to be broken half the time). IBM Thinkpads seem a perfectly sensible idea to me for what SI is doing with them - they're reliable, they're not expensive, they're small and easily transportable, and with Pentium-M chips and 768MB of RAM they're more than adequate for what SI is using them for, which is downloading and tranferring image files. This is efficient use of tools.
Similarly, did you even read why they're using ACDSee? We use it at my company as well. It's simply a very fast image viewer; there's nothing I know of that's faster either, or more suitable to the task of sifting through large quantities of images in as quick a time as possible. We use it for the exact same purpose.
I'm honestly impressed at how efficient and organized it seems SI is running their image processing program. They seem to know what they're doing and they've selected the right tools for the job. Who cares if they use "cheap" cameras and PC's? You got a problem with the technical image quality on any of their recent covers?
Yeah, but they may have had lenses from their film cameras... that seems to be one of the major big selling points for a professional/near professional grade digital SLR.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
RAW 12-bit (which the 1Ds captures) is a lossless representation of a bitmap with 24 or 32 bit color. RAW is the raw data from the CCDs of the camera itself, with a much higher color range. They capture 12bit Bayer patern, IIRC.
The RAW files are saved, to be converted into CMYK for printing, not RGB colorspace that PNG, JPEG and other monitor-centric display technologies use. The JPEGs are merely for previewing on a monitor.
RAW and JPEG are captured because that's the two formats the cameras they use spit out.
More details here.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.)
In workshops for bird or wildlife photography, I think 20 rolls/day is a typical estimate, and a lot of your time is spent finding subjects, or waiting for them to do something interesting, or waiting for the light to be right.
For the Super Bowl, the numbers come out to 40 rolls per photographer. That sounds about right to me. Figure they're getting every bit of every play that they can see from their position, and are shooting 5 frames per second or so.
Hell, photoshop shouldn't even be in a real journalists office.
Show me what happened, not an artists conception of what happened.
Just because you use photoshop doesn't mean you're mucking with the journalistic integrity of a photo. Color correction, contrast adjustment, sharpening, etc are all perfectly valid processes that don't alter the story of 'what happened'.
dan.
... 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!
I work (in IT) with photographers/journalists at a small news organization. True, they don't need the bells-n-whistles of Photoshop (effect filters, etc.). And yes, cropping is probably used on every picture that goes in the newspaper.
But:
Tempo. Photographers storming in from say a fire, an accident, etc., with a large number of images, and with minutes until the next assignment, or until the pages goes to print. Every second often counts, many times a week.
Good hardware shaving off a little time here and there helps.
Image corrections. Pretty much every image (to be published - in print or online) needs sharpening, color/hue/brightness corrections, and similar touch-ups (but never image manipulations like cloning, etc. Then, like you say, it would cease to be a journalistic photo, and become misleading and/or fraudulent). Actually, even cropping is done with caution - does the meaning change? is it still representative of the events that took place? etc.
Photoshop is still among the best software for doing this (corrections). Plus, most photographers are familiar with it, so freelancers, temps, etc., can jump into the production chain and be productive immediately.
So, I guess I'm arguing that they do need fast computers (we use P4s on the desktop, SUN servers & SAN) and Photoshop (we have additional image software, for batch conversions, etc.).
668.5
I assume that you are a more conservative person than I. While I respect your right to feel whatever you like:
1) Kids see nudity. Whether it's walking in on mommy and daddy in bed, a parent changing, whatever.... unless an adult freaks out about it, it's generally not a big deal. Worst case, they might ask some questions about anatomy that they'll need to know the answers to anyway.
2) "being offended" is really your decision. Another person can't offend you. (for example, A friend might jokingly say "Hey, asshole" and I'd laugh. A stranger does it and I might get mad. The reaction is MINE, not the speakers.
3) Honestly, it's a complicated and rough world. Perhaps if kids weren't shielded from it as much they would be more well adjusted. As it is, people lose their minds over a breast. God forbid we have 6 billion of them on the planet...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
You're going to be in for a rude awakening if you ever visit some European beaches..
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.
I don't think that's so true (anymore). Colour management on Mac/PC is practically identical when it comes to Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, and colour profiles have been handled better in Windows since 98 (I think, certainly 2000/XP). Yes, Colorsync is still nicer, but there's not as much of "wow, that's so much better than PCs" as there used to be. The historical reason is very much valid though, people work best when they use something they're comfortable with and used to.
c cessories/ sony-artisan.shtml
:)
As for Mac monitors being *completely* accurate out of the box, that's wrong. They're certified to a certain factory level - not wildly inaccurate by any means and *much* better than most standard off-the-shelf components, but still not good enough for critical work (in fact even Apple themselves recommend using hardware calibration on their website). Besides, devices go "out" with time anyway - esp. CRTs, which on the whole are much better at colour than LCDs: though the Apple Cinema displays are lovely I'd much rather have something like a Sony Artisan:
http://luminous-landscape.com/reviews/a
There's no way around it, you MUST profile your devices with a colorimeter (the Monaco equipment is excellent, GretagMacbeth also, and the Pantone Colorvision stuff serviceable and cheap) unless it's got hardware built in such as the Barco's or high-end Sony's, it's the only way to be sure. Also, a good thing about profiling is you can set devices to specifically match each other, so say you've just bought a batch of laptops to go along with the workstations, you can easily profile them to all look exactly the same - very useful when the photographers may have to share resources. I'm not going to start on profiling print devices or the intricacies of open or closed loop colour systems though, cause it all gets very boring