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!
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.