Sports Illustrated's digital workflow

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Very interesting article on SI's digital workflow, their
selection/editing/captioning process, equipment used, etc:

   Sports Illustrated's digital workflow
   Tuesday, March 16, 2004 | by Eamon Hickey

   http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-6453-6821

I recommend reading the original article online but here are some
of the interesting bits:

> 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.
:
> 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 had left to take up
> their positions inside the stadium -- two near each corner of the
> field, one roaming each sideline, and one in the stadium's
> rafters for overhead views.
>
> The first CompactFlash cards full of their images -- mostly shots
> of the pre-game show -- began arriving at the trailer early in
> the first quarter, ferried from the stadium by half-a-dozen
> runners. In the trailer, the cards -- 512MB or 1GB Lexars in
> speeds from 24X to 40X -- are fed into Lexar USB 2.0 CompactFlash
> card readers connected to ten IBM Thinkpad T40 laptops. The ten
> laptops are in turn connected to another T40 acting as an Oracle
> server 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.) The Thinkpads are 1.5GHz
> Pentium M machines with 768MB of RAM and 35GB hard drives.
:
> In 2003, Sports Illustrated's photo department processed
> 1,028,000 digital photographs shot by staffers or freelancers
> under assignment. In 2004, an Olympic year, they estimate they
> will process closer to 3 million. Though a small amount of the
> work done for the magazine is still shot on film, the vast
> majority of its photography is now digital.
:
> Staff photographer Bob Rosato's collection of gear is fairly
> typical. To a football game he takes four or five EOS-1D bodies
> and 600mm f/4, 400mm f/2.8, 300mm f/2.8, 70-200mm f/2.8, and 50mm
> f/1.4 lenses. For basketball, he adds five or six EOS-1Ds cameras
> and dispenses with the 400 and 600mm lenses.
:
> Like the other staffers, Rosato has been assigned 25-30 Lexar
> 512MB and 1GB CF cards in speeds ranging from 24X to 40X (with a
> few 16X cards still floating around).
:
> After JPEG/RAW pairs are cataloged by MediaServer, photo editors
> can copy the JPEGs from a particular assignment and browse
> through them with ACDSee, which they use because of its ability
> to very quickly display full-screen images or show them at 100%
> magnification. After cutting the raw take down to a group of
> selects, editors retrieve the original RAW/JPEG pairs of the
> selects and give them much more extensive captions that include
> player names and other information about the picture content. The
> captioning is done with MediaGrid, the desktop client application
> in the MediaServer suite, and MediaGrid writes the caption
> information into MediaServer database fields as well as the
> images' IPTC fields.
>
> "Do I like having to use two tools? No," says Jache of this
> two-application approach to browsing and captioning, but he can't
> find a single application that combines ACDSee's display speed
> with good captioning features.
:
> SI's photo department currently burns and stores DVDs using two
> Disc NSM 7000 DVD jukeboxes, each of which holds more than 500
> discs. Jache says he will have two more jukeboxes by year-end. In
> all, the magazine uses more than 100 servers and possesses 30
> terabytes of hard drive storage capacity as well as 24 terabytes
> of near-line DVD storage.


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Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/

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