Holy Cra-Apple. Video formats make raw look sane.

So, I have this new Sony camera and it's supposed to be really, really good at making video files. If you're hard core you can skip your in camera memory card and the pedestrian 4:2:0 file structure, and the highly compressed files your camera wants to make so your computer doesn't have a file thrombosis, and you can spool uncompressed 4:2:2 files straight out of the HDMI plug and into an external reader/hard disk. The cheap, decent HDMI recorders start around $1,200.  This is great for the people who are playing in the big, big leagues but most of us want to shoot compressed because we don't have a server room back at the studio dedicated to transcoding video and editing big, 10 bit video files.

Most photographer/multi-media folks I know want to be able to shoot on a good video camera or DSLR camera, get enough material on some 16 gig memory cards to make it worth our whiles and have some sort of compromise between compression and quality that works for our clients. We're shooting for local theaters, restaurants, and the usual business interview kind of stuff. We try to toss in a little art from time to time.  The finished work needs to be good and high definition but we're not ready (and our clients haven't saved up enough) for ultra high def (4K)  and all the storage, editing and nonsense that comes with it.

I figured that the big Sony a99, shot at 1080p @24 fps with the lowest compression setting should look pretty good on the old 40 inch TV in the living room. I'll be damned if we'll ever know.... (just kidding....kinda).

Thing is that the camera shoots a format called AVCHD. The people at Apple seem to regard it with the same curiosity travelers regard tapeworms and encephalitis, they don't want to get near it.
But the problem for me is that every computer within a 100 yards of my reach is an Apple product. When I insert a recently shot SD card from the big Sony the Apple kind of rolls its eyes and creates some wacky file folders called, "Private." I can click on them but I never get to see the individual .MTS files I need to get to....very frustrating. Many tricks and much ancient lore must be used to see what I want....the control key being critical.

I can look at the files on a friend's PC and they open right up and play. But on my machine I can only really get a good look at them if I import them into Final Cut Pro X and wait for seven coffee breaks for the buggy-ass program to transcode all the files. It converts them to Apple ProRes, which works fine, but by then the magic is gone, my attention span has gone down faster than the stack of new Boeing Dreamliner orders and I am, for all intents and purposes, grounded. And not in a good, electrical way. At this point I'd even watch European football rather than wait for the magic transcode elves to do their mediocre magic.

Apple likes movie formats that are called .Mov files. There are also beasts called Apple Intermediate Codec, or AIC files. The bling-puters like these too. But you can always buy a stand alone transcoder to convert anything to anything. You just have to spend more time and money and you have to make sure the trade-offs in final image quality don't push you out of the quality/investment paradigm you've been trying to establish from the beginning.

I hate trying to run Final Cut Pro X on even a fast machine while the program transcodes files in the background. It slows down everything. On bigger projects I've been setting up a second work station just to transcode clips from AVCHD to Apple ProRes or AIC while I edit on my primary station. Anything to speed up the flow.

While my primary system is great for day to day Photoshop and batch raw conversions for still images I can see that as video becomes a bigger and bigger part of my workload I'll either need to speed more on computer power and storage or smile and make nice with a skilled editor who has already made that kind of investment.

Realization: I'm pretty good at shooting the stuff. I hate to edit and would love to foist that off on anyone who needs to spend time alone in front of the screens.

So, I finally got everything imported and looked at the files. The stuff looks good. Really good. Better than I hoped. I just wish the whole process was as easy as pulling Jpegs into Lightroom...

Apple needs to spend some of that reserve cash to fine tune a couple things. They need to have some program like Preview that will open and show any kind of video file you even wave next to your machine. Then they need to nicely ask FCP-X not to grab every last shred of RAM with the intention of never sharing it again with any other program until you re-start your machine.

And I think the my monitor needs to be about 2 inches wider. And I think their should be an emulation mode in FCP-X so you can see, approximately, how your work will appear on a TV screen.

Finally, does NTSC really stand for "Never Twice the Same Color?"

Yeah. A video rant. Yawn.

Buy your stuff with our links and we'll make sure the lab continues to.....experiment.

Good Stuff from LL.

I like Michael Reichmann's latest essay. It touched on a some themes I like. To wit: That we've achieved a technical plateau with excellent tools and processes, and now it's time to concentrate on the actual images. Here's what he writes: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/why_what_works.shtml

I was walking last week and I noticed this stack of paper on a table next to a downtown trailer that sells coffee. It was a Sunday New York Times. It brought back to me the memory of buying our copy from Watson's bookstore in Clarksville (an older Austin Neighborhood), getting coffee and pastries from Sweetish Hill Bakery and then sitting out on the lawn in front of the bookstore and having a leisurely read. Belinda and I would swap sections and the magazine and jostle each other to point out interesting stuff. It's been years since I bought a paper copy. I read the NYT on my iPad while I'm waiting for the family to wake up. It all changes.

Sometimes I'll find an article that Ben will like or that my friend, Paul, might need to read and I'll send them links.

The thing I really miss about the paper copy is the Sunday Magazine. It's not the same to me on the iPad or even on my bigger monitor. But life is a process of adapting to change.

on other fronts: I've been battling a common cold for the last week and it's kept me out of the pool and away from the running trail. I am happy to report that I got back into the pool this morning and swam the masters workout with about 30 other hard working swimmers. All before the sunrise.

I'm celebrating by tossing a random swim photo onto the blog:

Backstroke Start. UT Pool.

Prince Rainier Swim Pool. At the Harbor in Monte Carlo. A great place to swim laps....

2010 Masters Indoor Nationals. UT Pool.

2010 Masters Indoor Nationals. UT Pool.

2010 Masters Indoor Nationals. UT Pool.

2010 Masters Indoor Nationals. UT Pool.

2010 Masters Indoor Nationals. UT Pool.

Some camera notes from the weekend: I shot video interviews for Zachary Scott Theatre with the Sony a99 camera on Sunday. The footage looked amazingly good to me. Very sharp and beautiful tones. The camera's front mounted audio level controls worked well and the Sennheiser wireless microphones I used were really good. I hope the editor for the project will have a series of PSAs that we can roll out on the site over the course of the week. 

I also used Sony a57 camera on a shoulder mount and was very happy with its performance as well. More as I settle back into the office.

Finally: My big job this morning is to write thank you notes to the eight team members of a high tech company that helped facilitate my two days of shooting with their CEO, last week. The jobs were fun. It's my reminder to my fellow freelancers out there not to put off thanking their clients. I don't know if it works for everyone but I sure love it and it makes me all warm and tingly when I get a nice thank you note from an assistant or second shooter I've just worked with....

An interesting perspective on teamwork in fashion photography.

"......When you shoot for fashion versus more of your traditional portraiture, do you ever become annoyed having to work with a team of stylists, beauty, and production people?
Working with stylists and beauty team has its function. I'm not necessarily frustrated with that part, as much as I am with the current state of fashion photography. I think, with the advent of digital photography, the dictatorship aspect of photography became democratized and over time became a group effort, which I think is bullshit. I'm sorry, but photography is a dictatorship; it's not a democracy. At the end of the day, I don't sit here and tell the hairstylist to move the hair a little bit this way when they're working. I'm sure as fuck not going to have someone tell me what to do with photography. With that said, as a photographer it's your responsibility to fulfill the needs of your client. You don't want to be a dick about it; there are plenty of people who do that, which, I think, is equally bullshit.  ........"

From an interview with Norman Jean Roy, fashion photographer.  It's a rocking fun interview and you can read it all right here: http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/01/norman-jean-roy-digital-ruined-fashion-photos.html

Make sure you click on his slideshow.......it's really, really good.

By Request: Kirk's woeful and unruly back-up strategy.

If you really love an image then make a really nice print and store it well.....

I once sat through a lecture by Vincent Laforet which included a half an hour sidebar on his back up strategy. At the time he was using an Apple iServe system which is basically a huge box filled with expensive and redundant hard drives. Everything he filmed or photographed would be backed up on three different RAID arrays and then spooled to Tandberg tape back-up systems. Two copies would be made of the tapes and stored in different locations. Laforet postulated that, at the time, he had several hundred terabytes of information stored and that his monthly cost for cooling the storage infrastructure (just cooling!!!) was about $800. He went further and told us that he would "migrate" the data to newer HDs on a fixed schedule. A "back of the envelope" calculation quickly told the audience that this methodology would require, in short order, a full time employee just to migrate and service the stored information. And can you imagine the number of man hours expended in cataloging each image and video sequence?  I squirmed in my seat. I'd seen the work and like every other artist I know the keepers probably amounted to 1% (generous) of the total stored. That's a lot of seconds to hang on to for posterity...

Of course, when I got back to my humble office in west Austin I felt like an inadequate IT provisioner. Until I remembered that I'm a freakin' artist and not a server maintenance worker....

All my storage philosophy derives from the formative years I spent (about 20) shooting film. Here's how we did back up in the film days:  Shoot film > edit film and throw away the rejects, in the garbage, gone. > Place film in archival sheets and label with description and job number. > After film was used by client and returned, place in filing cabinet by job number. > Try not to set fire to anything in the studio wherein flames might convey to said filing cabinets. > Always make a point to live far above the 100 year flood zone.  While the stakes and our egos were no where as big then as they seem to be now we did routinely make a few "dupes" (film duplicates) of our best work. Not necessarily the profitable work but the work we liked best. We'd use repro dupes if we were selling images as stock. Better to lose an expensive dupe than a irretrievable original. But I'm thinking that maybe we did 100 dupes a year. Max.

There was no separate, off site storage because the bulk of the material existed only as single original pieces of film.

Now we fast forward to now. Seems like everyone I know just puts their images on a hard disk and then makes a second copy on another hard disk and calls it a day. I can't imagine a scarier way to do the business. It's probably a prejudice from the days when our images existed in the physical realm but I need to have one component of my back up that I can hold in my hands.

So, here's how I do it:

I come back from a shoot and I open Lightroom. I set up the import menu to copy the files to an external hard drive. I click the little box to make a second back up to a second external hard drive. I name the folders on both hard drives the same. Before I hit "import" I go through the image thumbnails on the screen and edit out as many as I possibly can. The more images I dump upfront the fewer time and space resources I use up on the back end. I don't need to store everything I ever shot.

Before I hit "import" I make sure I fill out the metadata fields so I can automate most of the organization of the images, after the fact.

I hit "import" and my computing machine sucks the raw images from my memory cards into these waiting folders. When the process is complete I take the memory cards (all SDs, in my case) and put them into a job envelope. The un-erased cards become my third back up, temporarily. If lightning strikes the studio and demolishes the hard drives through some electronic voodoo I'll still have the original files on the cards to reconstruct from.

I buy my external hard drives in pairs. Currently, on the glass topped desk there are two Western Digital 3 Terabyte drives plus a 2 terabyte Time Machine drive that backs up system software and applications.

Next step: I edit in Lightroom. Eventually I'll output the finals from Lightroom into a folder of images that goes to the client. The images are profiled for specific uses, as requested by my clients. Sometimes I am the client.

When I've done everything I'm going to do for a job I take the original edited raws and all new Jpeg or Tiff variations and put them into one folder with the job name. I might even include a "read me" file if the job is complex and multi-faceted. Then I burn two sets of DVD's of all those files. On a large job the folder often exceeds the 4.4 gigabyte limit of the DVD's so I use an app called "Folder Splitter" to bust the big folder into manageable, smaller (4.4gig) folders. A big job, like the recent Dell World 2012 job, might have four or five folders. Doesn't matter, we burn them till we've got them. Two copies of every folder. If the job has a reasonable expectation of a long life or the images are my own art for my own pleasure, or family memories, one copy gets burned onto a Verbatim Gold DVD with a (advertising) promise of a 100 year life.

I've been using DVDs for seven years now and have not had a single failure. Surely, I have just jinxed myself...

We make very clear, in our conversations, contracts and delivery paperwork, to clients that we are not responsible for storage of the images beyond three years. If images are mission critical to them we advise that they make back up copies to store in their servers. Just like printers we are not selling them plates and print blankets for eternity we are selling one time use as specified by contract. Once images are delivered and applied the contract has been fulfilled. While we make every attempt to keep archives of everyone's files for up to seven years we are not in the "storage" business. And we don't want to be in the storage business.

From time to time we go through the filing cabinets and throw stuff out. The economic landscape seems especially volatile right now. Does it really make sense to hang on to those headshots we did for Dr. Koop.com? Or any one of a couple dozen tech start ups that are long gone? I don't think so.  I just dumped about six linear inches of DVDs that were headshots of executives from around 2002-2004. Those are images that were never going to be ordered again.

I'm not doing any real storage on the web. Well, I have over 100,000 images up on the Smugmug servers but those images are also resident on my disks and DVDs here as well. And none of the ones on Smugmug are higher res than 1800 pixels wide.

When storage takes more time than coffee or shooting or lunches you've just switched over to a different sort of undertaking than photography. I'm sure many of you have more advanced methods and I'm sure I'm falling short of some people's perceptions of "industry standards" but the question was, "What do I do for back-up?"  Not "what is the best practice in the universe for archival backup over the millenia?"  Sound reasonable?

Thanks, Kirk

A VSL reader named, Chuck, asked me to write about monitor selection and calibration. Ready to open a can of worms?

Let's start with a huge and monumental disclaimer: I'm not Scott Kelby. I've never claimed to be a Photoshop or Post Production expert or guru. I'm just as happy working on my laptop as I am working at the desk.  And, finally, I've drunk the Apple Kool-Aide continuously since 1985.

So, how would I select a monitor if I needed one today? I would go into the Apple store and say, "What's the latest 27 inch monitor that runs off Thunderbolt?" At which point the clerk/genius/guy in a black t-shirt points to the 27 inch monitor and says, "This is the only 27 inch monitor Apple current makes." I would ask how much they cost, flinch a little bit and then plop down the cash. That's about as simple as I can make it. But I'm equally happy with the matte screen on my older MacBook Pro 15 inch laptop.

There are people who like the idea of finding the "ultimate" combination of performance, price and features and I'm sure they are getting a better price on whatever they buy than I am on an Apple branded monitor but I like being able to pull it out of the box, turn it on and have it work perfectly. Just as with cameras some people like to do intensive research before buying. I don't care enough about monitors to spend that amount of time and effort just to save a few bucks. I've got a lot scheduled and I like to do things I can either bill or things that thrill.

What am I currently using? I'm using the last permutation of the Apple Cinema Display 23 inch monitor with a matte screen surface. It just keeps humming along and I see no reason, right now, to replace it.  If I used a Windows/PC machine I would try to find any other good photographer in my network who used non-Apple machines and ask their opinion. Some would talk about an enormously expensive Eizo monitor but most of them would probably steer me to some sort of Dell Ultra-Sharp monitor.  But I wouldn't over buy a monitor unless I was providing materials that were intended to go straight to a printer. And there's the big disconnection.

Let me explain. In the olden days of digital, when it was all new and scary for the ad agencies, someone had to have a calibrated monitor and produce files converted to CMYK (correctly) for the four color offset printers. After a while Apple monitors (which are the current standard for every ad agency I've ever walked into) came pretty nicely calibrated and profiled right out of the box. Most people, even using the little hockey pucks manage to do more harm than good when they jump in and try to brainiac their way through a calibration process. 

Oddly enough, stock photography severed the cords of responsibility for most photographers. Most stock is delivered as large Jpegs, profiled for either sRGB or Adobe 1998. Since photographers are routinely out of the loop agencies who used a preponderance of stock photography had to come up with a method that was reasonably fool proof for supplying files to be printed. In most agencies there is a print production staff who (with presumably well calibrated monitors) actually do the needed retouching, color correction and profiling of images intended for various print uses.

While it may seem hard to believe if you've spent several thousand dollars on a high end hockey puck calibration system, Apple monitors come with a monitor profile and in the monitor preferences is a calibration panel that walks users through step by step in the calibration process, for free. Thing is the eye is a great comparator and that's the essence of this kind of calibration.

I've done calibrations both ways and I prefer (and can more accurately match print output) with a monitor I've set up by eye, using comparative calibration.

So, now we go into PhotoShop or Lightroom and make our tonal and color corrections (and I still use an eye dropper and measure between 0 and 255 for some settings) and we get "pleasing" color. If we know our clients are going to send the files to the web we convert the profile to sRGB. If they are an ad agency or well informed graphic designer who specified the output for print we'll convert to Adobe 1998. They are responsible for final tweaks. And they'll do it whether you want them to or not.

But just as in the actual process of photography where attention to details can make an enormous difference so too can all the things that cost nothing but make a big impact on the look and accuracy of a monitor.

I once got a call from a print shop asking me to come and look at some files that a sub-contracting designer sent over for an advertising client of mine. The printer claimed they were at least 15 points too magenta. I did the original files on my monitor and they were (numerically) right on the money. The agency had gotten too busy and turned over final production on our project to a "bright" young designer. At some point in the chain the files got changed to match a monitor at the bright young designer's office. I called said "bright" young designer and asked if I could come over and look at the files on his monitor. 

When I walked into his office I knew at once exactly what the problem was. The designer's (uncalibrated PC) monitor faced the wall behind "bright" young designer's desk that had been painted, floor to ceiling, in a bright, Kelly green. In fact, the whole room had been painted Kelly green. The green reflected off his monitor and color everything he evaluated on the monitor. He didn't believe that this could be the problem until we took his system out into the white interior of his garage and opened up his "corrected file" next to the orignal file. Then you could see the horror of the situation spread across his face.

You may love having big windows or bright colors in your working space but you're doing more to sabotage yourself than the guy using an uncalibrated monitor. My studio is painted white with a gray back wall. I try to always work under the same lighting conditions. No bright light one day and dim light the next. I usually wear a black shirt when I'm deep into the post production marathon---one less variable to worry about.

Wanna check your calibration? Download a high quality printer profile from a high quality photo lab, convert your image to that profile and send it. Pick up the print and compare it to the image on your monitor. Too dark? You need to change the screen brightness and recalibrate. Color off? Correct the environment and then recalibrate.

Also, sadly, all the monitors we bought that had florescent tubes lighting up the screens get old and get dark. Eventually they will not be linear enough across the color spectrum to be properly calibrated and they will have to be replaced. Most good monitors now use LEDs for illumination (see, we can't get away from talking about LEDs here....) and this kind of drift and decay shouldn't be as quick or as severe.

I'll never forget the day I delivered some images to one of the three largest computer makers in the world. They were portraits that were going to be used for web and PR. Since there were part of a big job for me I checked my work on several different laptops and my wife's carefully calibrated 27 inch screen. Everything looked great so I sent over a DVD to the requesting client who was in administration NOT marketing.

I got a phone call a couple hours later and I could hear the panic in her voice. "The images you gave me are very, very dark on my screen and the colors are all washed out. Kind of flat looking. Help."  

When you get a show stopping phone call like that you jump into customer super service mode and get moving. I grabbed a very recent and well calibrated laptop, a hockey puck calibration system and a new set of DVDs and hightailed it through rush hour traffic to the opposite side of town. The client met me with arms crossed in the lobby and guided me to her cubicle. Sitting smack in the middle of her desk was a 17 inch cathode ray tube monitor that had been out of production for at least fifteen years. You could barely read type on it. I tried to fix her monitor but it was like fixing an engine that's missing all the cylinders. Didn't work.

I tried to explain calibration to her and I ran into a brick wall. Finally I suggested that we walk down a floor to the marketing department and see if anyone had a calibrated monitor. We found the print graphic people had begged and pleaded with the budget gatekeepers and had several nice monitors. The difference in image quality was amazing. But, guess what?

Most of your clients who aren't in the graphic design or photo businesses don't ever calibrate their monitors as long as they are somewhere within a huge ballpark. The stuff you put out on the web looks different to everyone who has never calibrated a monitor. And that cheap monitor you got as part of a package at Costco or Sams? Probably not perfect either.

All you can do is make sure your stuff looks good when it leaves your office. There's no way to keep crazy people from trying to change it and "fix" it and then muck it up. There just isn't.

So, to recap: I buy Apple because while it may be more expensive on the front end it tends to be easier to use, easier to calibrate and plays well with my other stuff. I make sure my workspace is consistent and neutral. I calibrate (depending on my mood) with either the calibration app in the preferences menu (monitors) or with a Spyder hockey puck. My target is sRGB 95% of the time. The other 5% is when I'm sending out a file to a source with a known and published calibration or when I'm sending out a file to print CMYK.

In my experience, if your lab doesn't offer you a profile to convert to for prints you might as well convert to sRGB because that's the space they're going to use.  If you do this for money you need to run tests. And you need to have a buddy who's a good graphic designer whose system is also calibrated so you can drop by with some beer and double check your calibrations by looking at a known file on his system. If you are doing this for fun make sure you do all the detail stuff first. No sense spending big bucks if you sabotage yourself (and your clients) with Kelly green walls and a sun drenched gloss screen.

My next computer purchase will be a 27 inch iMac. It's already planned and in the budget. Such a deal for a great screen. It's almost like getting the computer for free.  

Fun test: grab all the laptops you can. In this family I can put my hands on eight right now. Put them on either side of your calibrated monitor and then call up the same image on all the screens. How close are they to each other? Bigger samples means more data points. At some point, if they all look good then you are in the ballpark and ready to play.

If you want a smarter and more research-y point of view then go ask a real expert like Scott Kelby. But make sure you get it as close to right as you can before the image even leaves your camera. Custom WB anybody?

Re-reading an article about EVFs on theOnlinePhotographer...

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/05/kirks-take-electronic-viewfinders.html

From time to time I get e-mail from people who aren't understanding the appeal the EVFs (electronic viewfinders). I wrote the article above for Michael Johnton's the online photographer. I think the fun thing about the article is all the commentary following it.

If you don't know Michael's blog.....you should.

Crazy Day at the Studio with Some Jeckyll and Hyde Self-Portraits....

Or....What do hyperactive photographers do when they catch a cold, can't swim and don't want to infect their clients? Mostly find silly crap to do around the studio.

I felt it coming on yesterday, late afternoon, as I was leaving from an assignment location in the executive suite of a multinational, high technology firm. I sneezed as I got into my car. My nose stopped working right on the drive home. And then...BAM. I woke up with a head cold. Yuck. 

I decided that doing the outside, 7:00am, master's swim in sub-30 degree weather was contraindicated. (My GP will be so proud). So I've been stuck in my studio since 7am cleaning, filing and drinking way too much coffee.  Way too much. Client called this morning to tell me they'd gotten the files I sent them via Drop Box and that everything looked good.  I cancelled a lunch appointment and wished someone beautiful would come over so I could make portraits. But with a meaty cough and a drippy nose I decided I'd have to look for talent closer by. I elected myself.

In the process I've decided that self-portraits can be as revealing as a visit to a psychiatrist. You have to reconcile the self image (24 years old, perfect skin, handsome, with thick curly dark brown hair, athletic to a fault) with the reality that everyone else experiences when they interact with  you....(57 years old, too much sun, too much skin under the chin and grizzly grey hair). It's almost like a fresh brush with mortality.  Here's my sinister and nordic rendition:

The serious face that goads VSL readers into writing, "Don't you ever smile?" But I like the way the light works on the shadow side. Good cheek definition, for sure. Notice the engineer style adaptation of the glasses, just above my right eye. The screw in the hinge fell out nine years ago and I've been meaning to get the glasses fixed but the smallest size paper clip seems to work fine....a fix straight out of electrical engineering school. I also like the way that the hair swooping up makes me look almost as though I've got little satanic horns on my head. All the better to scare the people in account payables. In truth I had just coughed was attempting to re-arrange my face when I accidentally trigger the wired remote... really....

But I did include a softer look just in case.

If you haven't tried a self portrait lately you might want to save the money you've been spending on your therapist and come face to face with your own reality. It's actually kind of fun. I didn't think about doing this until I saw some really cool self-portraits that my friend, Frank, did. 

While my model is not up to the standards (by any measure) I usually set I do like the lighting in both images very much. Neither is lit with anything other than the natural light (indirect) that's coming through my studio windows. I have a ten foot by ten foot square set of windows that faces northwest. They start about four feet off the ground and go up to fourteen feet. If you position people in just the right spots you can use the windows as a flattering source all day long.

Gear.  I put my Sony a99 camera with a Tamron 28-75mm SP lens on the biggest, meanest, oldest and stoutest Gitzo tripod I own. It's an ancient, three section, five series. It weighs a ton but once you clamp something on it there's NO movement. I plugged in a cheap, generic, wired remote, flipped the LCD screen around to the front so I could compose easily and then banged away. The light isn't strong so I used ISO 200 at 1/4 second, f8. The wall behind me was painted gray 16 years ago. Maybe time for a new coat of paint.

That's all I've got. I get over colds pretty quickly but I sure hate living through them. Color me grouchy...

But animated...