| This 4,700-word story, written for an audience of photography enthusiasts, was published on the Rob Galbraith Digital Photography Insights web site on March 16, 2004. This is the unedited text as submitted. Click here to see the published version. |
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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. 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. "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. 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 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. Immediately after arriving at the trailer the CF cards are inserted into the card readers by five SI employees, each of whom mans two Thinkpads. The images on the cards are retrieved and saved to the laptop hard drive by a custom application written by Sam Greenfield, a Senior System Engineer at the magazine. Greenfield's application gives each RAW/JPEG pair a new, SI-specific name, identical for both images except for the three-letter file extension that differentiates JPEGs from RAW files. If a camera without the ability to capture simultaneous RAW+JPEG was used, Greenfield's program will create a JPEG for each RAW file. It also creates a basic caption—assignment number, photographer's name, and other information—for each image pair. By the beginning of the third quarter, most of the pictures shot during the first half had already been downloaded. Fine and Washington returned from the stadium and sat down to begin their edit, one eye on the computer screen, the other on the still-in-progress game playing on a TV in the trailer's corner. The shots are grouped into "takes"—roughly one for each quarter of the game, in this case—and the JPEGs from each take are copied into a single folder and then fed to Fine's computer for him to browse with ACDSee. The copying is done by Phil Jache, officially a Deputy Photo Editor but really the photo department's information technology guru. The original RAW images are stored on hard drives for later use. As midnight passes, Fine still hasn't found the great images he needs—and especially one killer shot for the cover. As he moved through shots of the second quarter and into halftime and the third quarter, he found a few nice images, but pictures of the halftime goings-on overshadowed them. SI's crack staffers got several excellent shots of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction". There was also a halftime streaker on the field, a stocky middle-aged guy, clad in a skimpy g-string, with a body apparently made from lumpy mashed potatoes. With eleven photographers on the job, no angle of the guy's little Shirley Temple dance went undocumented. But the game's fourth quarter was full of scoring action. As Fine begins looking at these images, the "selects" folder starts ballooning, and he gets visibly happier by the minute. SI's Managing Editor, Terry McDonell, will make the final decisions about which photos run in the magazine's Super Bowl story, so Fine and Washington make their selections with McDonell's preferences in mind. For covers, he is said to favor emotionally evocative shots over action images, and when a shot turns up of New England Patriots Quarterback Tom Brady, the game's MVP, smiling and holding up the Super Bowl trophy, Washington says, "That's the cover. That's a Terry cover. The trophy. The smile." But the images, though grouped roughly by quarter, don't show up on Fine's screen in strictly chronological order. They show up roughly in the order that the CF card they were captured on was downloaded. And an hour later a new sequence of images emerges, shot as the last seconds of the clock ticked off. Fine suddenly slows the pace. "Oh," he says. "Oh. Here we go. What's this. What. Is. This." Washington leans in closer as Fine enlarges one image to full size. It's part of a continuous sequence of Brady running onto the field in celebration as the game ended, shot from one end of the field looking down the Patriots sideline. The MVP is frozen in mid-air, jumping to high-five a teammate and smiling about an ocean wide. The picture is dead-on sharp. "Wait," Fine says, leaning back in his chair. "Let me just look at next week's cover. Who shot this? Phil, who shot this?" The answer comes back: John McDonough. "Johnnnny Mac," Fine says, drawing out the name as he studies the picture. "Johnnnny Mac. After 15,000 pieces of crap, we got a cover." [section break] 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. The switchover began in earnest in the second half of 2002, and it was Canon's EOS-1D that really made it possible, says Phil Jache. That camera provided the combination of framing rate and image resolution necessary for the magazine's day-in, day-out demands, and the large majority of SI's staff images are made with it. The magazine's 19 staff photographers also make heavy use of the EOS-1Ds, and lighter use of several other models, including the EOS 10D, the Nikon D1X and, more recently, the D2H. 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, 70-200 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. Of the ten or so camera bodies that he takes to a basketball game, many are of course mounted overhead or around the basket for remote operation. Rosato controls the basketball remotes with up to ten of LPA Design's Flash Wizard II units, which are designed specifically for syncing multiple cameras to one set of strobes. (He and other staffers still use a few remoted Hasselblads at basketball games and say that nothing else looks quite as good.) For his non-basketball remote setups, Rosato carries eight PocketWizard MultiMAX transceivers. One obvious reason why Rosato favors the 1Ds for hoops games is that the penalty for its higher resolution—the slower frame rate and more limited buffer—is irrelevant. SI shoots basketball almost exclusively with rafter-mounted studio flashes, which don't recycle fast enough for high frame rates. But another advantage, he says, "is the [1Ds] color balance looks more pleasing than the 1D when you're using strobes." Rosato's current laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8100, but the standard Windows machine that the magazine is now issuing is the same 1.5GHz Pentium M IBM Thinkpad T40 that was used in the Super Bowl trailer. Rosato also carries a 40GB SmartDisk Firelite FireWire external hard drive, at least two Lexar FireWire CF card readers, and a LaCie 4X external FireWire DVD burner. He uses Apple DVD-R media in the burner. 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). About half of the staff photographers prefer Macs, and the magazine has in the past issued them 14-inch iBooks with 700MHz G3 processors, 640MB of RAM, and 20GB hard drives. Phil Jache says that they plan to switch to 15-inch Powerbook G4s with 1.25GHz processors, 1GB of RAM, 80GB hard drives, and DVD-R/CD-RW SuperDrives. The magazine expects both staffers and freelancers to shoot in RAW+JPEG mode whenever possible and RAW with cameras that can't shoot both simultaneously. Other recommended settings and practices have been developed in an ad-hoc fashion, says Jache. They include formatting CF cards in camera before each use, setting custom white balance with a gray card, limiting the EOS-1Ds to ISO 800 or lower, and limiting the Nikon D1X to ISO 640 or lower. The magazine also likes both Canon and Nikon cameras to be set for the Adobe RGB color space—color matrix 4 on the EOS-1D, and color mode 2 on both the D1X and the D1H. They also recommend normal tone compensation, rather than auto, for both of the Nikon cameras, and sharpening off for all cameras. Many of these settings can be changed at the RAW conversion stage, acknowledges Jache, but he says that setting them correctly in-camera can prevent errors of omission further down the workflow. When an SI staffer finishes an assignment, he is expected to send his entire take, unedited, to the magazine. "We'd almost prefer they don't even look at the pictures," Jache says. For this reason, Rosato's software needs are modest; he burns discs with Roxio Easy CD and DVD Creator 6, browses images with ACDSee 6.0, and uses BulletProof FTP for file transfers. He says that approximately 75% of the time he downloads his full cards to his laptop, burns a DVD of the images, and sends that to New York by overnight courier. The other 25% of the time, he sends the CF cards themselves, which are downloaded and returned to him. Other staffers send CF cards more often and burn DVDs or CDs less, but it's rare for any of them to transmit images electronically. That's partly because the magazine's deadlines are rarely tight enough to warrant it and partly because SI wants the entire take anyway—usually too much data to transmit efficiently. There is no formal requirement for the photographer to back up his images before sending them in, but Jache points out that this is no worse than the risk the magazine took for nearly 50 years when shipping film. Still, says staff shooter Bill Frakes, "I'm fairly convinced, because I'm pessimistic, that the cards are eventually going to get lost. So when I ship the cards, if I can download them before I send them, I do. But you may not have time. If I have an afternoon game in Nebraska and a noon game somewhere on the east coast the next day, I've gotta' roll." When CF cards or DVDs arrive in SI's New York office a process very similar to the one set up in Houston begins. Sam Greenfield's application is used to retrieve the images and make them available for cataloging by SI's image database, which is built on a suite of applications collectively called SCC MediaServer. 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. Final decisions about which photos will run in the magazine are made during "color shows"—groups of five or six editors crowding around one of SI's Sony CPD-G520 monitors and almost always looking at out-of-camera JPEGs. Ultimately, a copy of each image is burned to two separate DVDs, where they are still accessible via the MediaServer database. As of this writing, both sets of archived DVDs are located in the New York office, but Jache plans to move one set of backups to the magazine's Tampa, Florida data center in the near future, ensuring the survival of the images even if a catastrophe strikes the Manhattan office. 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. For the photographers, shooting digital forced some of the same adjustments that their wire service and newspaper brethren had already made. "The shutter delay is definitely greater on the digital cameras," says staff photographer Damian Strohmeyer. "You know you're shooting the quarterback as he cocks his arm, and you think you've got it, but you look later and say 'where's the one with the ball in his hand?'" Strohmeyer also says that the EOS-1D's RAW file buffer depth forced him to rethink the way he times continuous sequences. "With film, when it's getting down to the nitty-gritty, you make sure you've got enough shots left by just reloading every camera with a fresh roll. With digital you're always stuck with the 14-frame buffer." The photographers interviewed for this story spoke of the focal length conversion factor of cameras like the EOS-1D and the Nikon models as a necessary adjustment but not a problem. For football, in fact, most said they find it helpful. Bob Rosato highlights one other change that digital brought to his life. "We used to go to the airport and ship film, and we're done. Now we have post-production. Downloading the images and burning DVDs." From his editor's chair, Steve Fine noted the shutter delay and buffer depth adjustments. "It took the guys a year to re-time themselves," he says. On the office side, other issues surfaced. "The first thing we had to deal with is 'where are the pictures'. Before it was possible to misplace a slide or a negative strip, but you had physical film somewhere. Now, we're creating folders and file systems on a computer. If you're not careful you can lose track of a whole take. And captioning was a big issue here. We shot 16,180 pictures at the Super Bowl. If our selects are properly captioned, you can type in, say, 'Tom Brady', and you'll get fifteen results. It's easy. If we don't caption, then you're looking at searching through 16,000 pictures. Who's going to do that?" Fine has seen no real problems editing from unmodified JPEGs. "But we've learned not to throw away too many shots that don't look exactly tack sharp, because when they make the conversion from RAW, they often can save a picture—make it sharp enough to print." The pictures themselves, Fine says, have changed the look of the magazine. "For years [with film], we've been fighting a battle between sharpness and grain, especially in low-light shots. You try to sharpen and you just end up building more graininess. I'm amazed at the quality we're getting in low-light shots off our digital files. We're running [low-light pictures] up to two-page size that we could never have done before. Sometimes [digital] looks like it's underwater, a little bit too smooth. A strobed basketball game on a Hasselblad has a sharp line and a punch that digital doesn't have. But we don't have grain anymore. In really poorly lit situations, the ability to make a clean picture far outweighs the downside." [section break] In Houston, it's now 3:00am on Monday morning, about an hour after Fine found the image he likes for the cover. He and George Washington are done. They have cut 16,183 photos down to 86 selects, including at least two shots from McDonough's sequence of Brady running onto the field. Phil Jache is getting ready to transmit the JPEG/RAW pairs of all 86 images to New York. He uses a "roughly T1" connection that is shared by all the print photo media trailers—SI, Associated Press, Reuters, and several others. For the Super Bowl, SI opts for the speed of electronic transmission, rather than shipping DVDs, because the magazine is laid out on Monday and goes to press Tuesday morning. Every second counts. Fine is delighted to be walking out of the trailer at 3:00am. In the days of film, SI brought two minilab film processors and almost a dozen assistants and technicians to a Super Bowl. Exposed film was processed as it came off the field, and all the negatives were cut and put in slide mounts. As many as five photo editors would edit the take from the negatives. The selects were then scanned and transmitted to New York, a process that typically lasted well into the day on Monday. With digital, the magazine needs about half the personnel and they're finished hours earlier. Later Monday morning, not long after Fine and most of the rest of the Houston crew stagger back to their hotel rooms, photo editors in SI's New York office gather up the selects that Jache has transmitted and begin a color show. Managing Editor McDonell and his colleagues choose three candidates for the cover, including a shot from McDonough's sequence of Brady that will, in fact, end up as the cover of the Super Bowl issue. It's not the same shot that Fine prefers, but it's very similar. It features the same mile-wide grin, but Brady is running with arms spread, rather than high-fiving a teammate. At this point, SI's imaging department gets in the act. They take the RAW originals of each of the three cover candidates and convert, process, and print a hard proof of each. The three proofs are sent back to the editorial department for another look-see. It's the imaging department's job to prepare the magazine's pictures for printing. Eleven pre-press technicians work in the department, and the group's Director, Geoff Michaud, lets them choose the software tools they personally prefer. He says that most RAW conversions are made with the latest versions of the camera manufacturers' converters—Canon File Viewer Utility and Nikon Capture, typically—but some of his technicians use Adobe Camera Raw v1.0. Generally, the department will make exposure and white balance adjustments during the RAW conversion process and most other editing moves with Photoshop. Michaud himself prefers the camera manufacturers' RAW conversion utilities because they allow greater exposure compensation, in his opinion. He has tried numerous other RAW converters, including Phase One's Capture One, but he has seen no real advantage to them and prefers to work with as few software tools as possible. The group uses Macintosh G4 450MHz computers, each with 640MB of RAM. Their monitors are a mixture of Sony CPD-G520 CRTs and Apple Cinema Display LCDs. SI manages much of its editorial workflow with Quark Publishing System (QPS), which isn't compatible with Mac OS X. That means Michaud's department must run OS 9.2.2 and that limits them to Photoshop 7 (the Mac version of Photoshop CS is only compatible with OS X). For noise suppression, a routine step for nearly all images, they use Photoshop plug-in Grain Surgery 2 from Visual Infinity. SI uses an ICC color-managed workflow and has used a variety of profiling hardware and software, including the ColorVision mc7 Puck colorimeter and OptiCal software, the Monaco Optix XR Pro colorimeter and software package, and, for the LCDs, the GretagMacbeth Eye-One Pro spectrophotometer with Profile Maker Monitor software. Michaud's department converts RAW files into the Adobe RGB (1998) color space, and now works in RGB (rather than CMYK) throughout their image processing workflow. They print hard proofs with Canon imagePROGRAF W2200 inkjets using the O.R.I.S. Color Tuner RIP. When an image is finished and ready to go to press it is output as an 8-bit RGB TIFF at 254dpi for printing with a 133-line screen. Each week, six different plants combine to print over 3 million copies of the magazine. Digital photography has changed not only the magazine's workflow but also its visual aesthetic, says Geoff Michaud. "There's a different quality expectation with digital vs. film. With film, grain was accepted and tolerated. It was a by-product of sharpness. When we moved to digital we found that the expectation changed. I'm not 100% sure why. Now a softer feel image [is considered good], and when noise becomes apparent it's a negative thing, where it wasn't with film. I'm concerned with my operators now that because noise or grain has become a negative thing, sometimes they're holding off on sharpening. [Sometimes] I look at images, and I feel they're not quite sharp enough." That said, Michaud adds, "I think [the magazine] looks better now, but maybe that's because my expectations about what looks good have changed." By the afternoon on Monday, the editorial department, after looking over the hard proofs, has decided that McDonough's shot of Brady will be the cover. The image is given to one of Michaud's colleagues, Imaging Manager Bob Thompson, for processing. Thompson uses Canon's File Viewer Utility v1.3 to open the EOS-1D RAW file with about +1.5 exposure compensation. ("It was a little dark," Thompson explains. "We like our images to be open and bright.") In Photoshop 7 Thompson uses curves to reset the black point, makes some color saturation adjustments, uses the Grain Surgery plug-in to suppress noise, uses the history brush to restore some detail to Brady's face, sizes the image for the final layout, and finishes with modest sharpening using Photoshop's unsharp mask filter. In a capsule confirmation of Michaud's comments about the magazine's new aesthetic, Thompson says, "I couldn't really push [the sharpening] on this one because there was a lot of noise with this shot, especially once I opened up the exposure." Michaud says there is no standard group of settings for suppressing noise with Grain Surgery—each image is different. For sharpening, Michaud sometimes uses a two-step workflow and sometimes sharpens only once, after the image has been sized for printing. With a relatively noise-free EOS-1D file, Michaud says, typical Photoshop Unsharp Mask settings for a two-step sharpening routine might be Amount: 150, Radius: .6, and Threshold: 0 for the first pass and Amount: 300-500, Radius: .6, and Threshold 0 for the second pass. Most of the time, Michaud applies sharpening to all three channels of an RGB image, but occassionally he will limit it to the luminance channel. Again, he stresses, each image is different, and he trusts the judgment of his operators for the pictures they work on. When upsizing images, the department uses Photoshop's bicubic interpolation and uses a "stair-step" technique, increasing resolution in 10% increments. For color and white balance, the imaging department may use the in-camera settings as a starting point—especially a custom white balance—but they will readily override them, relying mainly on visual judgment verified by careful checking of the RGB numbers during RAW conversion or in Photoshop. As Phil Jache points out, "There's only so many pro teams, and we know what color their uniforms are." By the end of Tuesday, the JPEG/RAW pair of Tom Brady that started out in the corner of an end zone in Houston inside John McDonough's EOS-1D and followed an intricate two-forked path from camera to photo editor to Managing Editor to imaging department to printing plant (and eventually to DVD archive) will be the cover of more than 3 million copies of Sports Illustrated. After 18 months of shooting digital, SI's workflow is operating smoothly. With the Athens Olympics looming that fact makes the whole photo department very happy. But Steve Fine is one of those guys who just doesn't like to settle. "You know what I could use," he told programmer Sam Greenfield, as he walked out the door of the trailer early Monday morning. "This is what I could use. Voice-activated editing. Write something that lets me tell the computer what play I'm looking for, and then it brings up the pictures." © 2004 Eamon Hickey
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