Lessons

Lesson Info

Big Studio Workflow

So far, we've discussed a workflow that involves a working catalogue, and we did that all yesterday. We showed that entire workflow, and then this morning we talked about individual catalogue, so you have one catalog per job and how what does that look like? So those are the two main options that you have when you're dealing with catalog work, and then all of the things that you might do, all the types of photography, whether you're traveling photographer, we showed you how you could take something on the road with you, whether you're outsourcing that's based in that one catalog, you know, export, catalog and send it off and then bring it back and import it. So all of those things are important to any workflow, but when you're dealing with a studio that has multiple photographers let's say, I am the main photographer and then you are the, you know, digital assistant that does all of the adjusting, and then you build the albums. So I have three people in my studio and it moves around fr...

om everybody, but you have your own computer. I have my own computer, you have your own computer and things move back and forth. One of the problems with light room is that it does not work on a network situation. Because the catalog itself has to be on the computer that you're working on has to be a resident on the computer or it has to be on a drive that's connected directly to the computer it can't be on a network drive because light room khun tell when something is on network drive and that precludes the ability to talk to it, it just won't do it. And so as a result of that it's not possible to just stick everything on a server and stick all the catalogs on the server and then just run from there so that you access I access that you access it, you can do that with bridge, but you can't do that with light room. However, it is possible to set up one main computer that has a drive that it works on that's that's connected to that drive. So I would say that the person that does the greatest amount of work which would be you because you're the digital editor, you're the one that goes through and adjusts everything and makes everything perfect. You're the one that's just building albums so you're you don't need a robust a system and I'm the one that's just looking through him and calling him I don't need his robusta system, so what you do is you create a digital hub for the studio and the digital hub should not be the photographers it should be the editor station is the digital hub, and if you attach that to a computer army to a hard drive and then you network our computers into that dr, all we have to have access to is the very small catalog files. At this point, it's important to start operating on a one catalog per job situation every time it comes in, the digital assistant will then create a copy of the catalogue template that we made. He makes a copy of that, puts it in the job folder and puts it in the drive that's attached to his computer. He imports the files into that dr he runs the import in delight room into that new catalogue he's just created, he runs it, building one for one previews and building the the the I just lost my thank you smart pretty, and he builds those two types of previews. Once he's built those previews, then he can say, we're good to go. Now you can shut that catalog down and you can send a message to your photographer and say, hey, you're ready to call my job, then would just be to open up that drive and grab that catalog along the previews, just grab that little folder that catalog is in and drag it onto my computer and do the calling once I'm done with the calling. All I have to do, I don't have to copy all the smart previews back over. All I have to do is copy that. One tiny light room catalog file that's just a couple megabytes. Grab that and drag it back and right over yours. Once that's done, then you I send you a message and say, go ahead and start adjusting, and then you will do all the heavy lifting because it's attached to your computer do all your heavy lifting. And once you're done doing the adjusting, you send a message to her and say, time for album design. When it's time for album design then you can go in and grab the images and pull the catalog on ly out and start working on those. And once you're ready to do like tto, finish up because the catalog is on your, uh, computer you khun still, you can still through the network you khun, tell your catalog. Oh, by the way, the photos are over there on the network drive. As long as the catalogue is on your computer, it can see the photos. So all you do is say, okay, I'm ready to export these to the cab to build my album in whatever software you're going to use, and tomorrow we're actually going to go through building an album and smart albums which is an amazing new piece of software but once you're ready you're just going to simply say export these files that are on your you're just looking at the catalog and you'll say export these files two tiffs or j pegs or whatever you're building your album with and it will look to his computer and pull from there and export them to your album production folder and then you'll build your album from there so it's completely possible for a studio toe work inside of light room as long as they kind of deviate from the pattern a little bit you have to be working on a one catalog per job otherwise you end up having to export and import files all the time and that's just not that's not productive so you build one uh catalog per job it all sits on your computer and we check it out check it out work on it and then I coffee back on ly the light room catalog to you and then I'd send you a message and say time for you to do your job and then when you're done you tell her it's time to her and she checks out the copy and she works on it and when she's done she and save what she's done back over yours and then we're all done if for any reason there's a modification to your workflow where maybe we're working at different times and then we got a right then instead of just copying over instead of taking the light from catalogue and overriding yours you would then from your station point to hers and import the changes as we did today we did that this morning you would just import those changes and tell it when you're importing them keep the other files as a a zey uh virtual copy so that you can see both and then you bring him in and it kind of merged the two together and that's the workflow for an in house system the other way to accomplish this, which is what I like to call a sneaker net situation. So instead of having an inter intranet that that you're working through, you can use a sneaker net situation and if that's the case, then each job would have its own small drive, and once the drive once you're done with the job and that drive is complete, the job is complete. Then whatever's on that drive gets dumped to the archive. It should be, you know, the main server in the in the studio you would dump it to that and then erase this drive and then that dr would be stuck back on the shelf and then you would start running it through the system again so that dr would just be a temporary place and at that point what you would do is you so you would have say a drive like this if you want a solid state or if you wanted a hard drive whatever you would just have drives like this that you would plug into a sled like this and just plug it in work on it and then when you're done, go drop it off in your inbox and you would just right you know, maybe a sticky note or something that tells what jobs on it or you could say, you know, drive one and you could say drive one has whatever job on it you'd have to figure out howto but but you would just drop this off in your inbox as a disk and then when you're ready to work on it, you could plug it in remember you have these ugly little things to you could use and you could just have one of these every station and then you just plug this in like that and now it's live on your computer, you work on it and when you're done you reject it and you delivered to her and she works on it so you can also use a sneaker that situation you just need one drive and I mean a serious of drives maybe five or six drives is enough because you should get it through the system fast enough that you could then dump it off to the archive drive and start with the new you know, just take this and recycle it back into the system, and so it just keeps recycling over and over and over again. So that's the sneaker net situation but the key to it is having inexpensive drives. If you're buying, you're buying drives with casings, you're spending way too much money on that sneaker net system you'd be better off, you know, building in an internet system that's really robust, but if you're just buying little internal drives, they're not all that expensive and even, you know, little one hundred twenty eight uh giga by drives like this that could hold one job at a time are not all that expensive, and if you buy five or six or ten of them that you have plenty to work on your jobs and they could just travel around in there fast as all get out. So these types of drives with the best way to go because there's, no casing there, this this drive is less expensive than one of the drives that you going by at the apple store that had a case on it and it's solid state, so you might as well just invest in some kind of a sled or some kind of a unit like this for each station and then move these around the stations and sometimes a physical thing like this is easier thing to get your head around on dh so if you have an assistant that has a stack of these they know I got a lot of work to do today you know I mean and it's like okay I get this done and I could and then and they'll want to get that pile down and so this is not a bad way to go for that kind of office experience so but in that case if you're going to use a sneaker net situation and of course if you're going to use on your on the internet situation make sure that the first person handles these files when they copy it in and create the original catalog it immediately gets duplicated somewhere right and so in effect probably what should happen then is you should put your information in and then copy this out to this dr and then this is the driving gets worked on innocent as its done it goes back into your system and gets overwritten onto yours and then that system is complex constantly backed up and so this is always a copy that's running around this is not the original the original never runs around like this I have no originals with me at all and so if something goes south here and we have an issue I'm not concerned about a drive going down here because there are no originals with me I never travel with originals and if I'm traveling when I create originals than the copy gets sent home so that I have I have an original home too so we're very careful about our backup situation any questions about that um maui photo wanted to know about what if I have two different computers in different states options for forwarding the changes from light room the the options were changing for reporting that changes very easy because all it requires is the catalog right the catalog khun b e mailed if you zip a catalogue it's less than a megabyte you could email back and forth between two people. The real challenge is those raw files the raw files are huge and they're hard to transfer back and forth. However, if you have if if I had a computer say say I had an operation in phoenix and I had an operation here and I shot in phoenix but I had my assistant that worked here and did his own thing here but he did all my color correction and stuff like that what I would do is I would shoot in phoenix and I would call in phoenix and get rid of the rejects and then I would take that selected images which is a much smaller set of images and those would immediately then be shipped via ftp to my other computer here and it would take eighteen hours to get them over but then once they were over and we had the same images at both place both named from one to four hundred or whatever was in it and those names were never going to change again at that point, all we have to do is move catalogues back and forth, which are megabyte of peace once there's it and and if they're not zipped, you put him on a dropbox and they'll automatically move back and forth and so it's not a difficult situation after that, but it's the initial movement of those that's a little difficult and using using an f teepee and eighteen hours is better probably than sending a mail because male it's going to take three days and it's probably going to get their wet we're not going to get there or whatever, okay, so sort of a dent into that lee s would like to know would you consider using the flash drive in your seeker sneaker net scenario? Absolutely. Flash drives are awesome as long as the original copy is somewhere and backed up because flash drives and ss d's are our little more volatile than a stable sitting hard drive because they will shock or, you know, some kind of electrical poles or something like that you might lose something and so I just want to be careful that everything's backed up on that there's one copy that's not doing anything it's not moving around it's not getting put in your pocket you know stuff like that so yeah, absolutely in fact I just bought for traveling around I bought a little thumb drive that's a usb three a thumb drive that's uh sixty four gigabytes I could put almost an entire day. Well, once I once I've selected it down I could put an entire wedding on that and move it around so yeah you khun certainly and they're not very expensive so you could go you know, for sixty bucks you can get a really fast little plug in a usb thumb drive and as long as this usb three it's pretty fast yeah, no doubt cool uh k g b p would like to know how glad the peas in the right k g b the k g b the k g b well, actually it is actually the russian kgb would like to know how do you store all of your archive drives with no casings? Oh, uh excellent question and I don't have I have the picture on my phone do you think they could zoom in on my phone? I took a picture before I came and I didn't hear hold on okay, get ready in camera land over there because I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna look at my photos here because I'm going to show you um to to do teo see where is there that is alright zoom in on that baby like that so that's a pelican case that has little the little hard drive cases so the hard drive cases are the little white things that you see in there and those air stuck into the pelican case in the pelican case closed so it's perfectly watertight and it's got a handle on it and it can move around and you know wherever I needed to go just pack it up shut it up and it's good to go and these are the cases that they're in so this is a case and you can get these from cr ew they make him on dh you just put your drive inside of this this protects it against the static and all that kind of stuff and then you shove it into the pelican case into the slots and then you close the pelican case and lock it up and you could put it somewhere you know hidden you khun take it with you wherever you want to go and so I have that pelican case holds all of my archive drives and then there's a coffee of all the archive drives on a shelf in the office so I have an office copy and then I have a pelican case copy that goes away so that they're in two different spots so I'm archived on for up until back to two thousand two I have archives there secure and I don't have to worry about losing him before two thousand two I don't have all that many archives because most of it's film and so I've got boxes and boxes of film and if you ask me to find something good luck I have been in a scanning project for the last five years but it's slow going so another good question from big apple video what is your take on using on ly time machine on an external hd once a day my take on time machine is run away run away put on your sneakers yeah the time machine is for time machine and if uh is mom if you're watching plug your ears time machine is for my mom because my mom delete stuff accidentally and then she has to go back in time to fix something that she did accidentally or she has to ask me to come over and look back in time and find it because she she's not really a definite like movies you know she didn't grow up with she grew up with she was excited they had a car you know like wow she grew up on a farm and they had a car and that was awesome she didn't grow up with computers and stuff like that so if you're if you're that kind of person that's losing stuff accidentally and you're deleting stuff accidentally than time machine is a great idea but the problem with time machine is that's fraught with danger because it's not always foolproof old accurate I have a friend who's, a photographer who had her laptop you know none of her files were lost like she wasn't in danger of losing her her clients photos but she lost a bunch of data on her laptop that she had had backed up to a time machine and when she took she tried for two days I think it was trying to get time machine to restore her laptop after she fixed the laptop and two days later she took it into the apple storks is still wasn't working right took it in the apple store and then they spent another two days trying to restore it and in the end she got half of her data back and the reason it's fraught with problems is because it's dependent on the hard drive that's in it, the software that runs it and the hardware that runs it so there are three opportunities for absolute failure, whereas if you're just using a raid one system there's on ly really one opportunity for spit or two opportunities for failure the actual case fails or the hard drive fails but if the case fails, the hard drive's still fine and if the hard drive fails there's a second one and so there's very little opportunity for failure on a very simplistic raid one system for instance today we had a failure do you remember we were having issues where we couldn't up like it was stalling that was an issue and so this something is weird I can't figure out what's going on but inside of this unit there's something that's not transferring are not connecting or whatever so I'm gonna have to investigate it rather than mess with it all I had to do and if you if you look here I just there's no drive in there it's right here on this sled so I was having an issue with this system something was going wonky and I don't know what it wass all I had to do was pull out the drive itself and stick it into a sled and I'm back online it didn't take me any time it didn't ruin my life it was just moved the drive into a different casing or in this case no casing at all just attach of the computer and we're back online there's no restore necessary there's no wonky time machine stuff going back and forth so I just don't get into those kind of crazy solutions that have all sorts of software and hardware and all of that stuff that just it's opportunity for failure the simplest solution is always the best solution comes razor isn't the simple answer is always the same with your solutions if if you can make your solution simple probably the right answer okay. Ready for one more? Yeah. Awesome. Bringing on um, lin would like to know. Do you know of anyone using safety deposit boxes for archive locations have been concerned that someone could have magnets close by in a box and wipe it out your thoughts? I don't mean the lap of that. Okay, I'm just thinking how many people store magnet and their safety? Oh, like twice try on this is amazingly strong magnet and I want to put in a safety deposit box because they couldn't get it out. You know, if it's strong enough, they would be like, I can't get this out of the safety deposit box, so I don't really worry about that. I think that if you store it in a safety deposit box, I think you're gonna do just fine. In fact, I think that's more than fine that's probably the most secure you can get it. However I would put it in, you know, a case like this, I would put it in one of these types of cases so that it's not going to get static charge and stuff like that on it. So, you know, it just protects it, put him in there, I think you're good, but remember it's, not the on ly copy. Because if you put it it's, your only copy that's in the bank, and then, you know, worst case scenario is not a magnet in the other safe. It's. Somebody comes and robs the safe, gets in and steals all the safety stuff in the safety deposit. I mean, if, you know, like if you're if you're really worried about crazy stuff happening a bank, well, you know, if I'm a robber, I want everything in the safety deposit boxes. I'll take everything. Of course, I think that only happens in the movies, right? I mean, how many times we've really heard of a safety deposit box raid? Just bonnie and clyde was the last people that rob banks and things and got away with it. So, anyway, that's, my thought on that magnets probably are not going to be in there. I think that's, pretty safe place.