Real World Workflow

Teching on an Ad job at the pier for 4 days. I promise that these will get more interesting as time goes on.

I heard word today from an LA Rental house that C1 DB 3.7.8 Beta is shipping with the Plus backs they have received recently.

Expect to get my hands on it at the end of the week, and PRAYING that they have fixed the Black Frames and Retransmitting Lost Data freezes.

Everyone make a small sacrifice in your backyard to the Phase gods. Hahah..

Hi there, i’m new to the site but have decided to start posting with everyone else. I’m a freelance digital tech in NYC. Anyways, I thought it’d be nice to tell you guys the setup that I’m currently shooting with and the bugs that I have encountered. So here it is:

Job: catalog shoot on location in mexico, 7 days of shooting, indoors and outdoors, usually with an outlet to plug into
Equipment:

P30 on a 500 series hasselblad, Canon 1DS Mark II as backup
2 Macbook Pros as capture/processing stations (main capture station has 4GB RAM, 2.44-ish GHz Intel, 10.4.9) (backup macbook pro has 3GB RAM,, 2.33 GHz Intel, 10.4.10)
Capture One 3.7.7, always tethered, 15′ cable
About 1.5 TB of hard drive space
4 Macbook Pro batteries total

So here are the things I’ve noticed:
The P30 shoots surprisingly well to the Macbook Pro in terms of speed and reliability. I thought we would have major power issues from the firewire port, but most of the time I’ve been plugged into an outlet and the capturing has been fine. The speed is not as fast as an H1/H2 but you can basically shoot as fast as the shutter closes and the body winds, which is probably how fast you would have shot with film anyways. We have shot with the computer unplugged, using just the battery power of the laptop and it has also been fine. I’ve been told by other techs that they don’t recommend shooting tethered without an external long life battery. But I thought the Macbook Pro batteries worked just fine, minus the fact you have to switch them out and shut down when you run out.We power the P30 back with a battery and set the power to be only coming from the battery and that seems to be key with this setup working well. The other key is we have to shoot IIQ small raws. If we shoot IIQ Large format raws, the capturing is way too slow and more errors seem to occur.

Every once in a while, I see captures coming in with green on part of the image or 2/3 of the image. Firewire issue? Not sure. If the photographer shoots too fast, I get an error -12 from the C1Pro software. You can’t capture once you’ve gotten that error. To get out of this, I just power down the back, then power it up, and it reconnects and is fine. Alternately you can quit out of C1 Pro, unplug the firewire, and restart software, but all those steps are really not necessary since you can just power down the back.

One major hiccup occurred at the beginning of our shoot. Before the shoot I had tested the setup in NY and kept getting that error-12 (anyone know what that means?) I attributed it to a power issue, so after reading some stuff on the phase one website, I decided to get a 2-port firewire 400 express card for the laptop, which I understood to give more power to the FW400 port compared to the one sitting in the computer. Anyways, it works fine for capturing. However, a few times I accidentally bumped the card and it ejected itself from the express card slot. This caused the MacbookPro to crash. It gave that grey screen that says to restart your computer. After this, the computer would hang at the gray screen on restart, which really sucked when we were in the middle of a shot. I kept restarting and the computer kept hanging. I eventually walked away to get a backup laptop, and when I came back, the computer had stopped hanging and had started up (this was without the expresscard in at all). After that I’ve had no problems, but I decided to ditch the expresscard. After that day I researched online and found that other people had experienced their macbook pro crashing on ejection of the expresscard while the computer was still on. anyone know a way to “eject” the expresscard safely? also, i guess the computer hanging at the grey screen was a possible indication of corrupted PRAM so i could have reset the PRAM and tried to restart. (hold command-option-P-R while starting up, until you hear chime 3 or 4 times).

This post is way too long now so I’ll continue later.

Today we Introduce another feature to the site as well as another category. We call this SFSC: Scenes From the Set Cart, a photo documentation of the set the way that you see it. Everyone is invited to participate however you will have to reference the photographs from your own site. For those of you who don’t know how to use the html tag, there is an img button on the dashboard page where you create a new post. When you click it it opens a popup box that allows you to input an address. Copy and paste the address from your image.

I will start.

Phase has its + series, Leaf has its s-series , now Hassy has its II sytem. We look forward to taking a closer look at this system sometime soon, however we find the flexicolor software too simplistic and its problematic in its current version. You can read about the new system here: http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/09/18/hasselblad.h3d.ii/

You will all notice that we’ve added a new feature to the bottom of the posts. Its a quick link to add the blog posts to your favorite social networking sites. Just click on Share This to choose the social networking site of your choice. Also you can choose to email the link to a friend. We hope you like social networking. We like Digg, Delicious & Technorati (more like Technobuggy, these days), but it also includes, Slashdot, Reddit, Facebook, Google Bookmarks & Stumble it.

Please use these as they help us all in getting information out there. If you are unfamiliar with social networking, what it is and what it does, then you need to have a long conversation with my girlfriend.

Eric Isaac,Tech Blogger
Real World Workflow, LLC
ebisaac@realworldworkflow.com
www.realworldworkflow.com
917.295.5313

Post on LL shows a Swedish website with info on a new H3D II..

We are pleased to announce the creation of the Real World Workflow Forums. We would like to use this new platform as an additional way to discuss topics that matter to us in the industry. I’ve created a list of topics that we can discuss. Additionally if you have any suggestions, please feel free to email me with them. There is also a site suggestions forum on the board.

You can reach the forums here.

We will have a link up on the sidebar within the next few days. Just as this site, we are still testing everything out, so for now we are looking very basic at the moment. We will update our look throughout the process.

Thank you,

Eric Isaac,Tech Blogger
Real World Workflow, LLC
ebisaac@realworldworkflow.com
www.realworldworkflow.com
917.295.5313

Sorry this post comes a little late, but I want to let everyone out there know that Amy Goalen out in LA is conducting a Leaf Workshop tomorrow and still has a few seats available. The information is below:

We have finally scheduled 3 more Leaf Digital Tech Training workshops in Los Angeles!

The dates are: Sept 13rd, Oct 25, and Nov 15th

We will be holding the workshops at Digital Fusion’s new ProCenter in Culver City, CA.

The workshop will cover advanced software on the latest Leaf Capture software as well coverage of the new Aptus Digital Back and the Hasselblad H2 camera.

Plenty of hands-on time will be available to become very familiar with the equipment.

Cost of the workshop is: $225 per person. Lunch will be provided.

To sign up or if you have any questions please visit: http://prodigitalconsulting.com

Amy Goalen
ProDigital Consulting
310-590-5844

As Erik Hilliard wrote in the previous blog, Phase One will be releasing a 3.7.8 shortly as posted by Jon Gilbert at Phase One US. You can read the post here. Looks like they will resolve some of the issue mentioned in my previous post and it will also have support for the Canon 1DS Mark III. Judging by the fact that the Mark III isn’t slated for release until November, we probably won’t see the software until then either.

Thanks to Hilliard for keeping on top of that!