Real World Workflow

What to do when you’ve got a big CEO shoot with multiple sets and no time to spare?

Simple…double up buttercup.

(Stay tuned for more upcoming shots of Eric I. featuring beaches and bikinis.)

LC11.2.0.2 is here and I’m promised the fix is real http://www.leaf-photography.com

I don’t know about other tech’s, but my daypack is stuffed full of gear that just always lives with me. ( I keep meaning to do an urban tech backpack review for those of us who routinely hop on and off the subway, airport, train, van…you know, whatever has wheels and gets us to our destination.) Besides the ubiquitous rocket blower and QP card, there’s always an assortment of batts, AA’s and CR123’s that are ready for use when somehow there’s no others to be found, and while this does come in handy, it’s always been a thought that I wouldn’t be too surprised if one my pack suddenly started smoking due to the potentially noxious bunch of gear rolling around inside, no matter how hard I try to keep it organized.

Surely, the Gods must have intervened today because while I was in BH Photo picking up a Tenba case for my printer, I came across this nifty gadget. Made by SureFire, the mega-flashlight honchos, the SC1 holds up to six CR123’s in a waterproof o-ringed case that beats the crap out of the box and/or plastic baggy that normally passes for packaging. Now to find something similar for the AA’s. I’ve seen some foam/Pelican units that no doubt are better than what I’ve running with now, but I’d love to find a unit closer to this one.

Now let’s see what happens next time I run the TSA gauntlet at the airport. I’ll keep you posted on that one.

  Ok, here’s a 100% cropped jpeg from one of my files. Rick and Joseph, take a look and tell me if this is similar to the issues you’ve been having.

MBP 2.33 running OS 10.5.4, LC11.2.0.1. Again issue was resolved for me by changing out FW cable and restarting software.  Still makes me nervous nonetheless. Any and all info/input would be appreciated.

Update: If you check comments on Rick’s post below this one, you’ll see that zapping the 11.2 gain file seems to be the current workaround. Read Rick’s post and comments below for more info.

Hey guys had an interesting on come up with LC11.2 and Afi7 the last few weeks. After about 10 days of shooting with it successfully one afternoon after backing up files to an external drive and reconnecting the camera the files coming in had bizarre grain effect. After trying another firewire cable and the usual restarts the problem persisted. I broke out the backup mac book pro and all was good again on the new system. A day later I was on another shoot but my gear remained at the other shoot. Anyway the assistant calls to say that they have had the same problem for most of the day (3-4 hours!!) and after call the local Leaf dealer and getting more firewire cables the reps where stumped. I’m not going to get into why it took them so long to call me. The only solution I could offer was to uninstall 11.2 and install 11.1.x and then reinstall 11.2. turns out this solved the problem and the rep also suggested this 15 minutes later aswell. All was good for 4 days on the fifth day I return to the shoot and on first start for the day the grainy pixels are back. Uninstall 11.2 and install 11.1 and this time I just stayed on 11.1 put a few calls into various Leaf guys I know to see if its happening on other systems EVERYONE flat out says no never seen that before. 10 days on not had a problem but others using 11.2 are cropping up with the same pixel probs. The moral if your hiring a Afi dont use 11.2 make sure you have 11.1 on your system and enough time to do the 5minute firmware downgrade. Its a really pain as 11.2 firmware was great at keeping batteries alive with 11.1 I’m back to the continual battery shuffle. Leaf is at the moment affering to replace the imaging module but we are shooting every day till christmas eve so have no time to do the swap, better the devil you know at this point.

So for the long post love to hear from others that may have come across this…

One of the big challenges for the work we do is client delivery. To start, it’s time consuming and can drag on long after a shoot with photographers and art directors alike making changes, requesting new edits, etc. When clients drag their feet and you’ve moved on to another job, this can prove to be a burden. There is also the issue of shoots where no art director is there to sign off on images. In the meantime you are emailing jpg’s every 10 minutes, compressing them down to make them “email-able”. All of this is time consuming and painful and completely unnecessary. This is where Lightbox Network comes in.

For 20 bucks a month you can secure yourself 1 GB of server space on a website that will allow you to upload your edits and make them viewable by clients via a web page that makes it easy for them to edit with a built in approval system as well as download final selects thereby cutting out the painful steps of client delivery making it seamless, effortless and providing the immediacy that so many have come to love with digital. Need more space? Just add on for an additional fee. For an additional $10 a month you can add on live edit which will allow you to upload simultaneously while shooting, providing an editing platform for art directors, creative directors and editors who are back at the office.

Further streamlining the workflow, Lightbox Network has recently launched an Aperture plugin that allows you to Export images directly from Aperture to Lightbox. more info here.

Just a quick note about an inexpensive product I have been very happy with.

$18 computer tool kit from Newer Technology. 11-pieces including the perfect size screw drivers and torx drivers. Just did a hard drive swap on a MBP and this kit helped make it seamless. (Along with the great video tutorials on OWC)

Everything you need inside including magnetic drivers that make the job simple. No more dropped screws into the caverns of your computer. And the nylon pry tool is a nice mar free solution to popping covers and changing batteries on iPods.

Newer Technology Tool Kit

I know I shouldn’t get so excited about a tent but…… anyone have one of these or experience with them. The weak aussie dollar is going to make it pretty expensive but it looks so cool. check out the video http://www.villageblackout.com/

Capture One 4.5.2 just released to solve the issue of corrupted CR2 files. http://www.phaseone.com/Content/Downloads/CO4.aspx

The cause of the problem was that Mac OS would write the files to cache and not fully to the hard drive. When a crash occurs in the software or OS, the placeholders remain on the disk, but the files, which were only held in cache are lost. That we can reproduce 100% of the time. The new version contains steps to ensure that the files are written to disk and verified. Worst case scenario would be that the computer loses power completely while shooting. In that situation at maximum 1-2 files could be lost simply due to not fully being written yet. Even that is very unlikely as the problem would have to occur immediately after capture.

There are also other bug fixes design to solve crashes occurring during settings/style copy and apply

Phase One

Gang, things are definitely up in the air right now regarding the latest release of C1. Something is not good with Canon files, and as Oscar pointed out, corruption is a possibility. Until this is sorted out, do not use C1 4.5.1. I would stay with whatever proven workflow you’ve been  using until more information becomes available. We will post more information as soon as it becomes available.