Winter Olympic workflow.
As a South African photographer, the thought of editing images from
photographers during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games is very
intriguing; mainly because I have never been in ‘real’ snow or seen any
winter sports with my own eyes.
Over the past two weeks I have been editing Winter Olympic images as part of
the EPA Photos and DPA teams based at the main media centre in Vancouver,
Canada.
One of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was just how the images were
getting from the photographers cameras high in the mountains surrounding the
city to the end user – the newspapers and websites. Another thought was how
long it takes and what IT resources are needed to make this happen.
What I found out is that an enormous amount preparation is vital for this
type of assignment, and planning from the agency in conjunction with the IOC
is also very important.
The IT department started their work two weeks before any photographers
arrived and they effectively cabled entire mountainsides with LAN cables,
and from there to the designated EPA photo positions that were agreed on
during earlier meetings with the photo manager of the IOC and EPA sports
editor, Gernot Hensel, as well as with IT manager, Ole Bratz.
A total of 4 kilometres of LAN cabling was laid, including 40 LAN stitches
and mountains of other IT hardware. EPA had to also supply its own servers,
desk top computers, power sockets and other office hardware.
According to Martin Leo, from EPA Photos IT department, the worst venue to
cable was the Ice Hockey stadium. He spent the best part of a day crawling
under spectators’ seats to cable the venue and had to share the stadium
floor with dead rats and mouse traps.
The main reason to cable the Ice Hockey venue was to access images from the
remote cameras that were preinstalled in the roof of the stadium directly
above the nets of the ‘field’. These remote cameras are fired by the two
photographers covering the hockey from pitch side and edited in real time by
EPA editors in the main media centre, with images moving from the camera to
the media centre via LAN cables.
Some of the events, on the other hand, allow photographers to edit their own
work and transmit the edited and captioned images to the desk via LAN
cables. Most photographers are using Photo Mechanic with code replacement to
add captions, before moving the images to the desk.
The 9 editors working shifts from 1oam to 12pm use FotoStation software to
edit, caption and transmit images to the EPA Photos head offices in
Frankfurt, Germany, where the images make the final part of their journey to
clients around the world via a satellite feed.
The process of shooting an image, moving it to editors, sending it to
Frankfurt and then moving it onto clients takes less than 2 minutes.
After the first week of the games, 10 000 images were moved to the clients,
with 16 000 images having been edited by the desk.
This makes me think how different the workflow would have been decades ago,
before high speed internet, before cameras that are now effectively powerful
computers, and before smaller and faster laptops.
The one thing that I can guarantee is that photographers would have shot
less images and would probably have focused on the winners of the events,
and not been forced to shoot images of most of the athletes, transmitting an
endless stream of images.
As editors, the modern high speed imaging work flow forces us to look at
more images than before, as clients expect their feed from major sporting
events to be all-encompassing, to be counted by the ‘weight’ of images, not
only important moments.
Thus, as an agency you are expected to produce not only the winning moments,
winners, podiums and stunning features from EVERY event, but MORE images
than from previous Games.
The more images, the better, and so the circle of needing to move more
images to clients faster than before is unending, and I am sure the workflow
will get faster and
Boet, thanks for the story behind the pics, and what it takes to ensure I see a perfectly framed image from the Olympics on the cover of my Sueddeutsche Zeitung with a Breze and a cup of coffee, only three hours later and 9000 km’s away in Munich. Awesome, respect! You guys do a great job!
Regards,
Blair
HEctic work! All that then its gets cropped like shit in the paper … I must forward this to our sub editors.
Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your blog posts. In any case I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write again soon!
Thanks so much for posting this good content! I am looking forward to reading more.