Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing Down Your Selects

So we're gonna burn through some images here. We only have about 250 here in a lot of sequences and I'm just gonna let Corey kind of. I'm gonna lean over 'cause I think this is very valuable. This is how I'm thinking when I'm actually editing, when I'm just kind of moving quickly. So I'm just gonna talk out loud, stream of consciousness for two minutes. Awkward knee position, can't see his face, awkward body position, awkward body position, can't see his head, can't see the hat, can't see his face, can't see his face, kind of can see his face, eyes are closed. I haven't tagged the frame yet. These are all throwaways and the tag is the first phase. If they get a tag, that means then they'll go into the next round. If they get a tag, they're select. So no. Okay accept these now. Grabbing the quick draw. Climbers don't like to be pictured grabbing the quick draw. Okay he's hanging. He's trying to figure out the move. His hand is blocked behind the quick draw. You know, we're 30 images i...

n and there's not a frame yet. So I'm still moving now. The quick draw is swinging around. No, still not a great position. Actually looks like a maybe soft. We're just seeing him look down. Okay, now we're starting to get his face in the shot. Okay he's struggling a little bit. That's a nice frame. Boom, first tag. Okay that's nice. I can finally see his face. He's actually doing something. He's chalking up. Now his hand, you can't see what he's grabbing onto. That doesn't look very hard. I'm gonna rip through that and now usually these would orient correctly, but you know, I'm looking at a vertical. It looks like this already has a tag so maybe that was tagged on camera, but just for the heck of it, let's say. Why is that not flipping? Maybe because we had pulled it back onto the card? Oh okay. I don't know if it respects the original. Right. Okay so I think just for the sake of it, we're gonna keep on ripping through this. That's starting to look interesting. That gets a tag. Awkward body position. You can't see his face, can't see his face. Looking down, looking down, kind of a nice body position. You see Red Bull branding. That's something I'm thinking about if I shot it for Red Bull, tag that. Okay now that's actually really interesting. He looks powerful, tag that frame. That doesn't look super hard, but it's a nice body position. I'd give that a tag. Okay we're moving through. Okay here we go. Now I wish I wouldn't have cropped his foot out, but I'm still gonna give it a tag. So a couple of these had tags applied. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm, theoretically I should've gone through, taken all the tags off, but it's starting to work as the point and then he grabs the draw, which I'm thankful for. Now here we go. I'm gonna ask him to do it again. Well he wanted to clip it again. Infinitely better photograph so it has a tag. This maybe is one of the hero frames. I'd probably tag that too, but that's the decisive moment in my mind. His eyes are sharp, there's action. It's compositional, it's interesting. So I think that gives you a feel for, it's a pretty quick process. Boom, boom, boom. If it doesn't catch my eye, it goes back to what Chase and I were talking about this morning. Instant visceral reaction or you just move on. Like it's not the right frame. After the tagging process, and let's just do this. Let's say file, oh whoops wrong one. You want to just look at the tags? Yeah, yeah. So if we click. Oh yeah I need to get out of that image. Close out of this and then we can go to just the tags and now we have all of our selects. So we've gone through and done that process and now we're looking at instead of 250 images, we're looking at 50. So we already cut out 80%. And let's just because this will tie into what we're gonna do next in segment four. So I just jumped to another 100 frames into the take. So here is Dane. We're shooting video and stills at the same time and what that meant was that Dane and I were switching positions. Dane slid in, he's shooting on the Red camera and he got out of the way. I slid in and shot stills. We traded positions to get two different angles. Sometimes I would do both which is someone hands me the Red camera, I shoot red. Then they hand me the still camera, I shoot stills. In this case, we were trying to do a lot. So now I'm going to go through and color code. So I'm going to use three. The command is you add a three, I think there's nine colors. So if I thought I was going to do a lot of like narrowing down, I would start with nine and then I'd work my way down to the winning images would get a one is the way that I work. So I'm gonna start with three here and okay, that's a nice frame. That's a three, orange. See I added that color code. That's even better. I'm gonna give that an orange. That's a great facial expression. I'm not doing a good job editing right now because I'm adding every frame so I'm gonna, but you know, I'm gonna tell you right now. I like these frames except it really bothers me because quick draw is right in his face. It's like swinging around in his face and we will come back to this in segment four, this dilemma of what to do about the quick draw in this photograph. So anyhow, I'm gonna go through and here we go. So I knew it was in my head when I was hanging there, this quick draw was bothering me and David wasn't clipping his quick draw because it was too hard for him to let go of the wall. So here I am, I'm shooting this frame. The body position is awesome. I'm gonna give it a color code. Shoot that frame and then guess what? I said David, do you mind if we just take the quick draw off 'cause this is gonna cause all kinds of problems later and again, we're not, ethically there's no issue here. I'm straightforward about it. I just don't want to spend time removing the quick draw and that might be ethical to remove it so we're just gonna take it out of the frame to begin with. So boom, look at that. Nowt here's a winner. So now we've color coded. We've tagged, we have our selects and we color coded. and I narrowed those down again using another set of color code. And so now we can resort by color class at each stage and now it's dropped all of his oranges from across the take. These could've been hours apart and they brought 'em up to the top. We can refine and go into level twos and level ones or there's different color codes. Magentas and yellows, the difference. So it's a great visual tool for speed and again this was a 200 image take, but it could easily be a two or 3,000 image take from the entire day and we figured out an efficient way. Yeah. Does everyone understand the editing and color coding process 'cause I want to touch on one more thing in the next couple of minutes before we wrap up. Good? And it's probably similar. Again, any program can do something similar to this. All of them support color coding, star rating and something beyond just tagging on and off. And I guess the one thing I would say because there was that one question from the audience, you know why Photo Mechanic, what is the advantage? And the advantage is this. It's how fast you can actually move through files without having to wait for processing. And so when you've done a 6,000 image edit or shoot, it's the ability to just really rip through images. You know, that gives you more time to do the other things in life you want. Cool. And so all of this data stays with the files. And for me, since I don't use Photo Mechanic for viewers that might be watching, where can you find that? What does it cost and how do you get that on your computer? It is from a software company called CameraBits.com. I believe it's about $150? Might be just shy of $200 and again, it was developed for journalists, but it's seen a much wider use for dealing with massive amount of images and quick review. I mean is this what you guys use at X Games? Yup. Okay. Across the board. Real quick, long term back up. One of the problems with spinning hard drives is they don't like to sit around not spinning. So they're not in a great solution for long term storage. We've now edit a project, we delivered some files and now we're talking about keeping your images available to you over many years. One of the problems with spinning hard drives is while they're relatively cheap for a lot of data, they don't like to sit on a shelf without spinning 'cause they have a lot of moving parts, bearings that need grease, things like that and so if you're using these for long-term storage, you need to take them out every few months, three to six months and spin them up and make sure that you can still go and access a file or write a file. I do that again pretty religiously every time I rotate my backup set. I pull out all my old hard drives out and I just plug 'em in and run a quick check on the file system and I pull off an image and add an image to it just to make sure if you catch a problem, hopefully you already have a redundancy and you can make another copy. And I want to interrupt for one second. We just talked about this edit process which is first you tag, then we color code, and we get the images down to the best frames in the shoot. Those pictures in at least my office and in Brett's office get backed up to a server. So we protect those select select images, the best of the best. Those get backed up on the cloud. They get backed up on a server system in our office. That might be another hard drive that you store at your neighbor's house where you back up on a drive at your neighbor's house. You protect kind of the most important files and now what Brett is talking about, protecting or backing up kind of larger sets of data, that's this bigger conversation of what you do with data and what is the best back up plan. Sure so SSD hard drives will be a better solution for it because there's no moving parts. They'll do better in the long term, but they're cost prohibitive still for large amounts of data. These are a lot cheaper than these right now. Tape drives are more for the world of big enterprise companies. We don't really fit within the tape drive world. They're relatively inexpensive per gig, but they're expensive to implement. The readers, the process is all very slow and then finally cloud, cloud storage will be the future. We're pretty unique in the amount of content that we create versus like a lawyer dealing with PDFs all day. Cloud works great for them because they're only going to generate so much data. Five megs, 10 megs a day. We generate 100 gigs a day. The storage in the cloud is not the problem. It's getting it there. It's sending it via your connection and when you're creating data at a faster rate than you could ever upload to a service. That will change over time and cloud storage will be the future for everyone. So you're not managing all of this. You're paying some professionals in a server farm somewhere to do it and then the last thing, RAID. It stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks or independent disks. A couple of things to think about. RAID Zero is fast. It sends bits of data to both drives at the same time. It is not a duplication. It's that part of it is here, part of it is here and you get some of those write speeds because you're writing to multiple drives at once. RAID One is mirroring and that's what we're essentially doing here, but there are devices that do it automatically and that makes two copies of the same data and then RAID Five is parity across multiple, you know, you have three or more drives. It's the best combination that you're getting some speed benefits writing to multiple drives, but you're also making sure that out of a set of three our five drives, the storage, the data is always stored in at least two of those places. You can lose one drive. A drive can crash, a drive can get damaged. You can pull it out, put it back into a RAID Five system and it rebuilds automatically. He keeps all of his server storage online. The people, the employees in his office, they're accessing that image information everyday. It's in a RAID system just like that so that it's fast, it has some protection against a hard drive crash before you have to go back to backups and it's the best balance of that RAID system. It's a G-tech Gspeed. Studio. Yeah Studio RS. I can't remember what specific model. And then we were just talking about, there's online storage, things that are attached to your computer. There's offline storage which is sitting in a shelf in your desk and that protects you against at least power surges because it's not attached and then there's off-site storage and that's if your house burns down, you have a theft, you have a flood. That storage 100 miles away, 50 miles away at a friend's house, at a server farm, at a place you Fedex drives back and forth. The idea of keeping it in three places at all times or more is critical to long term storage. And a great example of that is in the Lake Tahoe basin, everyone is susceptible to a fire. And so we send our hard drives with my mom and dad. They have a lot of hard drives in Gardnerville, Nevada just down the hill because they are not prone to the same natural disasters and so it does not have to be you're paying for a server farm. It does not have to be that you're buying a fireproof safe. It's just splitting that data up, getting it out of your home or out of your office into someone else's home. If his whole office burns down, it would be a very painful process, but we'll get it all back because it's stored off-site in multiple copies. It's key to success in the business. But is there any other questions as we wrap up? You touched on cloud storage. Yeah. Is there a particular one that you would recommend to people looking to back up maybe their most important work? We use Photo Shelter. They're both our web host. So they're the engine behind our website, but they are also all of our selects, our hero images are backed up on the Photo Shelter website. So that serves two purposes. One, it's very easy. They're backed up, they're safe, they're on server farms that Photo Shelter worries, number one. Number two, if everyone were out of the office and we wanted to serve up that data to someone, it's an online searchable database that we have access to or we can make it accessible to the public. Additionally and it's not really a backup solution, but we're conscious that this is part of our world, many tens of thousands of my images are with photo agencies and so those images also live in Aurora Photos and then through Aurora Photos, those images get distributed to Getty and Corbis and all of the different distribution agencies. All of that is backed up on cloud and so Photo Shelter is our go-to real solution. Yeah it's not really a back up solution. They don't build themselves that way, but effectively is. Pure data like Amazon S3 is great for just getting a large amount of disk space remotely. You create an account, you can load things in. Google Drive does that and then there's back up specific software like BackBlaze and a few others where you put a little software tool on your computer and it automates that process. But again, even with a one terabyte hard drive in my machine I have a hard time getting all one terabyte up to that cloud backup solution and that's just my startup drive. That's not this. That's not where all my images live so for me, the cloud is not a tool, a solution yet mostly due to the pipe that it takes to get it there. The space is cheap. It's getting it there that's the problem. It's a solution for selects is what it is. Yeah, yeah. So I want to thank you, Brett. You just made the least sexy part of this business really sexy. Well thanks. I do what I can. So thank you, that was really great.