Lessons

Lesson Info

File Formats

so that's time lamps there is another kind of video that I do that I don't think I'm going to spend the time to do here just because it's takes a bit of time and it's a little bit more of a novelty and that would be a gift animations give animations are ones that can repeat over and over again and they could look rather interesting but it just takes more time to put them together and that there has fewer uses but if you've ever seen on a website a still photograph just sitting there and then suddenly somebody's clothes or something just kind of waves in the wind and then it stops again that's a gif animation and you can also do some of that kind of stuff in photo shop all right so a few other things I want to cover that we don't really have a like a predetermined time to talk about but might be good to just get out of the way right now is a little bit about of the dmg file format because a lot of people ask about it and how I think about that so when we imported are images we would hav...

e went down here to the import button we chose our source images on the left we told it what to do at the top and on the right side we could choose our destination well one of the choices that was up there was to copy or to copy as tng a lot of people want to know what the heck is that and should I use it or not well it's there's no straight answers some people really like using dmg other people not so much and let me see if I can give you this a little bit of information about it the dmg file format was developed by adobe and the reason why they developed it was any time you hear of raw file format in your camera all the raw file formats for the most part of proprietary meaning the manufacturer came up with it and didn't plan on sharing with other people how the data is saved in that file it's their secret file format but then people at adobe inn and other cos they kind of reverse engineer and figure out much as they can about how the image was saved in that raw file format that's really only designed for the camera manufacturer to know how to open and they made it so we can actually open him and camera and in light room but the problem is we can't really save information back into that raw file because we don't truly know how exactly how it's structured and if we put anything else back into it might screwed up for other programs if they don't understand what we put in there and that's why we create an extra file for our changes and it's called the next mp file and say hey we're not touching the raw file we're putting all our instructions in this separate file just so we don't mess that up well no we came up with a format dmg which stands for digital negative and it's a raw file format that is completely documented if you want to know how to save an image and raw for matter read it you khun get a document that tells you how to do that the camera manufacturers unfortunately don't do that for us and there are a couple advantages and disadvantages of it the main thing is far as advantages go is you don't need an ex mp file the changes that we make in light room could be recorded directly and the original files the dmg far because it's a documented file format many we know how to save information in it without screwing it up where's with raw file were afraid to screw up the original because we don't know exactly how the manufacturer decided teo structure it so the d n g you don't get those ex mp files you don't need him also with the dmg there's a preview built into the dmg file that could be updated so if you load that image and other programs it might be ableto to read that preview in that preview might incorporate the changes that we had made in light room so in certain other programs would be able to see those some people will claim the dmg will make your file smaller because it can apply compression and in some cases that's true but let's take a look at how much uh space you might say so I went in I just took one file as an example in here is on a raw file taken with from my camera and here's an ex mp that contains some adjustments and if we look nearthe right side at the file sizes that air there my raw file is seven point three megabytes and the adjustments are four k so we're talking seven point three megabytes for the most part so then how much space might we save by using the dmg file format so that's one thing is it can apply lossless compression which means it's not going to degrade the quality but the file size could be smaller well in here there is a one right here which is a d n g file when you recorded dmg files you can choose what size preview is in it and this is one with the medium preview so if you look we saved a little bit of space six point seven megabytes versus seven point three for the original that might not sound like a huge savings but how many pictures do I have in my catalog I have two hundred some thousand so multiply the savings that's there by two hundred thousand and it starts to add up but know that you don't always save space it depends on what settings you use here's a dmg file that uses a full size preview you have the choice of full size or medium and if you look at that file size compared to the original you're pretty much not losing not gaining any savings there so it's not always just file size and there's a check box you can turn on to say to include fast load data which would make it so when you go to the develop module you could move the sliders without having to wait and that made it a little bit bigger still so you're not always saving space but here's what I like about dmg for me well before I mentioned that actually the problem with the mg is twofold one is it takes time for to convert them and it could take a lot of time so if you're going to do when you're importing is going to take longer for the important pictures the second thing is not every program on earth can open a dmg files and if your camera manufacturer ever comes up with some really special software and they choose not to support dmg then you can't open it in their software but there's not too many programs that can't handle deon geez so dan ji's air nice a lot of people really like them I personally I'm too lazy to use him it takes too much time for it to convert my images if I take a folder off ah hundred pictures and converted to dmg this is what I ended up getting I got one hundred won items actually because there's no ex mp files where is when I had a normal raw file I had two hundred because there are ex mp files in there there's twice as many files but you see the files savings with one hundred images you save a little bit you have to think about how much time it takes and that's the main reason I don't cause I'm so impatient but when you do a dandy you also have the choice of doing a los e d a n g a los e d a n g will degrade the quality of your picture a little bit but it's going to save a considerable amount of space look at this file size that's a hat heck of a lot smaller than this original isn't it I'm not saying you should use that on every single image you have but if you're hard drive starts getting full remember our rating system where when we press the number one it meant keep but ignore remember those files those air the files that I call out takes their files that I don't think I'm ever going to need to use but I just can't throw away well when I'm completely done processing the folder I can search for the images that were rated with only one star those are the images that I that I want to keep him but ignore him in those I'm gonna convert to dmg and I'm going to turn on the checkbox called lossy I can't remember what the worthiness of the checkbooks but it means lossy compression in for those then my file size is goingto be cut to less than half and if I do that for only those images that I've raided one star those of the images I don't think I'm ever going to open anyway I can still get to him we'll still look okay it's just like j pigs look okay j pigs have been compressed lost her loss aly but that's where I find the energy to be useful for me but dante is a fine file format to use if you want to convert your files film it's just don't use the los e version for your best pictures it does take a considerable amount of extra time though in the conversion so if you do it on import just make sure you do it when you're at home and you have the time to wait for the progress bar to finish and that's the thing I don't have too much patience for any questions about dandi in general so we're here um let's see I'm gonna bust out with this when we did have one if you don't mind going back a little bit sure folks wanted to no one of our regulars been philly birdie about how many frames you like to shoot for a smooth time lapse so I'm lapse question that came in that I just thought it was important sure to kind of throw your way well you you can kind of get used to timelapse after awhile as faras how smooth you wanted to be the main thing is thirty frames per second is pretty much as many as you I should use you shouldn't use any more than thirty frames usually it's not going to get any smoother above thirty it's just going to look like it sped up so if you take and think aboutthe length you want your time lapse to be let's say you wanted to be a total of twenty seconds long and multiply that by thirty that's how many frames you could take to make it an absolutely smooth video over that length of time thirty francs per second if you go lower than that you're getting a little bit more choppy and it's a matter of experimentation to see where does it start to bug you as faras the choppiness goes but I'm not a huge time last laps person it's mainly my wife karen that seems to shoot him and since I know she's going to be over there shoot the time lapses I'm just relaxing doing other things so I don't know if I'm the best person asked that okay so don't do it you know bram and you cover dmg really well so no questions over here all right then I want to talk a little bit about how I maintain my backups because what happens usually I find is you go out shooting you come home you get your photos and at least two locations your main drive in some sort of backup drive and then you out shooting again and their process repeats but what happens is all you're doing is adding stuff to your backup drive are you ever updating it if you adjusted a picture in light room is that being reflected on that backup drive one way of doing that is just back up your light room catalogue as well put it on that drive so at least you have that but I like to back up and even another level beyond that and I use a program and I'm not saying you should get on lee this program I'm sure there are others that do similar things but I use one called beyond compare that's beyond compare and only shea what it will do for me what beyond compare does this first off it's the program I used on the first day I think it wass when I compared to different ex mp files and I could show you where the text was different it highlighted it read he said all this technical junk but then you could see the lines and read that had changed well I could do the same thing by comparing two folders so I can compare my folders that contain my pictures to the folder on my backup drive that contains the backup pictures because what if I ended up merging together a bunch of images into an hd are that gets saved is a tiff file on my hard drive it didn't get saved on my backup drive though or I go and make changes and all my ex mp files update why don't I update the ex mp files on my backup drive there's all sorts of things like the time lapse I just created that wouldn't get it to my backup drive if the only time I think about my backup drive is right after I come back from shooting so I try to maintain my backup drive and I find this program called beyond compare is very nice for doing that but as I say there should be other programs similar to let me just give you the idea of how it works with beyond compare I khun drag a folder to this upper area you can see the name of the folder right here that's the hard drive that contains my pictures then I opened up my backup drive and I drag it up to here on the other side and so it will show me where are their differences between the two if you look at anything that's red red means something exists on that side that does not exist on the other so what I can see here is the last time I played with my backup drive I had all these sp locations that had shot but since then I have shot these three over here these three here a red saying they don't exist on the other dr so those are the three that I need to copy over to get my backup drive to contain all the stuff I shot so I select those three and at the very top there's a copy button it will change into the arrow pointing right when I click on something on this side you click it and it copies over these three folders to the other side and then they simply disappear from the list because this program will on ly show me if I've set it up right where things are different and if something is identical itjust doesn't show in the lift there's no reason to look at so I would do that and those would disappear let me see if I have yeah I could show you ok so let's say that I did some screen shots here to show you I would select those images by clicking on him and at the very top center do you see the choice called copy hit that it copies him over and then they just disappear from the list then I would look at what is left that sing in color red means there's something missing from the side that's not read so if this is read over here it means there's something in there that is not included over here the green means there's something of the same file name but the modification dates later it's probably an ex mp file I wouldn't made a change to one of the slaughters it updated the ex mp file next mp file is in my back up but it's not the current version that makes us so I'm gonna go up to I can double click on a folder and will expand both sides you know show me in this case the red thing is what's missing it's not found in this side you know what that thing is well look at what is called folder status plug in remember that plug and I show you where I could clip the little boxes to keep track of what I have done to a particular folder while it does it actually creates a little invisible file in a folder that keeps track of what those settings are and I hadn't used it before back when I made my backup so it says hey that little hidden file is missing over here and then here it shows me all of these ex mp files and it tells me the modification date over here and I modified them recently where is the ones over here from january so I just review this to glance and make sure that nothing looks unusual and then I could just click on the folder and hit the copy but it's only gonna copy it words different and so I do that and then I can start inspecting other folders down here is where I found some ex mp files that simply did not exist over here which simply meant I had never adjusted these pictures before so it didn't need to create them yet and so say these are missing so I could get him to copy over sometimes I get weird things where I'll find that hey here's a file that doesn't exist over here and I'm like what's that well that's where I either created in hdr where we merge three files ended up with a tiff or I pitched a panorama or something else doesn't mean your backup has that panam around pama can say the word panorama so I use this to find out where is my back up different than my original and in this particular case it's an odd difference here is actually what it is if you look at this you see the red file that means it's missing over here but look down here there's a red file meaning it's missing over there well after looking at those you can actually write click on them and say showing finder and actually look at the files these two are the same file and all I've done is re naming you see the file name up there is different than this useless edit edit file name and so I said hey they're different so I just told update innit copy this one over and deleted the other so anyway there's all sorts of things you can do in here let's see if I have any it'll warn you anytime it thinks it's going to do something bad and it will say do you really want to delete those things so it's it's a little harder to mess up when it says it's going to delete one you can click on it it will tell you exactly the file names you can go and see what's going on but I find this program called beyond compare to be nice takes a little bit of time to get used to but I find I can really keep my backups up to date and I'm sure there are other software that could do similar things that's just the one I got a holdup in found that I actually use so not the most exciting thing to talk about but if your backup drive does not contain the panoramas you stitched doesn't contain your hd ours and your ex mp files are out of date and all that what good is the backup if your main drive failed no so I try to make sure I'm reviewing that and depends how often you shoot as far as how often I might review it