I started this blog feature with good intentions – to regularly share knowledge and ideas – but the last few months have been crazy busy with all sorts of projects. Hopefully 2011 will allow us a little more time for these posts! I have a few more in the pipeline – kit we use, simple on-location flash, and some behind the scenes videos from engagement and fashion shoots.
Only the paranoid survive is a great way to paraphrase the required workflow for a photographer working with digital cameras!
We encourage you to think like this – if your files are not located on at least three different disks, your data doesn’t truly exist!
For anyone not backing up any data, that should be a wake up call.
Cameras and cards
Canon shooters, we shoot RAW, so our files are around 20MB each(!), and we shoot to lots of 4GB cards. We consider 4GB cards the right balance between risk of image loss from a card corruption and frequency of replacing the cards in the camera. To ensure we never have a corruption, we always format the cards in camera – even when we know they are blank. This ensures the disk starts clean before the first image is written to it. (No corruptions yet, but this readiness prevents Hope being our strategy!)
Workstations and studio systems
Our workstations are Mac Pros. These have multiple hard disks, but we combine two disks in a striped RAID for the main work disk to increase performance. Since we use Macs, we use the wonderful Time Machine to back up this and other disks to a firewire drobo array – four disks in a redundant array means that the backup cannot be easily lost from a single disk error on the backup itself. I love Time Machine – it has saved our bacon on more than one occasion…
This takes a snapshot of the system at an hourly interval, but we manually force additional backups immediately after file imports.
Around each Mac Pro, we additionally have a second firewire drobo array that we use entirely for local manual backups.
We use Chronosync to sync our various working disks and projects to this drobo. The techie in me loves to script, so we have automated many processes to ensure we always have a second clean backup, local to the Mac.
Import to workstation
We use Lightroom (LR3) to manage and edit our images.
For each project, we have a project template directory structure, complete with legal files, project templates and notes for each step of the process. This ensures consistency in every project, and nothing is overlooked. Each project gets its own Lightroom catalog and directory structure. Anyone familiar with Kevin Kubota’s Lightroom workflow will recognize our project flow as an adaptation of what Kevin suggests in his books – and it is recommended reading!
Before importing the images into Lightroom, we manually copy all Flash cards into a RAW project folder that is immediately archived and replicated. That way, we have a complete record of every shoot and know all images are safe if any are accidentally deleted later.
We import this RAW folder into the Lightroom client catalog.
Two things I really hate about the current version of Lightroom (LR3) are that it can’t do print proofing, and worse, it has no way to allow multiple users to access one database simultaneously. In a small studio with several people needing access to these files, this can be a productivity bottleneck.
To overcome this limitation, we export and sync the catalogs to a Network disk (NAS) – again using RAID disks for redundancy – and this allows catalog export / import from different machines. It’s a fix, and hopefully Adobe will give us a better solution in LR4 or 5?
The RAW Lightroom backup is also backed up to this NAS disk.
The final step in our asset management is to backup the projects to removable hard drives. We backup all projects to TWO hard disks using an eSATA card in the Mac. These disks can be stored at a different location and / or stored in a fire safe to ensure we have triplicate copies of project files.
Again, Chronosync is the gem that ensures we never lose a byte, as every sync gets a data verification pass as well!
We no longer use DVDs or CDs to archive material. They are simply not good enough, regardless of alleged quality. Multiple hard disks appears to be the most optimal method now.
Post process workflow
Beyond Lightroom we also use Photoshop and other image manipulation tools, but the project structures, and Lightroom management ensure our flows are non-destructive. We can always re-trace our steps in any image, and never lose data.
