Digital Fusion:
The Future of Pro Digital Photography
What do you get when you cross a Swiss Army knife with a digital photography service? The DigitalFusion FuseBox™. Moeller and Millstein’s scanning and retouching business was boiling over, but the duo had a hard time convincing old-school pro photographers to jump on digital. They would need a simple, shiny all-in-one device to lure their clients into the future.
“That’s the beauty of a lot of the Apple technology. It’s simple and it’s extremely well designed and we know what it takes to run it.”
”We knew that we were going to be standing in the desert some day next to a photographer with FireWire cables and digital backs and batteries and generators,” says Moeller. “He’s going to have to use a full complement of computerized gear to do what he used to do with a camera and a roll of film.
We started to think about how we were going to mitigate the risks of taking computers from our nice controlled editing suite environment to a rough location where they’re shooting the new Mustang for a billboard or a celebrity for ‘Vanity Fair’ in a swimming pool.”
The team mulled the problem for almost two years before they found an answer. In 2003, the FuseBox™ was born. Moeller and Milstein packed a full array of digital photography and computer equipment into a durable aluminum container the size of a typical tool chest. They designed the unit themselves with reliability and versatility in mind.
They mounted an LCD monitor on a swing-out arm, included a PowerBook as a backup CPU/break-away capture station and stacked a mirrored hard drive system into the box to prevent accidental data loss. They outfitted it with enough batteries to run for up to 10 hours. Technicians could preview photos and tweak studio setups and camera settings to get perfect shots. Photographers could use the FuseBox™ to capture thousands of frames without worrying about computer equipment or changing the way they took pictures. The FuseBox™ served up the security of analog film and the speed of digital.
“That’s the beauty of a lot of the Apple technology,” says Moeller. “It’s simple and it’s extremely well designed and we know what it takes to run it.”
The FuseBox™ was first deployed for a CBS promo shoot. DigitalFusion and a photographer secured about 3,500 shots with no hang-ups, lost data or delays. Since that shoot, entertainment companies and corporate clients have booked the system non-stop, including CBS, Paramount, Warner Brothers, FOX Broadcasting, Universal Pictures, NBC/Universal, ABC and HBO.
The DigitalFusion FuseBox™ is a mobile digital capture unit loaded with Hasselblad SLR cameras sporting 22-megapixel digital backs, Apple Cinema Displays, Power Macs and batteries. The kit can be shipped almost anywhere and comes complete with a technician to run all the equipment.
Catch and Release
When DigitalFusion catches a snapshot — either with a digital camera or a negative scanner — it’s held in two places. One copy is detained on a DigitalFusion server and another is locked up in a portable hard drive. Photographers get to visit their imprisoned shots in luxurious editing suites that feature comfy couches and iMac workstations. There they can meet with photo retouchers, browse the Internet and catch up on correspondence or simply lounge until their photos are processed.
”When Hugh sits with a client, he can speak in photography terms — one stop, two stop, burn, dodge, darken, lighten, different paper stocks, film effects, cross processing,” says Moeller. “Hugh is the translator between that and a new layer mask in Photoshop, a new curves adjustment in Photoshop.”
Once a photographer decides on a particular look for the job, Milstein or another technician divvies up the processing work among several Xserves. The company is experimenting with Xsan, Xgrid and cluster processing, and currently runs batch-processing software on several machines at once. “In a traditional film lab, if you brought me 100 rolls or 10,000 rolls of regular film, they’d all be done at the same time,” says Moeller. “Our clients want that same level of service, only faster, because now it’s digital.
