Digital Fusion:
The Future of Pro Digital Photography
Most jobs are processed in a matter of hours or overnight. When the job is done, the client is handed a cassette-sized, aluminum-armored, 20-to-100-gigabyte hard drive — called HardFilm™ — loaded with her photos. Backup files are stored on DigitalFusion servers for one year. After that, clients can extend their files’ stay for a modest fee.
”Now we can deliver these perfect files to our clients,” says Milstein. “The end points are set right, the color, the contrast, everything is great. They’re like perfect little prints.”
“We’re at the point where any one server can go down and it can be replaced in a matter of two or three minutes; it will never take down the entire house. It’s a pretty far leap from where we began to where we’ve ended up.”
All those perfect little prints take up a lot of server space. DigitalFusion has 40 terabytes of Xserve RAID storage. When the company needs more room, adding more Xserves or Xserve RAIDs won’t be a problem. Moeller configured most of the Xserve and Xsan system himself, including e-mail and web servers, so he’s more than up to the task of adding on to it. “We’ve never had a full-time IT staff,” he says. “It’s always been myself and Hugh and an occasional part-time consultant.”
If a server ever fails, Moeller can have a new one up and running in a matter of minutes. “We’re at the point where any one server can go down and it can be replaced in a matter of two or three minutes; it will never take down the entire house,” he says. “It’s a pretty far leap from where we began to where we’ve ended up.”
Solid Proof
Organizing thousands of photographs is a chore, to say the least. Traditionally, photographers thumbed through stacks of proof sheets to find the good shots. They sliced up the sheets and pasted their top picks into one hybrid proof sheet for their clients. “We’ve done the same thing, but electronically,” says Milstein. “It’s significantly faster and it’s also much sexier.”
Moeller and Milstein asked software designer John Supra to write an online application for digital photo management. The end result: DFStudio™. When a job is processed, it’s dumped into DFStudio™. Photographers can log in to their DFStudio™ account through any browser to view and organize their photos, selecting first picks, second picks and kills. Once they’ve made their selections, DFStudio™ can generate an online proof sheet that can be sent to the client via a secure e-mail link or printed out.
DFStudio™ doesn’t stop at proof sheets. Photographers can attach notes and keywords to each frame for future searches. They can also log expenses and keep track of contacts — from producers to stylists — for each job. “We want to get the professional photographer using this system daily because it’s so much more than just doing an edit,” says Milstein.
DigitalFusion used its high-resolution, museum-quality scanner to reproduce Marilyn Manson’s watercolor “Experience Is the Mistress of Fools.”
“You can track expenses and contacts. It really becomes this incredible organizing tool of not just your images, but the data that goes along with the images,” says Milstein.
Digital Franchise
Moeller and Milstein may have the secret formula for complete digital capture and processing, but they’re willing to share. They’ve already sold a copy of their system (servers and the DFStudio™ web application) to FOX Broadcasting. In the future, the DigitalFusion FuseBox™ and DFStudio™ could be sold off the shelf. “The FuseBox™ is on the track to become a real product, to become something the outside guy can buy that’s fully equipped, ready to go,” says Moeller. “He just rolls it into a studio and starts taking pictures.”
The next generation FuseBox™ is on the drawing board. It could feature several rack-mounted Xserves, Bluetooth and an Airport Extreme network. The second version of DFStudio™ is being beta tested and will feature support for “flash-scanned” contact sheets. Photographers usually store mountains of contact sheets. DigitalFusion is ready to shoot each sheet with a 35mm digital camera, then dump the data into DFStudio™, where it can be organized and archived.
In the coming years, photographers and printmakers may be able to open up their own shop based on the DigitalFusion formula. “We now have the digital workflow solution,” says Milstein. “We get questions like ‘Hey, we’d like you guys to open up in San Francisco, New York and Chicago.’ The professional photo market is dying for this.”
