In addition to other photographic exploits, I do a fair amount of motorsports event photography, utilizing a concession trailer (see pic) in which we download, sort, show and sell photos from that day's event.
I have ALWAYS shot motorsports events in JPG format, because I was certain that the RAW workflow would simply be too slow. I also almost always shoot everything in landscape format at these kinds of events, because it fits the monitor aspect ratio better, and also because it eliminates any image rotating steps. But about a month ago I shot an event where we shot almost everything in portrait orientation, because the competitors filled the frame much better in vertical orientation.
The resulting slowdown in the workflow at the trailer was brutal. With a few thousand large/fine JPG files to download and sort, we were way too slow to get photos in front of the customers, and surely lost a number of sales because of it.
This past Sunday I shot another similar event (same discipline, different venue). But this time I had a plan to shoot RAW + basic JPG (Nikon). Earlier in the week I had modified my custom-written file download utility to download the small JPG files to our server, but leave any corresponding .NEF files on the card. My download utility renames each JPG file as it downloads it to the hard drive, and I added some code to the program to ALSO rename each corresponding .NEF file with an identical filename (excepting the .NEF extension, of course), but to leave the RAW files on the cards.
After downloading the JPG's, which obviously went much faster than usual, we found that we were able to rotate and sort those smaller JPG files astoundingly quickly. This got the images in front of the customers in a fraction of the time.
The second part of our process involved downloading the (now renamed) RAW files to our "Printing station" PC. We chose to dump all of the RAW files into a single directory; this way, regardless of the location of the image files being ordered, we were able to quickly find those image files (in that single directory with all the RAW files) when it came time to process them. Obviously, downloading the RAW files took much longer than the tiny JPG files, but it was of little consequence, as the RAW files were all downloaded by the time the JPG's were rotated and sorted.
As you can imagine, the fact that the master image files were in RAW format gave us some flexibility. At Sunday's event, one of the shooting locations was a heavily wooded area, and the white balance would have been a nightmare with JPG files. I was also able to brighten the shadow areas with much better results than normal. We used Lightroom 2.2 to edit and print, and to convert files to JPG format for CD orders.
One drawback was the amount of time it took to convert a number of RAW files to JPG. My printing station PC is not particularly fast; it's a Windows XP 32-bit OS with just 2GB of RAM, and only one hard drive...obviously not a Lightroom screamer. Nonetheless, we made out okay, with just a couple minutes added to the processing time for each CD order.
All in all, I'm quite happy with the results of the experiment.
Questions/feedback welcome!
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