Press - Photo Outtake Management

Scrounger Field Tested by The New York Times Convention Coverage

Quincy, MA, March 19, 2005 - Covering major events like the political conventions and managing remote bureaus is always a challenge for photo editors. Today's digital cameras speed up capturing images for publication, unfortunately the rest of the workflow has remained slow and arduous.

That has changed. The New York Times broke new ground at the 2004 Democratic and Republican conventions by implementing a remote digital camera workflow using Scrounger from MerlinOne, Inc. Based on the remote model used at the conventions, MerlinOne has added bureau support to its Scrounger digital photo outtake management system.

Scrounger provides an efficient way for photographers to file their digital "negatives" - either RAW camera files or JPEGs. Photos are easily edited in Scrounger and sent to production. Dynamic links make it easy to navigate between Scrounger outtakes, Trax assignment management system, and the Merlin picture desk. Scrounger contact sheets and thumbnails are automatically linked to the Trax assignment and the edited pictures sent to the Merlin picture desk.

David Frank, Deputy Director of Photography for The New York Times, decided to use a remote version of Scrounger at the convention sites. Once uploaded to Scrounger, convention photos were immediately viewed by photo editors in the home office. This kept convention photographers on the scene covering the news, delivering late-breaking photos and getting new assignments without the cost and overhead of extra on-site staff.

Times photo editors created convention assignments using MerlinOne's Trax assignment management system. Assignments were made on location at the convention and at the New York City office through a simple web browser interface. Photographers were assigned using Trax scheduling feature.

"We were working off three PCs (for the remote Scrounger) - two input stations and the server, which doubled as a backup input station. Everything got generated at the remote site and we simply browsed and edited the thumbnail pages from here in the office. This way we only moved the large, hi-res files once it had been selected and output to production," Frank explains after the Democratic Convention.

Photographers quickly uploaded their digital camera files into a remote Scrounger at the New York Times' work area in the conventions, entering the assignment number generated by Trax. To supplement caption details, photographers were encouraged to use the digital camera's voice annotation feature, which is playable in Scrounger.

Editors in New York were alerted in the Trax assignment management system that an assignment was completed. They simply clicked on the assignment link in Trax to see the images in Scrounger. The link took the editors to HTML contact sheets with small and large thumbnails to make selections.

Editors selected the images they needed and downloaded them directly from the conventions to their Merlin picture desk system in New York for production. The entire shoot remained online and accessible for additional editing as the story evolved. During overnight hours the outtakes were automatically transferred to the main Scrounger system in New York.

"The system has worked beautifully. Not only is it saving us money on staffing, it gives us more control here in the office. If a given story changes at the last minute or we decide that we want a slightly different moment, it's only a few mouse clicks away in Scrounger - versus the old traditional way of having to call your editor on site and have them stop whatever they are doing (usually editing live, current material also needed on deadline) to go digging back through a pile of finished disks or file folders on their computers to try to find an image that may or may not suit our needs."

About MerlinOne - MerlinOne, Inc. is a leading provider of digital asset management systems and electronic document discovery platforms. E-Sheets® is the foremost electronic tearsheets service. The Merlin picture desk management solution has over 140 major installations at corporations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Harvard University, Pfizer, Habitat for Humanity and The White House. MerlinOne technology helps companies manage photos, text, graphics, PDFs, multimedia and e-discovery material.

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