– Senior Manager of Technical Support, Andrew H. AP changed to some Australian frequency to stop the interference. Howard recalls that during NFL’s “smoke test” on Saturday they discovered that AP was using the same frequency as the blimps and AP knocked out their video feed. I know there were 6 wireless links using BreezeCOM technology (early 802.11), and the signals were bounced off repeaters from a light ring above the stadium. I recall two photo editors assigned to the four fixed photographers, each editor covering two photographers. The crate held a battery (UPS), a BreezeCOM wireless link, and radio gear for voice communication between the laptop operator and an assigned photo editor in the trailer. This was a first for AP to have wireless transmission from the field.Įach photographer in the seats had a “laptop operator” sitting next to them with a Mac laptop zip-tied to an upside-down milk crate. Their trip was relatively immediate because it was wireless and no runners were needed (other than a camera swap of course). seated in endzone) took a very different trip to the trailer. The photos from the fixed-position photographers (e.g. Good enough for the newspaper rag apparently. These were definitely “digital quality” which had a bad reputation back then. But you have to get it right, and this would eliminate the chance of any NC2000e photo slipping into the system claiming to be “film” quality. Howard wasn’t upset that I called it the Elway Release (even though he was rooting for Green Bay), it was the last minute changes. Project Manager Howard Gros was not too happy to have to install the Elway Release on all of the computers in the trailer, and especially the laptops that were ready to leave for the stadium seats and end-zone to accompany the fixed-position photographers. So I jokingly called it the “Elway Release” because I was rooting for Denver. Jim proceeded to test this build, but I had to give it a new version number and I was at 0.99. It was an easy-enough fix (what us nerds call a “one-liner”), so I agreed and made a new build in the trailer on my laptop. Story continues after photo, Photo © 1998 Dennis Walker But since AP’s Super Bowl coverage was all digital by then, Jim asked me to just “rubber stamp” every photo that PM processed with this IPTC field indicating a digital source. I frankly think it was a “be prepared” warning to AP’s members (newspapers) because the images from the 1.3 MP NC2000e camera were a bit low resolution, especially when the editors did a tight crop. Back then it was important for AP to include the words “DIGITAL PHOTO” in some IPTC field (I can’t remember which one) if the photo was taken by a digital camera versus film. Making a new build of PM on game day sounded crazy to me, but Jim explained why it wasn’t such a big deal, and that he had faith in me. Normally everything is all setup and locked down by Saturday, and Sunday is to just get the job done. I laughed at him because this is definitely not standard protocol. So I was a bit surprised when Jim Dietz, my technology contact at AP, asked me to make just one last minute change to PM. AP was willing to give Photo Mechanic its first real exercise to cover this big game even though PM wasn’t for sale quite yet. Perfect! This was a big day for me and my fledgling company, Camera Bits (which was just me doing business as). Last minute preparations were underway for coverage of Super Bowl XXXII between the Green Bay Packers and the Denver Broncos – Favre vs Elway. It was Sunday morning January 25th, 1998, and I was in The Associated Press’ trailer in the parking lot at Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego. Hopefully the speed of Photo Mechanic 6 in other areas makes up for this.Update: Flash Anniversary Sale on Photo Mechanic is on now! We’d mentioned adding FB to our Uploader feature in the marketing for the new version, so we hope this didn’t cause too much trouble for folks. In the meantime, did you know you can drag right from Photo Mechanic to a browser window? This requires already having Facebook open in your browser, but it’s still pretty fast. We all know how mercurial Facebook can be, so we just have to chalk it up to the whims of the big blue f. Oops! Even apps like Lightroom Classic CC can no longer post directly to FB. Unfortunately, between the time that we tested and finished the feature and the time we launched Photo Mechanic 6, Facebook went and disabled the ability to directly upload from all desktop applications entirely. We’d wanted to provide this feature for a while, so it was completed early on in the process. Isn’t this just the way? We worked hard for ages on new features for Photo Mechanic 6 like the built-in Facebook uploader.
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