Have scanner, will travel

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1990 by Liz Horton

New York City-News waits for no man-or production schedule, as any newsmagazine can attest. But Time magazine has foregone some of the frustration of waiting for images to dribble in over telephone wires by installing a new multitasking picture desk and remote electronic imaging system.

Designed and configured by National Digital Corporation, the system delivers high-resolution photos when even the Concorde can't meet the film deadline, provides high-quality wire photos, and even lets editors preview agency photos before agreeing to buy. But perhaps most important, it increases control over what goes into the magazine: Instead of a person in the field choosing only a few photos to transmit in high resolution via the Crosfield system (Time's previous method), that person can transmit as many as 16 lowres images; then the New York City picture editor can say, "Okay, I want this, this and this transmitted in high resolution."

The system consists of a remote unit and a New York City-based Photo Management Workstation.

The remote unit includes a Nikon LS-3500 35-mm scanner, a Compaq laptop and five-inch monitor, and a Telebit Trailblazer modem-all of it so portable it can be hand-carried on a plane. The equipment can be used to scan, view and transmit images at any of three resolutions anywhere in the world where there are telephone lines. Compressed data is sent over phone lines at 19,200 bps; a preview photo (video quality, at 500 x 400 pixels) arrives in one minute, a medium-resolution photo (wire photo quality, at 2,000 x 1,400 pixels) in six to seven minutes and a production mode photo (at 3,000 x 2,000 pixels) in 11 minutes.

In comparison, movement of wire photos seems sluggish, limited by the wire service's transmission speed. Neverless, the workstation's multitasking capability has cut reception time in half and increased the quality o the images.

For a wire photo to arrive at the picture workstation in the New York City office, for instance, takes 21 minutes-seven for each CMY color. Once separations are aligned on-screen, it takes another 10 minutes to write the photo to tape. If not for the multitasking capabilities of this system, a single wire photo would clog the system for over 30 minutes. Now, however, the photo is dumped into a second system in just two minutes. The second system writes it to the tape drive, freeing up the receiver. Once on tape, the photos go to a Crosfield system. High-res or low-res versions can also be sent in TIFF file format to art directors' Macs for placement.

Time's system has won over at least one wire photo skeptic-Phil Jache, deputy picture editor of Sports Illustrated. Because of poor quality, SI rarely used wire photo shots from paper ngatives. But getting a print from the wire service could slow things down 24 hours-impossible on a deadline. The cover of the February 19 issue was an exception, however: The Mike Tyson knockout, as well as an inside spread, was a wire photo taken in over the new Time system. "We couldn't have gotten that picture except by paper output," says Jache, referring to the traditional black-and-white paper negatives that are output by wire photo machines, which lack resolution and align poorly. SI is now considering buying its own.

Time's initial equipment, first tested in December at the Malta summit, was on loan from NDC. The real system was installed in mid-March, and now, says traffic manager Kevin McVea, "We're really going to start humming. We're sending it on the road." -L. Hortion