Dual Camera Workflow and Management

For those shooting with two cameras regularly, I am wondering how people are managing images efficiently from a dual camera workflow.

Please share your general workflow in regards to using two cameras during a shoot (preferably wedding work), how you manage shoot-order, importing, conglomerating, file naming and file order in an efficient manner.

Thanks for the contributions!

Tim's workflow resurfaced here recently and he goes into great detail on this.

For myself, I just manually set each of the cameras to have the same time. That's been good enough for me lately, though I hear there is software to do this. After the wedding I download the pictures into a folder and delete the non-keepers. Then I do a batch-rename in Irfanview (awesome free image viewer) on the remaining images. Irfanview has option to sort by time/date. So I end up with something like: Smith-001.jpg, Smith-002.jpg, etc and all the images are in order.

Works great for me.

~mp

Hey mp, Irfanview will let you sort by "shot time" and rename in the same order?

Also, I did not have luck finding this other thread you mentioned... can you point me to it? (remember any keywords?)

edit: I found that thread and got the idea of syncing via PC time, but still didn't see anything about importing images that may have the same names.

We regularly use 4/5 camera bodies...

1. Set the time on every camera to match, by plugging each of them directly into laptop on the morning of a wedding, and using EOS Utility to set time to always match PC. This ensures cameras are usually within a couple of seconds of each other through the day.

2. Use BreezeSys Downloader Pro to download cards from cameras - you can set it to recognise embedded serial numbers and rename on the fly based on this without any user intervention - we have it set so it adds a camera prefix to the filename (e.g. image 3251.CR2 from our first 5D becomes PC filename 5D1_3251.CR2). Beauty of doing this you can safely download everything into a single folder without fear of overwriting any files, yet you still can tell immediately from filename which camera was used for which shot.

3. Currently we then use Adobe Bridge to view the files and just sort according to date/time created.

Camera times shift slightly, so if we need to adjust or tweak camera times, we use BreezeSys BreezeBrowser to adjust file times.

Rob

amonline wrote in post #4156114
Hey mp, Irfanview will let you sort by "shot time" and rename in the same order?

Also, I did not have luck finding this other thread you mentioned... can you point me to it? (remember any keywords?)

Yes, with Irfanview you can sort by date, and then it renames them in that order. It uses the date of the file though, not the date in the EXIF.

Tim's Wedding Workflow

~mp

Thanks Rob. Since I'm not worried which camera a shot came from, can you have BSDP rename all files according to "shoot time" so they are in order rather than having a prefix that will still break up the sorting by prefix/camera? Alternatively, do you know if LR will rename by "shoot time"?

You can do it in DPP. Just use the rename tool, sorting by shooting date/time. Simple really. I could care less which camera snapped which pic either, so I just rename them all YYYY-MM-DD-XXXX.JPG (or CR2, CRW, what-have-you).

amonline wrote in post #4156225
Thanks Rob. Since I'm not worried which camera a shot came from, can you have BSDP rename all files according to "shoot time" so they are in order rather than having a prefix that will still break up the sorting by prefix/camera? Alternatively, do you know if LR will rename by "shoot time"?

Downloader Pro has a whole bunch of options for renaming, many include time but I haven't used them so not sure whether it can use shoot time - there is a time-limited trial version available (www.breezesys.com). LightRoom I don't know, we have it and plan to move to using it this winter, but have been too busy to sit down and study it in detail so far.

Rob

cdifoto wrote in post #4156249
You can do it in DPP. Just use the rename tool, sorting by shooting date/time. Simple really. I could care less which camera snapped which pic either, so I just rename them all YYYY-MM-DD-XXXX.JPG (or CR2, CRW, what-have-you).

Agreed there are many ways of using rename tools, but the real beauty of Downloader Pro is once you've set it up, you just stick a card in the reader and it automatically recognises what it should do to the filename - no user intervention needed, so no room for silly mistakes.

Rob

cdifoto wrote in post #4156249
You can do it in DPP.

DPP will also add the "_1" tag on the end of the file name if you download a file with the same number.

RobKirkwood wrote in post #4156269
Agreed there are many ways of using rename tools, but the real beauty of Downloader Pro is once you've set it up, you just stick a card in the reader and it automatically recognises what it should do to the filename - no user intervention needed, so no room for silly mistakes.

Rob

You have to pay for Downloader Pro though, right?

cdifoto wrote in post #4156249
You can do it in DPP. Just use the rename tool, sorting by shooting date/time. Simple really. I could care less which camera snapped which pic either, so I just rename them all YYYY-MM-DD-XXXX.JPG (or CR2, CRW, what-have-you).

That works perfectly! Thanks cdi!

No problem. Sometimes simple is best.

We make sure cameras are synched on the day, download to separate folders on the computer and hubby has written a batching script which looks at Exif of both the raw and jpg file, then sorts them based on time taken, and it renames them all. Its also fancy enough to put the raws in a different folder, but they all match up.

lil_miss wrote in post #4156749
We make sure cameras are synched on the day, download to separate folders on the computer and hubby has written a batching script which looks at Exif of both the raw and jpg file, then sorts them based on time taken, and it renames them all. Its also fancy enough to put the raws in a different folder, but they all match up.

Why put them in a separate folder in the first place? I don't understand that. I find it easier just to dump everything from a shoot into the same folder then rename all at once. No scripting or batching or complex software wizardry needed...