dance

Putting Dance Competition Photos Online

After each dance competition, we process our photos with a watermark and upload them to our dedicated dance website: tmmdance.com

Web Procellator Script

For the Synergy 2009 upload in April of 2009, Tim wrote our second version of our "Web Procellator" for Adobe Photoshop.  To run the script, follow these steps.

If the script is not installed on your computer:

  1. Close Photoshop
  2. Download the script here (Updated May 11, 2009)
  3. Unzip it into C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\Presets\Scripts\

To run the script:

  1. Open Photoshop
  2. Go to FILE | SCRIPTS | WEB_PROCELLATOR2
  3. You will be prompted to select a source folder.  Choose the Photo Library from the competition
  4. You will be prompted to select a destination folder.  Create and select a new folder called "Web Photos" in the project folder
  5. Stand back and wait.  It will take a while for massive amounts of photos.

img_50_4698

Watermark

Larger preview images on the website are all embedded with a watermark, as seen on the right. This helps deter people from stealing images, and if they do anyways, it works as advertising wherever they show it. *cough* facebook *cough*

Progress Bar

For the Synergy 2009 upload in April 2009, we created a progress bar function that we can call on in the future to track the progress of the upload:

progress-bar

To call the function, simply add the code:

<?php echo get_upload_progress("synergy_dance_2009",371); ?>

Where synergy_dance_2009 is the folder name for the competition, and 371 is the total number of album folders that are being uploaded.

There is also an option to sign up your email, which simply logs their name and email to a text file found at http://www.tmmdance.com/scripts/cyan/emails.txt. When the upload is complete, check this log and send a BCC email to all people who signed up. The default email should read as follows:

Thank you for your patience. All of the photos we took at DANCE COMPETITION NAME are now available online for previewing at:

  • INCLUDE LINK TO GALLERY HERE

Keep in mind that we also took photos and video of every performance, including all the final showdown performances, and that videos are also available on Blu-ray.

Contact us to place an order today!

John Romein Techno Monkey Media www.lifetimeheritagefilms.com 604-961-4861

When the number of folders existing in that folder reaches the number that was input for the total number, the progress bar will disappear and will display a short message with a link, saying the photos are online!

Upload Time

The bottleneck for the upload of photos is our limited upload speed from our residence. This forces the upload to take approximately 20-24 hours for 20,000 photos.

If we were to incorporate the processing of the photos and have an internet connection on-site, we would have the ability to stream the photos to the web while we are still on location at the competition, and all the photos would be online by the time we packed up and went home.

2009 Dance Survey Questions

Half way through our dance productions in June of 2008, we came up with the idea to include papers with the web address to a survey about how we can better improve our dance coverage.  We didn't go ahead with it, but we tabled it to give it a shot in 2009. Currently we're drafting the list of topics for questions below, that we might want to ask:

  1. Fullscreen vs widescreen
  2. Camera operator's ability to follow action (framing, zooming...)
  3. Cuts or fades
  4. Audio of music vs audience levels
  5. Graphics for Case covers and disc surfaces
  6. Scene Selection
  7. Cost of package
  8. Amount of recital per package
Feel free to add more to the list above.