DiCentra in use
We have purchased commercial software for running our projected digital image competitions and this was brought into use for the second Clubworker Projected Image Competition this year. The software package comes well recommended having been adopted by L&CPU and several local clubs. The software company also have impeccable qualifications. The writers are long time club photographers and a professor and a former senior lecturer in computer science at London universities. Their other line of business is in colour management for which they run courses. The software emblem is the Bleeding Heart flower, proper name Dicentra.
DiCentra has two great advantages over the system we have used since we started to run projected digital image competitions. Firstly, only one computer is required to project the images and score the competition. Secondly, and less obvious to other than the person running the competition, is that it does the majority of the work needed to compile, check, alter if necessary, arrange in a suitable projection order and list for scoring the images to be judged.
For its introduction at our PDI competition on 8th December not all of the second advantage could be utilised as there was not time to issue members with revised guidelines for the submission of images. Even though I had to rename and renumber every one of the 109 images, preparation took me very much less time that had been required previously. In future you will be asked to submit your image set in a directory folder titled with your name and with each image named with your priority number and the image title. Images will still need to be JPEGs in SRGB colour space. Image size is independent of the software used and set by the digital projector, so this remains unchanged also. Assuming that members can get that correct, your image title will be overlayed on your image when projected for judging and your name from the folder title used in the scoresheet and on your image if you win.
Images can be ingested by the competition software either as a complete set or incrementally as they are received. When images are entered, the software automatically checks the image for compliance with the competition rules and alters those that do not, but can be corrected, rejecting the remainder. (It does also have a ‘hard line’ mode of rejecting any image not completely fitting the rules!) This is an enormous time saver. Previously it was necessary to load every image into Photoshop to check size and colourspace and either correct those that faulted myself or return them to their author for correction. One problem did arise with our first competition. One member unintentionally supplied images by email in 640x480 size. The previously necessary manual check would have revealed this, but DiCentra accepted them.
When the submission deadline is reached and all images entered into the program, DiCentra sorts the images into a random show order and renumbers them as appropriate - big time saver number two. A blank score sheet for backup manual scoring is then available and the images in show order but with any author identification removed can be exported to CD for the competition judge to preview - which was exactly what was required in this case. With the previous system, all the image titles had to be re-typed into a spreadsheet, then sent to Barry for sorting into a randomised projection order, then returned to me and all the images re-numbered to match the projection order. Fortunately no previous judge had requested a preview of the images as arranging that manually would have entailed more work.
It would be nice to report that all went like clockwork, but those present at the competition already know of my big clanger! In order to get the preview CD to the judge in reasonable time, the competition had to be set up soon after the submission date. In my final go after several practice runs, I failed to notice that DiCentra had defaulted to scores out of 10 not the 20 we traditionally use. It is a feature of the program that the maximum score cannot be altered without re-randomising the image show order, so on the competition night the judge had to mentally halve his pre-prepared marks and Barry had to double them all again before publication on our website. There was however one benefit of my mistake - it gave the opportunity for Tony Redford to be told when he returned from his engagement at Nantwich that the judge had given one of his images 7½!
In fact there were more difficulties behind the scenes than the wrongly set mark range. The projector screen resolution is also set before randomising. Now my computer monitor does not have as high a resolution, so only the centre of the image is displayed and any realistic practice run is not feasible. My ‘caravan computer’ (a laptop) does have the necessary resolution but DiCentra operates from the numeric pad and it took me a while to organise an external keyboard before I could start to practice meaningfully and then to notice my mark clanger and the small size of one image set. However my practice was successful and I remembered all the keypress actions and nothing else went wrong on the night!
One very helpful aspect of the software I have not yet mentioned, because it worked so well, is that the competition can be set up on any convenient computer and exported to the actual machine to be used for the competition. The license conditions only limit the software use to within the society, not to any set number of machines.
Overall the system was well received at its introduction to NCPS and it so much simplifies and reduces the organiser’s work that we will continue to employ it for our digitally projected image club competitions. It will not replace Peter Redford’s Annual Exhibition system for the interclub competitions which is much better and gives us and our visitors a unique competition experience.
Members will be able to enter digitally projected images in our forthcoming Annual Exhibition and DiCentra is superbly suited to controlling a rolling projection of these and to running other types of competition than just our Clubworker contests, so we may well see its use in NCPS extended.