This week was my first week of classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art. I am now in what they are calling the MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media program. Earlier this week we all met to talk about logistics and get our assigned studios and workstations.

In the end I decided that I didn’t really need my own studio space, as there weren’t quite enough for everyone to have their own, and I have plenty of room at home for that type of thing.

But I did grab a pretty nice desk area which I will be moving some things into early next week. This space is where I will be spending a lot of computer time so I have been thinking about what I would like to have on my desk, and how I will integrate my Aperture workflow.

For starters, since I will be moving around quite a bit ( Baltimore apartment, Brooklyn apartment, and campus ) I realized that I really need to focus on my laptop as my primary machine. This will be the center of it all and will be the machine I spend most of my time with.

On my laptop I will have my entire Aperture library. This consists of all of my images, but not the Masters. The Masters will sit in a number of locations for ease of access and redundant backup. Images that I shoot while on the road or in the field or whatever will get ingested into Aperture on the laptop and then eventually moved to a central storage location. If I run out of space on my laptop, they will temporarily live on a portable external drive. All of this will be backed up via Time Machine to another larger external, or duplicated by some other means until I am back in a place where I can easily migrate the files to their permanent location.

I like to keep my laptop pretty lean without adding on too much extra software or files. This way I always have plenty of space, and if something goes wrong I can easily recover.

On the laptop I plan to have the following: iLife and iWork, Aperture, Final Cut Studio, and Adobe CS3 Design Premium. I have a number of other utility apps, and of course I have Apple’s developer tools installed for the programming that I do.

At school I have access to some pretty heavy machines. These will be advantageous for doing audio or video work. They are all set up with video monitors, and recording devices depending on their purpose. None of the machines at school have Aperture however. I guess they just haven’t made that jump as of yet. So, the work I do on the school machines will have to be outside the realm of what I can do with Aperture.

This is pretty much only a logistics issue. On my desk I will have a calibrated Apple Cinema display that I will be attaching to my laptop. I can use this with Aperture to do fine editing of my images for print. I will be able to go direct from Aperture to the school’s printers over the network, or if I wish to use the wide format printers, I can export the file and take it up to their machine and make the print.

As for scanning I can easily work with the school’s scanners attached to one of their machines and transfer the scanned files back to my laptop, importing them into Aperture. I sort of think of the school’s machines as input and output devices, and my laptop as the hub for all of my work.

My laptop is plenty fast to handle some editing in Final Cut Studio, but for rendering purposes, I will want to export my project to a removable hard drive and do the tedious work on one of the school’s machines.

Back on my desk on campus I plan to have a large storage device such as a mirrored raid drive or a Drobo. This will serve simply as a way for me to store the files that I am working on currently. As I plan to involve a good deal of video and audio in many of my projects I will need a decent amount of space.

So far, Back To My Mac has proven very useful. I have a machine setup at home that is always on, and I can use Back To My Mac to retrieve files, access backups, and run scripts. I can even use it to access the files on my Airport Extreme, though it’s sort of a two step process!

I am really excited to have access to all of these resources, but I have to admit I am a little concerned about this issue of making sure that everything eventually winds up organized and in a central location. So, I would love to hear any ideas to that may help me with this basic media management problem. I think I have the beginnings of a handle on it, but I would love some input. If you have any cool tips or tricks that you think I should consider, please tell me in the comments!