Digitizing the Moldy Oldies

Over the years I've accumulated boxes and boxes of images, film, video, etc. of our family, trips, projects, photo shoots and such. I've been a professional photographer at several times, and also done a number of free projects such as Vancouver's Sea Festival over the years.

Since I've been in the computer industry for much of that time I've expected that "one day" I'd get it all digitized so that I had "instant" access to it all for such things as weddings and funerals and other family gatherings.

Well, last week my mother passed away (expected, but...) and this week I've been doing a lot of what I'd promised myself to get done far earlier than this; but never actually got around to.

There have been all manner of reasons for not doing this huge task in the past. The time involved is the largest, but the sheer amount of disk space this would take is another.

The time never seemed to materialize but today the disk space is simply not an issue. I have almost 2 Terabytes of mirrored disk on my workstation alone, and over 6 Terabytes (of my own - plus lots more from client systems) on my local network; again, all mirrored or RAID 5, so the total separate disk is in excess of 12 Terabytes. In fact I have a spare Terabyte drive sitting on my desk, and it's been there for over a month.

So... it's time to do this job up right, and here's how I'm doing it.

Digitizing stills involves doing one of 3 different things: copying photos (can't find original negatives or they came from someone else), digitizing original negatives, or digitizing slides.

The objectives I set for myself is to get as good a version as i can of as many images as possible as quickly as possible, then go back and re-do the ones that I need higher resolution of for special purposes. This is a speed vs quality vs cost trade off. I could hand the problem to one of the many businesses that do this sort of thing, but they'd charge a huge amount for doing the work, and probably take far longer than the task is really worth for many of the images. Doing it myself I can make decisions on each page of negatives and each slide (easier to see what is on a slide than a negative, and if you do any piece of negative film, it's easier to do all images on it than to be selective)

I have negatives, including 35mm and some larger format sizes - all the way up to 1/2 plate size (about 4 3/4" x 6 1/2") and some strange formats including "instamatic" (square frame, slightly wider than typical 35mm) and 1/2 frame (from a Petri mini camera) as well as several types of video and movie film. This is not going to be an easy task, and I have to do some of it in the 2 weeks leading up to mom's funeral. 

The first thing I did was purchase a little box from the local Staples store that I though might make things go quickly, if not 100% in terms of quality. This "Film & Slide Converter" (ITNS-301) from Innovative Technology, a company that makes all manner of "digital retro" equipment it seems, is essentially a small 5 megapixel camera with a film or slide holder and built-in light source and image viewer. It did a passable job of turning negatives and some selected slides of mom into digital images just in the 1 1/2 hour ferry ride over to Vancouver Island last weekend as my son, Michael, and I went to say goodbye to her. It helped to pass the time, and it has provided numerous images that the rest of the family are sharing now, with the expectation of doing up a slide show and prints.

The work went fast with Michael pulling the individual negative strips from the Patterson negative file pages (about 1/2 the family negatives are in this system - from the days of my professional work) and handing them to me while I worked the little unit. My 4 Gig spare SD card from my Nikon D90 fit into unit's card slot and provided lots of space for it to save images to. The 301 uses the standard naming convention and put its images in its own sub-directory on the chip, not interfering with those of the camera. Each image is about one megabyte in JPG format (no choice of format and no options for quality, but hey, it's fast and easy)

The unit ran from the power it pulled off my laptop via the USB port. It comes with a 110 volt adapter too, but the ferry only provided me one plugin, and the laptop needs power all the time as its battery is all but dead.

We did about 300 images in the time we had. Not too shabby. The unit does a real-time conversion and color rendition of negatives onto the little screen, so you can easily see the content. Much easier than trying to view the negatives directly. I had a bit of problem getting the unit to power up, but it turns out it needs to be connected to the power for a minute or two before you push the power switch. This may be due to the limited amount of power it can draw from a USB port.

Once the negatives were done, I changed the unit to doing slides. There is a separate slide holder that takes 4 slides at a time. You load it and push it to a detent position inside the unit that lines the first slide up with the camera. Push the "shutter" button, then push the "save" button, and move to the next slide. This takes only a few seconds per image. Most of the time is spent re-loading the slide holder (same thing with the negative holder which takes up to 6 negatives). 

After we got to my brother's place in Parksville, I set the unit up again and did some more of the negatives - about another 500. At that time I found that the "roll film" adaptor actually was faster than putting the negatives into the holder strip. This worked for any strip that was longer than 2 frames. As most cut strips of film are 4 or 6 frames, this was fine. Only the "extras" at the end of a roll (I tend to get 38 shots on a 36 exposure roll) needed special handling.

What the ITNS-301 didn't do is provide the quality needed to do some of the crops and blow-ups that I need to do for portraits and such. It seems that there are few images of our mother on her own - mostly she is in there with other people.

For that job I've picked up a used HP Scanjet 4010 unit. I'd hoped to get a 4050 but have not found one yet. The difference is in how many slides can be done at once. The 4010 will do 5 and the 4050 will do 24 (you can load the whole platten up on it instead of just down the center)

I've had an Epson scanner hooked into my system for a number of years now. It has a film and slide adapter that will do some fairly large formats, with masks for single images from film and slides. The problem is, it's getting old and the images I'm getting from it are not good enough for the work I'm needing them for. It is also slow to load and scan as it only does one image at a time.

The HP Scanjet has a light source down the middle of its top cover, with film and slide-holder to do a number at once. The major problem is that I can't get it to work with the SANE scanner function on my Linux system - so had to connect it to my Windows XP laptop. It turns out it will also run under VMWare's Workstation virtual system, also running XP "in a box" on the Linux system as the USB pass-thru function of VMWare works just fine.

No matter, the unit will digitize into the network drive to my work station in any case, so having it run into a Windoze box is not that much of an issue.

It took a bit of fiddling to figure out just what its settings for film really mean. It does "300 ppi" with 400% expansion as its default. Me, figuring that this meant the scan was pretty low quality (a 35mm film image has roughly the equivalent of  12-20 Megapixel resolution, depending on the film and things like lens and camera movement) used the controls to boost to the "native" resolution of the scanner: 9600 ppi.

Ooops - the scanner said my system didn't have enough memory for the 1.7Gigabyte image. Hmmm... maybe things are not as they seem and HP really does know what they're doing. OK use the default.

This resulted in files in the 12-20 Megabyte range (compressed TIF) which is about what I'd expect from my 12 Megapixel camera, so we're in the right range. The results are excellent too. The only problem I have is that each scan takes a minute or two - not very fast when you have thousands to do. It also takes almost a minute to load each set of negatives, and the holder is not designed well, leading to high chance that finger prints will end up on the negatives. I'm cleaning them of dust as I go - they're pretty clean having lived in glassine pages all their lives - but finger prints are tough to remove. 

All in all, having the little ITNS-301 has meant getting a lot done fast - and slimmed down the number of times I've had to go to the full, high-res scanner.

I'll write more about this in a future article. Right now I have to attend an interment.

richard