Hacker News Reader

Comment by interestica | Hacker News Reader

For those in the Toronto-Hamilton-Montreal corridor, I've been running everpixels.ca for a bit as a side thing (though it's kinda on pause). It's primarily focused on photo digitization for families - but I've also done a ton of tape media. I can help any local HNers that need access to hardware. (Or just some info/direction)

Technology Connections (YouTube) does some good coverage of capturing/converting analogue video - hardware choices make huge difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC5Zr3NC2PY

There's clearly a need/desire for this kind of stuff (though it's sad how many times I'm approached as someone is near death). Don't wait til that moment to save the stories and memories that you have.

I've been back and forth about how much I want to dive in with this project. If anyone is local and really interested in some of it, drop me a line. There are some cool avenues I've touched - seniors, alzheimers, story capture.

View on HN

Do you scan 35mm slides? It turns out a family member needs this service. If you unpause it, my email is in profile.

Unpause? Is this a secret I don't know about?

TBH 35mm slides are the biggest pain in terms of time-vs-return out of any format. It's a painstaking process and I could not justify the $5000+ cost for a dedicated high-speed machine. But if the end output is ~300dpi for TV display, etc I may be able to help with a fast option.

> Unpause? Is this a secret I don't know about?

I think this was in reference to your comment that your side gig that provides this service is “kinda on pause though”. :-)

Ha thanks! I couldn't find the email in profile and I was wondering if there was some sort of console trick to make it show up....

Do you, or anyone else here, have any experience with using a slide duplicator on a macro lens with a digital camera, DSLR, for 25 mm slide duplication?

Especially I wonder if you've got advice on picking a useful level of resolution when digitizing slides. I seem to recall that a 35 mm slide contains around 10 megapixel data. If correct, is it at all useful to digitize at a higher resolution for general purpose usage, eg display on a computer or showing slideshows with a digital projector.

Otherwise I'm currently leaning towards digitizing at 4K resolution as a default, given that 4K is 8.2 Mpx.

How does dynamic range come into play? I seem to recall that slide film has a high dynamic range in general.

I've got a couple of film scanners (like for example Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED) but for quick results that should be enough for most people to archive a couple of hundret of slides I tend to use Canon 8800F [0]. I wonder if you can buy a scanner today with similar capabilities.

[0] https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/support/de...

I recently bought an Epson Perfection V600 based on online reviews and I've been pretty happy with it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002OEBMRU/

(I used to have a CanoScan 8800F.)

We were looking at the V600. How quickly can you go through slides with it once you get rolling (e.g. slides/hr)?

Thanks for posting that YouTube link.

I started down the path of doing this project for a family member after we found an old VCR and I had been playing with a few of the cheap HDMI capture cards.

I've had a world of hurt with video/audio sync issues and the recommendation he uses to grab the component to HDMI device led me down a path of searches where I finally found that my V4L2 capture with ffmpeg was using a different clock than the ALSA sound capture device. Using ffmpeg's -ts flag I have set V4L2 use 'abs', the same as ALSA.

I haven't done any extended length captures yet so I'm not positive I won't have drift, but on the shorter length clips it has worked flawlessly.

Anyway, thanks again for the link. His advice led me down a path that finally seems to have made the capture aspect of this project work!

It's almost never right to throw away the originals. I definitely do not think it should have been done in this case. Too high value.

Any tips for digitizing old Sony Video 8 camcorder tapes? I have a whole stash but when I looked into paying to digitize them it was shockingly expensive.

There are a couple '8mm' tape formats. My suggestion: Put a saved search on kijiji (or craiglist or whatever) for a DIGITAL8 camcorder. You'll find one for under $100. These cams are backward compatible to the 8mm and hi-8 analogue formats. They will play those analog tapes and output digital stream (DV) over Firewire. The harder part is now getting a computer that will take the firewire (you may have an old laptop -- macs had them until like 08 -- or get a firewire-to-usb2.0 cable or thunderbolt to firewire adapter on amazon). Modern imovie/premiere will gladly accept the DV stream/control the camcorder.

You can buy firewire pcie cards on Amazon for $20 that work with windows 10, then use win dv to capture, works great with d8 and dv.

I've heard of d8 camcorders that are v8 compatible but never seen. V8 and hi8 I just use rca.

Blackmagic digital studio capture cards work very well.

No matter what you do all these old formats never look good imo.

I concur, it's the best solution for analog Video-8 tapes. Buy a Digital-8 camcorder with DV. You may get a better picture with some kind of bespoke high-end rig with rebuilt camcorders and studio digitizing equipment, but for mere mortals, it's the best solution.

I can only add, that for me it worked best to capture the tape all in one go, and not try to start-stop the camera with DV control. Be it deteriorating tapes or whatever the cause, but the capture software had problems resuming the camera if it was ever paused.

Agreed - just letting the tape run for the duration is best. It's a shame that it has to be done in real-time. I don't see why (from a technical standpoint) the process couldn't be done at a faster speed. It's just that the hardware isn't made for it and there's not market. The analog-to-digital processing could be done by a faster chip or even software at this point. Something akin to the high-speed dubbing of analogue audio cassettes.

And it leads to that other challenge worth mentioning: Even though DV is technically a lossy format, it results in really large files.

Funny... I've been contemplating a SLOWER than realtime tape digitizer. Something that would make multiple passes and reconstruct the magnetic domains on the tape with very high certainty.

Yep. Especially a hacked VCR could be made to do this. If one taps the data from the spinning head directly, instead of relying on the VCR to process it into a proper composite signal, I'd say it's even realistic to do this.

Just run the tape at half or a quarter of the speed. The spinning helical head should still produce data. Then it's a matter of assembling it in software.

> The harder part is now getting a computer that will take the firewire (you may have an old laptop -- macs had them until like 08 -- or get a firewire-to-usb2.0 cable or thunderbolt to firewire adapter on amazon)

Modern computers with thunderbolt will take a converted fw stream without any problem. I am using several old fw400 sound interfaces with a string of adapters without any problems, on both mac and pc. The mac laptop has tb built in, for my workstation pc (Windows 10) I bought a PCI Express io adapter for 30 euro. Works perfectly.

Sound interface -> fw400 -> fw800 -> tb -> tb3 -> mac|pc

YMMV with video, but I can't think of why it wouldn't work. I haven't tried a converter.

Thanks so much for the advice! I'll keep my eyes posted for a camcorder.

Would you be comfortable sharing what kind of hardware you're using?

Sure. For which aspect? Video or Photo? It's largely dependent on the task - you kinda have to balance speed/quality/postproductionrequirements.

For high-speed photos a popular choice is the Kodak Ps50/ps80 -but it was discontinued like 2 years ago so you have to get it second hand. TBH, I've used the Epson FastFoto series for fast scans at 600dpi (useful when you have literally thousands you want to get through - a shoebox will hold 1500+ photos) and it has great quality if you set it up right (read: turn off any image post-processing and do manual correction). But beware of a few caveats: the rollers are garbage once they heat up and glossy photos will 'stretch'. You can mod the rollers (kinda). The rolling action also causes some static buildup (thus: dust) and there's no Digital ICE (image correction/enhancement) to remove it.

For video, check the youtube video above for one option. I've found that you can get really good results with a Digital8 camcorder with a good Digital/Analog converter. They existed in this weird sweet spot of the transition of analogue to digital. They often have RCA/SVideo connections out to Firewire (yes.) Use it as a pass-through for a really good VCR (which are getting harder and harder to find).

That's helpful, thank you. Do you do any 35mm slide scanning at all? If so, what do you use for that?

(Nevermind, I see this was answered elsewhere.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com