Flex Color 4.8.9 Crashing When Loading Images

[Nebbit]

I've been using Flexcolor for some time on my home PC. Typically I scan .FFF format at an hourly rate and edit the raw files at home to save money. Suddenly the software keeps hanging when I attempt to load my .FFF image files. It's become almost impossible to work now. There appears to be no consistency, or trick to making it work. Sometimes it loads and more often it doesn't.

Unfortunately, this is a legacy software as Hasselblad has discontinued the Flextight series and the software is no longer available for download form their website.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled several times from the only download portal I could find for the software. I would try downloading an older version, however I cannot seem to find one out there in the tubes of the internet.

Wondering if anyone else has experienced this issue and if there are any work arounds.

Thanks!

 

[BrianShaw]

Are you running it on the operating system for which the software was designed or a newer OS? I have no experience with that software but had many problems trying to run old software. Unfortunately old software often goes very unstable, if it runs at all, on newer hardware and operating systems. I kept a Windows 8 machine running for as long as humanly possible just to run one piece of old software. Then I had to update everything. It was a costly transition and in the end it worked out. But what a pain in the neck!

 

[grat]

Have you tried running it under compatibility mode?

 

[Lachlan Young]

Easiest work-around is to rename .fff to .tif. You then get what a .fff file really is, an unadjusted, uninverted .tif file. Much easier to get good results from the tiff file than from the .fff file.

Better yet, scan to .tif at the origination stage and do all your inversion etc in Photoshop.

 

[shutterfinger]

Install a second hard drive or partition your existing hard drive if large enough and install Windows 7 on the second drive/new partition then install the Flex Color software and scan from Windows 7.
https://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=windows+7&_sacat=0
When doing this Windows 7 boot loader loads on start up, to switch to Windows 10 boot loader download the Win 10 installation media from Microsoft website then run it in install in place option which keeps current software, settings, and personal files.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

 

[grat]

Install a second hard drive or partition your existing hard drive if large enough and install Windows 7 on the second drive/new partition then install the Flex Color software and scan from Windows 7.
https://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=windows+7&_sacat=0
When doing this Windows 7 boot loader loads on start up, to switch to Windows 10 boot loader download the Win 10 installation media from Microsoft website then run it in install in place option which keeps current software, settings, and personal files.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Would be easier to set up windows 7 in hypervisor. Or run in compatibility mode.

Edit: Nuts, forgot Hyper-V isn't available on Windows 10 personal. Use Virtualbox instead.

 

[shutterfinger]

Compatibility mode does not work that well in my experience. Silverfast 6Ai will not run on Win 10, it will run on Win 7. I'm not sure it would run in Virtualbox or Hypervisor either.
Dual booting Win 10 Pro and Win 7 Pro on separate drives the Win 7 drive folders can be accessed from Win 10 but Win 10 folders cannot be accessed from Win 7.

 

[Nebbit]

Easiest work-around is to rename .fff to .tif. You then get what a .fff file really is, an unadjusted, uninverted .tif file. Much easier to get good results from the tiff file than from the .fff file.

Better yet, scan to .tif at the origination stage and do all your inversion etc in Photoshop.

Didn't realize you could just rename them without corrupting them.

As I mentioned earlier, I scan in 3f to reduce the amount of time spent adjusting prior to saving as tiff. I like to have the most info possible in the file before post

 

[Nebbit]

Have you tried running it under compatibility mode?

So far this seems to be working. I wasn't aware of this feature as a long time mac user. Thanks!

 

[Lachlan Young]

Didn't realize you could just rename them without corrupting them.

As I mentioned earlier, I scan in 3f to reduce the amount of time spent adjusting prior to saving as tiff. I like to have the most info possible in the file before post

Renaming works well - I use it routinely to deal with files that have been mangled by Flexcolor. For whatever reason, Flexcolor's understanding of colour inversion isn't great, but the underlying scan is very good, so all you need is to get an uninverted, unclipped 16-bit scan with the USM switched off (all easy to do) into Photoshop and remove the colour mask etc (again, straightforward to do, if wordy to describe), then invert the image etc. If you get this right (and it isn't difficult), then you can essentially scan without making frame to frame adjustments - and get vastly better finished files.

 

[grat]

Compatibility mode does not work that well in my experience. Silverfast 6Ai will not run on Win 10, it will run on Win 7. I'm not sure it would run in Virtualbox or Hypervisor either.

Compatibility mode has varied over the years-- the version under Windows 10 is actually quite good. The problems usually stem from more stringent default behavior with regard to memory or device drivers. Anything that works on Windows Vista or later, compatibility mode should allow you to run under Windows 10-- unless it's behavior is truly bizarre.

I admit it's non-trivial to do, but if it will run in Windows 7, it will run in Windows 7 under Virtualbox or Hyper-V. If you're trying to scan over USB, you'll need to ensure the add-on pack is installed under Virtualbox, and USB ports are allowed to function inside the VM. As I said-- not exactly for a computer novice, but it can be made to work is my experience. Then again, I've been doing virtualization since VMware came out in 1999.

 

[Lachlan Young]

@grat The Flextights are either SCSI-2 or Firewire (effectively just an onboard SCSI-to-Firewire converter).

 

[grat]

@grat The Flextights are either SCSI-2 or Firewire (effectively just an onboard SCSI-to-Firewire converter).

Was afraid of that-- so the software would run, but not so much the device.

Strictly speaking, it should be possible via PCI passthrough / DDA (direct device addressing), but Virtualbox dropped their (incomplete) implementation, Windows only implemented it in Hyper-V for Server 2016, and in theory, in later clients, but no one has apparently gotten it to work (note, they're trying to do PCIe graphics cards with direct memory access, so a SCSI adapter should be exponentially simpler). It could be done through a linux host running KVM and a modern EFI BIOS with good IOMMU support, but at that point, the only real benefit is that you can run Windows 7 in an isolated network environment, and the complexity becomes increasingly higher.

I'd be willing to take on such a project personally (but I don't have a flextight)-- But I wouldn't even dream of trying to walk someone else through the process. Honestly, I've got enough hardware lying around, I'd just build a standalone box for the scanner.