Nikon Coolscan LS8000, Vuescan and MF image size

[JWMster]

Some might suggest otherwise, but the key trouble I'm having is disk space: My scanned color MF 120 film images scan into files running in the 500,000 KB range at 4000dpi. Somehow, I'm afraid of trying to compress and sacrificing image quality, but disk space constraints are starting to kick in. Even at $200 per 1-TB, it still ain't free. So while I haven't really played much with compression, I'm wondering whether you have any recommendations, pointers, or suggestions?

 

[Les Sarile]

I have the best results when tying to recover poor results from film scanned in 16bit TIF. Otherwise, JPEG files are good enough. You can save as least compression JPEG so there won't be any JPEG artifacting. There are proprietary 16bit JPEG file formats but I don't know if I can trust support in the long run.

 

[shutterfinger]

. Even at $200 per 1-TB, it still ain't free

Check out https://www.newegg.com/Desktop-External-Hard-Drives/SubCategory/ID-414?Tid=167525
4TB for $79 ain't bad.
In Windows you can right click the file, folder, or drive and select compress to save disk space, its safe.
Mac should have similar.

 

[chriscrawfordphoto]

Buy a bigger hard drive. That's the solution, full stop. I don't get buying a $3000 scanner then whining about the cost of hard drives that cost $100-$200 each and saving low-quality versions of the scans to save money on storage.

 

[Anon Ymous]

$200 per 1TB? Are you sure about that? It probably is about half that for 3TB

 

[rbultman]

Are all of your shots keepers? Why not scan at a lower resolution? Once you figure out which you want to print, scan at a higher resolution.

 

[Born2Late]

Well, you could always put your photos on DVD's and store them in a safe (place).

 

[Eric Rose]

DVD's are far from archival.

 

[destroya]

costco has 8tb for $139. not sure where you shop!!!

I agree, if you have a good scanner why scan at poor quality settings? just scan the good ones and all is well. you can always go back and re-scan more if you want

 

[MattKing]

Scan quickly in lower resolution for the purpose of record keeping.
Mark and possibly discard the obvious rejects. Editing is your friend.
Scan in higher resolution those that make the quality/interesting/saleability cut.
Store and catalogue your negatives.
A 3 TB hard drive will store months/years worth of scans.

 

[Wallendo]

High quality compression is not a problem as long as it is not repeated multiple times.

My general workflow has been to scan 16 bit compressed TIFF (this is lossless compression and roughly reduces filesize in half - It is supported by VueScan). After doing all necessary resizing and editing, I convert the images to 8-bit and convert to JPEG at quality 10 (on PhotoShop's scale of 1-12). I will often save the TIFF file to a recordable blu-ray disk (It is not archival, but the negative can be rescanned in the future if the disk fails).

It is also a good idea to buy an extra external drive and keep copies of all your scans on that drive, using backup software if possible - I use Time Machine on my mac. Hard-drives will fail suddenly without warning - I had this happen 6 months ago. Fortunately, I was able to recover all but 4 or 5 of my images, but it took a lot of time to do that. In general, try to keep all your images in either TIFF or JPG format. These format have been around a long time and should be supported well into the future. Other formats are at greater risk of obsolescence.

 

[jim10219]

DVD's are far from archival.

They will probably outlast the negatives and any other method of storing data. They're supposed to have a lifespan of between 100-200 years if properly kept. Who knows if they'll actually live that long, but hard drives have a typical lifespan of about 6 years. Also, as with any magnetic data storage device (such as thumb drives and SSDs), they'll demagnetize over time and you'll lose data, even if the drive itself continues to work perfectly. Optical drives, like CD's, DVD's, and Blu-rays, are the MOST archival method we have available to us to date. Don't use the rewritable ones though. They won't last nearly as long. Just use the write once kind. It's likely that they will outlast the film negatives, if properly taken care of.

 

[shutterfinger]

There are several free apps that monitor a drives smart attributes giving one notice that the drive has problems.
SeaTools https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/ is one, Crystal Disk Info is another https://crystalmark.info/en/download/

 

[bdial]

Dyes are used in recordable CD's and DVD's, and their life beyond 20'ish years is questionable for most brands. Additionally, they are quite fragile if handled too much, not to mention that the drives are starting to become unusual in new computers.
Hard drives currently offer the best cost/mb, as noted they have their own issues, but are generally quite reliable. I have quite a collection of external drives, and most of the failures I've had have been with the power supplies or other electronics in the enclosures, but not the drive itself.
If you want the best reliability, get an external RAID array, make regular back-ups and be prepared to copy everything to new media every few years to stay on top of the technology curve. If the RAID is too much money, get a pair of same size drives and save all your images on each one, either manually or with mirroring software if your OS supports it. Keep at least one powered down except when actually using it.
Finally, use data center grade drives instead of the consumer grade drives seen at the box stores, if the budget allows. The price will be higher and the size smaller, but they are more reliable.

 

[JWMster]

Lots of good info here.Thanks to all so far. I'll have to spend more time with later.

Drives: But FWIW, if you've used a SSD drive... the kind of thing that almost never screws up, you get spoiled. You also get spoiled by the speed. Here, 1 TB is now about $200. I have plenty of the bigger, slower drives that are in semi-retirement. These things die, lose their indexing, and just plain have issues. Never had that with a SSD yet.The latest one I bought last week is about the size of a credit card. Good drives.... ain't cheap. Seems to me the thing is to use AWS for online backup, but I haven't put much time into that yet.

File Size: The first thing is to optimize file size. I scan at low res (669) in Preview and then 4000 for Scan. And you're right, Everything ain't worth keeping. But so far, I haven't developed a discipline here. That's clearly the next step. But still... compression seems an issue. My scans of MF 120 come out waaaay big relative to the 48MB files from a Sony A7RII... so something seems a bit odd. I am using TIFFs and maybe that's not efficiently defined (yet) in my case. So here's a potential problem: I see my (Medium Format 120 Portra color negatives) are scanning with a TIFF file type set at 64 bit RGBI and one of the posts here suggests 8-bit and/or 16-bit - but those settings look like B/W only. My computer is a 64-bit machine and maybe my mistake is assuming that this making the image file size in the same 64-bit thing?

Scanner: Nikon Coolscan only auotmates 3 MF 120 files at a time, and it's very slow. I'm curious about the Epson V850 'cause it does 6 MF 120 files at a time. Experience?

 

[MattKing]

24 bit RBG is very high quality.
48 bit RBG is just about the maximum that you can get much normal use from.
64 bit RBGi is essentially a "raw" scan with a separate infrared defect channel stored with it. You might use it to defer processing by the scanner software (not Photoshop or equivalent).