Scanning 35mm Slides

[Steve Roberts]

If you are going to HD eventually, your final frame size would be 1920×1080 square pixels.
So a shot that will fill the frame with no zoom-in should be scanned so it fills a 1920×1080 frame. Depending on the shot, you may have some image area outside the frame, or black bars showing. This shot would be scanned at such a dpi (or pixels per inch) as to give you an image at 1920×1080 or a little more. If 35mm film is about .866″ wide, then to get 1920 pixels wide, you need to find a dpi: 1920pixels/.866inch= 2217 pixels per inch, or about 2400 dpi or whatever is available.

Now if you want to zoom … imagine a rectangle that is 1920×1080 floating over your image and shrinking to encompass somebody’s head. If that head is 10% of the width of the frame, then it is .0866 pixels wide. So in order to get a 1920×1080 image out of that, you need to scan at a higher dpi: 24000 dpi.

Now these numbers look pretty crazy. If your scanner can’t do it, you’ll have to scan as high as you can, then use something like ReSizer to enlarge the shots to avoid a lot of pixellation.

Anybody else?

[Brendan Thompson]

If you buy Stage Tools you can have your editor do the pans and zooms in edit and save yourself time and money. It’s a very simple program.

I know this isn’t directly related to you question but thought it might help.

[Delete]

steve’s right. i used to have to do this all the time for funerals. scan at the max of your scanner; needless to say, you need a backlit source for negatives or slides. (9600) or higher gives you leeway.