Scanning Slides in FCP for Ken Burns type effect

[David Roth weiss]

You’ll have to have a very good scanner to make a 35mm slide look good. Typical home or office scanners don’t have enough resolution to do the trick. They seldom do 600 dpi without interpolation, even though they may advertise 1200 o 2400. You might consider having your slides them scanned at a service bureau at least at 1200 dpi.

DRW

[Bret Williams]

My $80 epson perfection 1260 does slides and negatives at 1200. Not sure if it’s interpolated or not, but it looks damn good. Plenty of resolution for a ken burns effect.

But it’s no different than a regular scan. Just save it as a tif, pict, jpeg, whatever you want. Then drag it into a bin in final cut and animate away.

[David Roth weiss]

Huh, seems to me that your experience is different from both mine and from Kalunga’s. Its clear your Epson is an exception to the rule. Since that clearly won’t help Kalunga in this case, maybe you should send him your scanner?

DRW

[David Rowan]

I’ve scanned a lot of slides on my HP scanner with good results. I have not used the scans for video, but they are at a much higher resolution than video.

Here is one tip I picked up. If you can, tell the scanner that the output will be much larger than the original and then use a lower dpi. That is instead of a 1 inch slide getting scanned at 3000 dpi tell the scanner to make the output 10 inches at 300 dpi. The result is still 3000 pixels, but somehow more programs have an easier time dealing with it.

Also, at LAFCPUG-dot-org someone figured out a whole chart of recommended sizes for scanning images depending on how you were planing to use them in a video. Its somewhere in the library there.

DWR

[Bret Williams]

Shouldn’t be. A slide is larger than 1″. Even if all you can get is 600dpi optical, that’s still just about 720 pixels wide. And if it’s interpolating a little to give you 1200 dpi, then that should easily be enough to do some basic pushes without losing any rez. Heck, even a 720×480 frame in FCP looks ok for just a slow creep in at 110-115%.

But I’m using slides right now in iphoto and printing full bleed iphoto 6×8 images that I’ve even cropped in on a little. Look great.

Epson Perfection 1260. I’m sure they have a different model now. Mine is 2 years old.

[Bret Williams]

Ok, I just checked. My fairly el cheapo 3 year old epson perfection photo is 1200 dpi optical. Not interpolated. Nobody should be having any trouble scanning slides these days. They’re $35 on eBay.

[David Roth weiss]

Hey Bret,

Based on your arguments so far, let me ask you a question that may get you thinking in a slightly different mode.

What would you imagine might be the difference to a video person, like yourself, between a scan made on a $200 scanner vs. one made a $10000.00 scanner?

Looking forward to your answer…

DRW

[Kalunga Lima]

Thanks for all the feedback.

I don’t think it is a scanner issue, I happen to be using an Epson 2580 and the pictures look great in Photoshop on my 21 computer monitor… My fault for not mentioning this. I’m primarily concerned about when I bring the pictures into FCP, that they all seem so soft.
kalunga

[Gary Adcock]

[David Roth Weiss] “What would you imagine might be the difference to a video person, like yourself, between a scan made on a $200 scanner vs. one made a $10000.00 scanner?”

the same difference that separates a disposable camera and something with real professional glass.
The difference is in a scanners ability to record the image accurately, Highlight to shadow detail, Dmax ( max density of blacks)
and maybe even the need to record an image that is not from a 35mm camera, some people still shoot sheet film for print, and that content often appears in commercials.

On the realistic side, if you are working in DV25 in NTSC are you going to see the difference- I doubt it,
but remember that these lists cover people all over the world, doing all kinds of things. If the original poster was working in Film or HD, Yes the difference could be Very Very noticeable, and I just saw a project rejected from broadcast due to bad still scans in the project.

The question reminds me of the vendor at all the trade shows selling a $200 No Name DV camera. Yeah it works, but don’t use it for anything and god forbid you tried to match that footage with something from your DVX100

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA