this should take 38.75 hours total for a manual scanner , less than half that for a autostack scanner

..and whatever you do, don't get a Minolta scanner. I rented a $1K+ ditto recently for an important job and haven't been so pottymouthed in a long time...

Totally abominable software and clunky hardware.

The Nikon scanners are far better, both in terms of less aggravation and the end quality.

Also, you do remember that even when slides are fresh from the pro lab, they are speckled with dust, right? A moment later, it's a Photoshop feast. For each slide...

Consider getting a radioactive blower brush if you have static buildup, it can save you a lot of work.

A friend needed to scan a few hundred slides and I did some research for him - Was going to recommend the Nikon film scanner (for about $500) but I kept on seeing users raving about the Canon CanoScan 8400F flatbed scanner. This unit has a slide adapter and scans multiple slides in one pass. Well my friend got it and is extremely happy with the results.

Newegg.com has it for $123 + $6.45 for shipping (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16838111118)

It's going to be very labor-intensive, so I hope you're not low-balling your bid.

I did this many years ago, before NLE's. About 1200 slides, one at a time. It was tranferring a couple's travel slides to VHS. The couple smoked, and every single one of those slides stunk like cigarettes. Yuck! F-ing smokers!

But I digress. Bid high, not low.

Some of the new flatbeds (I use one of the $500 range Epsons) do an amazing job, rivaling dedicated slide scanners in the same price range. They add the flexibility to handle many transparency sizes as well.

Be careful that you and your client are speaking the same language. "Archival" scanning usually means that the slides are being scanned at a resolution high enough to produce at least 8X10 inch prints. Scanning for viewing from a DVD implies video resolution - hardly enough resolution for a decent 3X5 inch print.

The difference in the time it takes to scan at a resolution for video presentation (300 dpi or thereabouts) versus archival scanning (2400 dpi or so) is significant.

RalphM is right and brings up a good point -- are you supposed to make a playable dvd or just store archive (think big files) on a dvd disk as data ..

big diff. in time and method ..

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some of those flatbed scanners do look pretty good - make sure you comparing optical resolution, not interpolated though ..

I have an good quality highly rated Epson flatbed with a slide scanner attachment.

After spending quite a bit of time on optimizing the scanner settings, it produces surprisingly decent output, and it was in fact good enough for a professional job I did two years ago.

Still, there is no comparison with a professional $1,000+ slide scanner. Totally different league for achievable quality, but professional skills are needed to get the best results. Between the optics and the better CCDs that can handle even 16-bit color (3x16 bits per pixel) if desired, the scanning leaves only the imperfections of the film source.

If you're being paid to scan 1,000 slides, you need to ensure that you can either eliminate the dust (and occasional hairs) or get the customer agree in writing to pay you even if there are specks and stuff in your scans.

Digital Ice helps a bit, but can also affect the picture quality, and either way you're looking at much slower scans.

Or if you love retouching in Photoshop, don't worry about any of this stuff!

Coursedesign's comments jogged another part of my memory bank: for dust and hair removal, you may want to try Polaroid's free utility PolaDSR available on their website.

However, Digital Ice is still the best game in town for 99% of the customers you will encounter.

I'm having a hard time understanding why someone would want 1000 photos just to look at with no interest in printing them later. I think they may want a data disc and just don't know it. Make sure you specifically ask what they want. And definitely don't underbid! Charge by the time and make sure you end up with more than a couple bucks per hour.

We had a customer that wanted something similar - first, they wanted to be able to easily view them; second, they knew that out of the 4,000 slides that they had, that probably only a small percentage of those would they even want t o consider printing.

So, the initial scan was done at 300dpi and everything was organized such that once the customer identified specific slides they wanted to print, they would just bring those slides back in and we'd scan them at a higher resolution for printing.

--Scott

I am in the midst of an extremely large project which involves scanning over 15,000 slides. I have scanned 12,000 as of this date.

The slide scanner will give you the best quality. For large projects, you need to have the slide feeder attachment, or you will go nuts. You should use Vuescan rather than the software that comes with your slide scanner because it handles "hands-off" batch scanning far better than the bundled software.

If you are in a hurry, you can put slides on a flatbed, but the resolution won't be as great, and you won't get the automatic cleaning that is available with slide scanners (they shine infrared light through the slide, in addition to visible light -- the dust and scratches reflect this differently than does the emulsion, and the results are subtracted to automatically remove surface defects and dust).

A third solution is to simply use a digital camera to photograph the slides from a screen. If the slides are in a carousel, and you have a fast digital camera, this can get you through the scanning process very quickly. I have known people that were able to get through 10,000 slides in two days using this technique. By contrast, scanning slides with a slide scanner takes between 60-75 seconds per slide (at least it does on my Nikon Coolscan 4000).

Once you have the scans, you will need to label them and also orient them correctly. Also, you should convert them to JPEG. I always scan as TIFF (lossless) and then do a batch convert to JPEG (I use an old "classic" version of ACDSee which does this very rapidly). The reason I do this is that I can edit the slides, if I choose, without incurring any incremental compression losses. Only when I am ready to publish do I convert to JPEG. If you use the low compression settings (i.e., highest quality) settings, the results are virtually indistinguishable from the original in all but the most stringent applications. I would defy most people to tell the difference, even when zoomed way in on small dark/light details.

To publish these to DVD, you have lots of choices. On some DVDs that I create, I actually have three separate versions of the slides. You can choose to do any combination of these three:

1. Create a slide show in Vegas by putting the JPEG pictures on the timeline. You can change the duration of each slide, do dissolves, add music, etc. This is the ultimate (well, at least the most creative) way to display the slides on a TV monitor. Render the results of this effort to an MPEG-2 and AC-3 file and put these into DVDA.

2. Create a slideshow in DVDA using a music compilation. That's right, a music compilation, not a picture compilation. The music compilation has an extremely interesting property when used with still photos. If you drop a music compilation into a DVDA project, and then add still photos to this compilation, the pictures are stored as a single I-frame. What this means is that they take up virtually no space on the DVD. You can put thousands of pictures into your DVD project, and your project will hardly be any larger than before you added those photos. Each picture will play for a length of time determined by the default duration set for your project. Each will be treated as a chapter, so that during viewing, the viewer can push the chapter advance button on the remote to "hurry" to the next slide. Of course, each slide is simply static on the screen.

You can only have 99 chapter stops per music compilation. You can put more pictures than this into each compilation, but beyond the 99th pic, the user will not be able to use the chapter advance to go back or forward through the pictures. However, you can use multiple music compilations and link them via end actions, if you want to keep the navigation.

The only downside to the music compilation approach is that you cannot have continuous music while the slides play because each slide has its own separate music. However, it might be possible to take your music and cut it into segments that exactly equal the default duration for each slide and then attach each segment to each slide. It would be a lot of work, though.

3. Put the individual JPEG images in a data folder, separate from the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders. This will give your client access to the original hi-res images. You can make a note, in one of your DVDA menus, that these files exist. I also usually put a notation somewhere in the DVD packaging.