Using Home Movie Depot and ScanCafe to transfer movies and tapes

This may be a bit off point but I'm going to post this anyway since I feel it bears some relevance to archiving photos.

I recently used Home Movie Depot to transfer old Hi-8 videotapes to a digital format that I can use to edit and archive along with my photos.

The online process was pretty simple: you choose the services you wish to purchase (in my case a straightforward video-digital transfer), make your payment and then ship the tapes off. That's it. They return the original media with the DVDs.

The turnaround time was impressive: in less than two weeks I had my original tapes and the new DVDs. Unfortunately, I discovered that half of the movies suffered from out-of-synch video and sound. I attempted to contact Home Movie Depot and it took a week before I could get through to someone in customer support.

The woman I spoke with was honest with me: they had a problem with "a setting" used during the transfer process of numerous movies and if I would send back the discs and the tapes they would redo everything.

Which they did. And mailed the original tapes and discs back to me soon afterwards.

I have also used ScanCafe as a test run form work. The idea was to see how well they handled the transfer of a series of different formats, but particularly slides. I also included medium-format negatives and prints as well.

Straight off I should warn you it took more than 3 months to transfer less than a hundred items. And they outsource to Bangalore. And their customer service was often unresponsive and certainly difficult to track down.

I would say that you should use ScanCafe at your own risk.

Sharing collections in Bridge?

"Bridge Booster" claims that we can now share collections, at least in the latest iteration of Bridge.

Here's his comment on an earlier post here:

You can share regular Collections in CS5 for images stored on a server that other users have access to. You can just copy the .filelist file from /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Bridge CS5/Collections and paste it into the other users Collections folder and relaunch Bridge. This will not work for local files. Please note that there is a bug in CS5 Collections where any file names or folder names that use an apostrophe will cause the Collection to not list any files after that file. If you search on the Adobe forums you can find a script to fix the Collections file and replace the apostrophes with the proper characters (%20 I think).

So far I haven't been able to test this out yet -- can anyone confirm this?

DO NOT UPGRADE TO BRIDGE CS6

OK, sorry for the uppercase scream in the title but Ive recently upgraded to CS6 and learned that the latest iteration of Bridge has at least one VERY SERIOUS bug buried in the program's bowels.

When indexing a folder, in this case a mixture of 793 jpgs and tiffs, the program extracts all the existing metadata (keywords and the like) but appears to hang up with extracting the thumbs and apparently the previews as well.

In the lower left corner of the program where the number of items and extracting progress is found, the item numbers shows up but the extracting process is interminable. By that I mean that the number of thumb extractions decreases but  before finishing goes back up again, then down and then back up and so on. And if you try to resize the window during this process it will happen with a larger swing in number differentiation.

Note that the settings and preferences are the same used in CS4 and CS5.

I googled the issue and sure enough this problem has been identified on the Adobe forum site (http://forums.adobe.com/message/4500258) but there doesn't appear to be any clear-cut answer at this point --  it is a cross-platform issue as well.

If anyone has an answer or possible solution please let me know and I'll post it for them right here.

Final note: there doesn't appear to be any reason to upgrade to Bridge CS6 anyway, no cool new feature or enhancement (such as easily sharable collections) worth the hassle.

One final note, and a curious one as well: the Bridge and Mini Bridge icons are missing from Photoshop CS6. Coincidence? I hope so. . .

Cache workaround if you have to update/upgrade Bridge

Upgrading your present version of Bridge will require a completely new cache for your image library. (Indeed, each version of Bridge is cache specific.) If you need the latest version of Bridge to help keep up with your design teams but don't want to have to completely reindex your image library there is one reliable workaround: Don't do it.

OK, what I mean is keep your "old" version of Bridge and use that for all your searching needs -- you're already indexed. After all, the latest version probably won't make a significant difference for searching. You can still upgrade, of course, just don't overwrite your old copy of Bridge.

That way you can take your time and grow the next copy of your cache with the latest version, at your own pace -- if you wish.

Error, bug or server glitch?

It's been too long since I posted an update about our central image library but things have been going well and I suppose I didn't want to jinx that. We're at nearly 160k (that's 160,000) photos archived using Bridge and so far, so good.

Well, OK, all is not perfect in the Emerald City,  at least in respect to one machine in particular, a Windows PC running Bridge CS5.1.

Lately I've notice an odd behavior occurring on this particular Windows machine: when I save a search by creating a collection of images (~5k), and then return to review the collection later, once it completes building criteria and I start sorting through the collection, duplicate thumbs and filenames appear, first a few and then hundreds.

Mind you, this phenomenon is machine-specific only and does not seem to affect copying files to another folder; it does not actually create duplicate files in the image library (housed on a separate server).

Anyway, if I click out of the collection and then back in the phenomenon is gone; the collection has returned to its normal state. (Or what passes for normal in Bridge).

Odd? It's not so much the frustration that arises when I try and use the collection for sorting, etc., but the concern that something is going on deep inside Bridge's bowels (not a pleasant image either) that may be causing unseen or unknown things to occur inside the image library.

Any ideas?

Media Pro 1 - initial testing

Imported 34,810 photos taking up 272 gigs of space on an external hard drive, resulting in a catalog slightly larger than 1.8 gigs.
Total time of import ~ 6-8 hours

Initial import produced about 2 dozen images logged as "Unable to scan" (see note and graphic below) but was able to rebuild by hand. I have read other reviewers who claim they were unable to rebuild by hand.

User Interface:

Reminds me of why I liked Expression Media 2 (except in black). Straightforward, simple and intuitive.

Out of box, very little customization before import.

Left hand is devoted to either the Organization Panel or the Media Information panel -- both customizable.

Org Panel very nice and full of robust features, providing far more sorting tools than Bridge: Credit, Author, Doc title, Copyright, Place finder (Country), in addition to the standard keywords (of course), date Finder,

Media Info panel -- use of colors to visually separate categories of information is a cool idea and makes it easy to scan the panel. Annotations (what Bridge calls "Metadata) is reminiscent of EM2 as well.

OK, the bad news:

1. Single most obvious issue is the "Unable to scan media file" error message. This can be resolved by going back and selecting the unscanned files -- listed in the activity log at least -- and then going to the Action menu and then Rebuild Item (Command + B). This may not always work, however, and I had to retry it several times with a few of the unscanned files.

2. Maximum catalog size is unclear -- at what point do the problems begin? Media Pro tech support claims "128,000" files but we don't have a clear idea of the aggregate size of those files. They might add up to 20 gigabytes or 120.

Next up, a series of search tests to see how the program fares under the gun.

Stay tuned!

From Wikispaces - LoneLibrarian

This note was too good not to pass along to the readers here. LoneImageLibrarian has done her homework and it's worth sharing.

"I've been playing with Lion OS, as well as full versions of Portfolio, Filemaker Pro 11, and the old Bridge standby recently and had some interesting details to report. Lion OS has more bugs to it than I originally noticed; we'll call it blindly wanting to see the best in something even when it isn't there. Snow Leopard is continuing to be used office wide to avoid some hiccups with our printer-from-the-future, so that is a hurdle for later down the line. While Lion is not necessarily the savior we all hoped for, there are other options on the purchased horizons. Filemaker Pro 11 sounded like such a good idea in the literature, but what doesn't? The Photo Catalog section comes with templates for getting database level organization underway, which look excellent and pretty. In practice, however, the no-manual new-user experience of this supposedly beginner level appropriate feature is not user friendly in the slightest. I am no green kid when it comes to computers and tend to find my feet just from using a program. The overall response of the office to Filemaker Pro 11, even outside of our digital images needs, has necessitated the purchase of The Missing Manual book on Filemaker Pro 11 to move ahead in just testing it out.

"Portfolio is proving to be a nice image-tagging and organization option, though one has to categorize the correct metadata to embed as IPTC to have it searchable both within Portfolio as well as Spotlight. For budget purposes, however, Bridge still encompasses the full package of features. Portfolio 8 for the individual experience has a pleasant user interface and is rather pretty and oddly tactile, but the expense is certainly off-putting. For those who are not intimidated by many-paned, institutionalized programs, Bridge is thus far still the best cost-effective image cataloging software. More news to come from the front as more images are processed."

Lots of food for thought and all worth digesting. Stay tuned sports fans!