Phillyman's Work In Progress...

[Phillyman]

Choo Choo.......these guys are being scanned today

 

[Sean697]

16 hours ago, Phillyman said:

The little brother to EGM #65 has now been scanned, this one weighs in at 396 pages.

 

Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 64 (November 1994)

Status (Scanned)

I was actually going to do this issue next. I recently have spent the last month and a half traveling and taking care of family issues. I'd be willing to edit when I have time to get back into scanning shortly.

[kitsunebi]

Good to see that Scansnap finally getting used, but I hope Phillyman's Bane hasn't been forgotten...

EDIT.  Oh, wait.  Looks like it got taken care of...and you didn't even say anything???!

[E-Day]

6 hours ago, Sean697 said:

I was actually going to do this issue next. I recently have spent the last month and a half traveling and taking care of family issues. I'd be willing to edit when I have time to get back into scanning shortly.

Be my guest! I have three or four issues that I scanned that I need to edit.

[imdavid555]

10 hours ago, Phillyman said:

Choo Choo.......these guys are being scanned today

 

Very much looking forward to these issues !

Thanks Phillyman  

[Phillyman]

Next up.....

[Phillyman]

I wanna smell that sweet aroma of scanner wheels burning rubber!!!!!

NEXT!!!!!

 

 

[Depressor]

Can i edit UGP scans?
 

[Phillyman]

3 hours ago, Depressor said:

Can i edit UGP scans?
 

 

Sure that would help me out

In the Team Members section is a link to all my unedited scans, just watch that location and you will see them all my scans pop up over the next few days.

[Phillyman]

In order to move quicker thru stacks of magazines, I have decided to invest into a professional guillotine paper cutter. I did some research and settled on the following item....

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NO7PYYI/

It arrived this past weekend and it just cuts thru magazines like a hot knife thru butter. The only complaint I have is that it weighs around 40lbs so its a beast to move around. Now on the weekends I will be able to chop thru 20-30 magazines with ease and then just continuously feed the pages thru my Fujitsu IX500. This is the final item I needed to buy. At this point I now have the guillotine to debind, the IX500 to scan and the QNAP with dual 6TB drives (RAID 1) to store.

Also I would like to thank @Hudson187 for donating like 50-70 magazines toward the cause. I will make short work of them with the items above. While some of the stuff you sent is a little newer than we can currently provide, I will still get them processed for release at a later date.

[kitsunebi]

1 hour ago, Phillyman said:

Now on the weekends I will be able to chop thru 20-30 magazines with ease and then just continuously feed the pages thru my Fujitsu iX500.

I haven't looked at anything you've scanned since getting the Scansnap but I sure hope this statement isn't literally true.  Just dropping a mag into the feeder and letting it run is pretty much 100% guaranteed to leave you with a bunch of pages ruined by scan lines.  All it takes is a particle of dust to get on the glass, and every page scanned thereafter will be ruined and need to be rescanned.  Unless of course you don't mind scan lines and leave them in there in which case congratulations you just discovered my Most Hated Thing  :knash teeth:

[Phillyman]

14 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

I haven't looked at anything you've scanned since getting the Scansnap but I sure hope this statement isn't literally true.  Just dropping a mag into the feeder and letting it run is pretty much 100% guaranteed to leave you with a bunch of pages ruined by scan lines.  All it takes is a particle of dust to get on the glass, and every page scanned thereafter will be ruined and need to be rescanned.  Unless of course you don't mind scan lines and leave them in there in which case congratulations you just discovered my Most Hated Thing  :knash teeth:

Let me rephrase, I can chop 30 mags on the weekend, and then over the course of that week I can run a few a day thru my scanner. I use a microfiber cloth every 20 pages or so. I have not noticed any dust lines thus far.

 

[kitsunebi]

Don't take any of this negatively, since I simply view it all with an air of amusement, but I'm still a little unsure of your motivations for doing all this rapid scanning.  Let's say you scan 30 mags in a week, as you say.  As I understand it, you have no plans to edit anything yourself, so it basically falls to E-Day and Imaginary Guy to do the majority of the work.  Now, I realize that Imaginary Guy is incredibly dedicated to helping the site out and could quite possibly blow through editing all 30 issues in a single afternoon, but there's always the chance he could suffer a terrible illness that leaves him completely incapacitated and unable to help at all like what happened to him last year.  Which would just leave E-Day, who might take all year to get through those 30 issues, since his pace has understandably slowed after his ability to edit at work was taken away.

So, a week of scanning results in a stack of mags that won't be added to the site for a year.  That's fine, but assuming you scan 30 mags a week every week, then in a single year you'll have scanned more mags than will ever be made available here in your lifetime.

Which is still fine, assuming your goal is simply to get the mags scanned so you can get rid of them and save the foundations of your house.  But here's where you lose me: you said you save the loose pages, which baffles and confuses me to no end.  Kiwi scans mags in order to get them out of the house to please the wife.  You scan in order to...move them from a shelf into a box?  WHY?

[Phillyman]

19 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Which is still fine, assuming your goal is simply to get the mags scanned so you can get rid of them and save the foundations of your house.  But here's where you lose me: you said you save the loose pages, which baffles and confuses me to no end.  Kiwi scans mags in order to get them out of the house to please the wife.  You scan in order to...move them from a shelf into a box?  WHY?

At the moment 90% of the 1900+ magazines I have right now are in cardboard banker boxes, or stacked on a shelf in a utility room off to the side of my balcony. This is a very small room, maybe 5ft by 5ft? Its almost impossible at this point with a child for me to move this collection indoors to sort it out and organize it. The collection is so big that even just putting all those 1900 magazines into magazine bags with backing boards would increase the storage needs by about 2.5 additional banker boxes. I have a storage unit, but I do not trust it with magazines that have not been scanned.

So I am going to start working my way thru stacks of magazines. Grab a pile of magazines, are these already preserved? No, ok chop, scan and store the digitalized pages on the QNAP. The loose pages get put into plastic banker boxes and once it reaches capacity I number said box and send it off to my storage unit. If rain leaks thru the roof of the storage unit I won't be screwed (most likely I will wrap said plastic banker boxes in heavy duty garbage bags for additional protection). However if a scanned page needs to redone, ok.....I can stop at the storage unit on my way home from work and snag it from the box.

The added benefit is that as I grab stacks of magazines I will start running into duplicates, triplicates and even magazines that I may own 4 or 5 copies of. Those magazines can be listed on here or eBay for sale, and the funds can go back into a slush fund to acquire magazines that we need to complete out sets. Perhaps after I scan 400-500 magazines I will get bored and then go back and start editing them over the next decade

 

[kitsunebi]

Well since there's going to be such a massive collection of unedited scans sitting around for years, we should probably put up a list somewhere on the site so everyone can see what's already been scanned.  Right now, I think only patrons can see what you've done, correct?

[Hudson187]

About how long does it take to edit a magazine, say 40 pages?

[kitsunebi]

3 minutes ago, Hudson187 said:

About how long does it take to edit a magazine, say 40 pages?

Ha, a 40 page magazine!  Never seen one that short.  It takes about an hour per 40 pages if you're really fast with Photoshop.

If the mag is pristine and requires almost no fixing of blemishes, you could almost squeeze out a page per minute.  But probably not.

And mind you, that's an average.  Some pages are fast, some pages are slow.  Covers can often take an hour.

[Hudson187]

I'm pretty good with Photoshop, but I only have CS2 :|

I was considering helping by edit scans and compile magazines in my free time.. not much of it, but I really enjoy the preservation community. Also, the wife wants me to downsize my collection  I have more of my collection to donate (already sent a box to @Phillyman); I'd like to help in other ways.

[Phillyman]

5 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Well since there's going to be such a massive collection of unedited scans sitting around for years, we should probably put up a list somewhere on the site so everyone can see what's already been scanned.  Right now, I think only patrons can see what you've done, correct?

I will be marking everything I scanned as "Scanning" and putting a status note on those issues that I have already scanned said magazine.

Pictured below is just two of the main locations I have magazines......in my utility room and on the side of my desk. I also have two stacks next to my couch, one banker box in my bedroom, one behind the couch and 5 banker boxes in the back of my car. So yeah, I need to convert them to digital images

 

[Phillyman]

32 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Well since there's going to be such a massive collection of unedited scans sitting around for years, we should probably put up a list somewhere on the site so everyone can see what's already been scanned.  Right now, I think only patrons can see what you've done, correct?

This is where the QNAP comes into play. Any of the 3 administrators can create a special link to any folder on this device. So if a user comes forward and says they want to edit Nintendo Power Issue 150, we can give that user a link to grab those unedited files. After they edited a magazine they would be promoted to Team Member and could retrieve any additional issues themselves.

[Depressor]

8 hours ago, Phillyman said:

ictured below is just two of the main locations I have magazines......

 

We need separate topic for such foto's)))) BTW My wife would expel me for such mountains)))

 

[kitsunebi]

9 hours ago, Phillyman said:

This is where the QNAP comes into play. Any of the 3 administrators can create a special link to any folder on this device. So if a user comes forward and says they want to edit Nintendo Power Issue 150, we can give that user a link to grab those unedited files. After they edited a magazine they would be promoted to Team Member and could retrieve any additional issues themselves.

Is this just for holding your stuff, or can any team member load it up with raw scans?

[kitsunebi]

10 hours ago, Hudson187 said:

I'm pretty good with Photoshop, but I only have CS2 :|

I was considering helping by edit scans and compile magazines in my free time.. not much of it, but I really enjoy the preservation community. Also, the wife wants me to downsize my collection  I have more of my collection to donate (already sent a box to @Phillyman); I'd like to help in other ways.

We're going to need all the help we can get, and then some.  One of our members uploaded a bunch of unedited mags over a year ago for anyone who wanted to contribute to be able to edit, and half of them still haven't been touched by anyone.  There just aren't enough people out there willing to help, and Philly's talking about uploading way more raw scans than that previous case, so any help you can provide will be gratefully welcomed.

The biggest disadvantage to having older Photoshop is the lack of the content-aware fill tool.  This is the single most useful editing tool for fixing tears, creases, blemishes, etc., and I believe CS6 is the first to have it.  People without if are forced to use clone stamp for those purposes, and it frankly isn't really up to the task (though still better than nothing).  But don't let that stop you.  Several of our scanners manage just fine with older versions of Photoshop, and some people have edited mags using other software entirely.  Pretty much any photo editing software can crop, straighten, and adjust the brightness and black levels, which is the main thing you'll be doing to every page.

[Phillyman]

4 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Is this just for holding your stuff, or can any team member load it up with raw scans?

Anyone will be able to upload files to the QNAP. Even if I manage to kick ass this year and scan 1000 magazines on my own. My average scan is coming out to about 1-2GB per magazine, so I will only chew up about 2TB of space. Users are more then welcome to upload their own unedited content to the QNAP. Or they can just send me a DVD/FlashDrive with the files and I will dump them onto the unit that way.

[kitsunebi]

Some friendly criticism:  I just took a look at the raws to EGM 64.  Haven't looked at any other issues, but that one at least has a persistent scan line running down every other page, if you weren't aware.  Goddamn dust particles...The Fujitsu is way faster and gives way better results than a flatbed, but I was pretty disappointed the first time I used it and discovered that dropping a bunch of pages into the ADF and letting it run was useless unless I didn't mind half of the pages ending up with scanlines. 

Also, was that issue cut with your new cutter, or some other method?  There seems to be a hell of a lot of missing real estate on the gutter side of the pages - joins of those images won't even be possible.