About Scanning And Contributing My Collection

[triverse]

I am interested in scanning my issues of past magazines, I have about 50 already scanned for personal use and am interested in changing what needs to be changed to meet the standards here and upload them.

I have gone through the wiki and was just wondering about a few things:

1) Some of my scans are off, just a little, in the angle, not much but if you look you will see the pic is a little off kilter. Is this a problem? Some of the mags I no longer have (moved quite a few times and well, bulky things like a few 100 mags is just too much weight to justify moving).

2) Do I need to run all of them through irfanview and resize the pages and then compile the cbz/cbr file from that or can I just upload what I already have?

3) Thinking of using Rapidshare since I don't have an always on Internet connection, is there a site that would be better?

The most critical question in my opinion here:

4) Do I need to scan the ads too? Some mags that I have already scanned I skipped the ads in them to save space since I have been working on a video game archive of sorts and didn't care at the time for the ads, although now I have realised it would be nice to have them at least for that. As far as releases here, do I need to scan the ads?

Thanks guys. I am currently scanning my Gamefan collection, just finished the April 1997 issue (the one with Castlevania Symphony of the Night on the cover and a 6 page preview of Final Fantasy 7 in Japan). That is not the oldest issue I have, it was just one that I like a lot. I have issue 3 up missing only a few here and there (mostly their last year in business really).

[E-Day]

Scan everything from the front cover to the back cover! Ads are part of the magazine

As for the other questions, someone else will have to answer it. I don't know what irfanview is. Someone like meppi or Phillyman can answer all your other questions. I only scan magazines once in a while.

[kbf_private_joker]

If you have PhotoShop, use that because it will make the scanning chore faster. You can also import, rotate, and resize using losslessly, which is important.

[meppi]

Always glad to see people who want to help out.

1) If they are a tiny bit off I wouldn't worry too much. It all depends a bit. I can't say without looking at them, but if you feel they are probably too slanted, they very well might be. But they don't have to be 100% straight either.

2) Depends a bit. Lately we are starting to put out scans at a width of 1440 pixels instead of 1280 like we used to in the past. Due to just about every screen being widescreen nowadays and the resolution of monitors improving over the years.

If they are something like 1600 and over, I would resize them.

But if they are yet to be cropped and edited, then it would be fine to upload them as 1600 and possibly a bot more.

This will give editors that want to clean up the scans afterwards a bit room to play with.

If they are already around 1280 or 1440, I would let them be.

3) You can contact Phillyman to upload the cbz (best to use zips instead of rars) files to the ftp, so they can be easily transferred onto the download manager.

I normally take care of any rapidshare links as I have a premium account for that, so they never get deleted as long as I pay the bills.

4) I would say most definitely scan the ads as well.

It might seem trivial to some, but it can't be denied that the classic video game ads are as much a part of the classic magazines as the rest of the pages, wether we like it or not.

There's just something that feels wrong without them. And there are have been some truly great ones created over the years.

Personally I'm looking forward to the GameFan magazines. Heard lots of great things about them, but sadly enough these were never available over here, unlike EGM and such.

[triverse]

Looking at the scans, I will definitely have resize the mag scans. They are around 2000+X3000+ in size, way to big according to the wiki, lol.

I am going to download a couple issues from here and see how they were done and try to emulate that, any suggestions as to which ones would be good examples to follow?

Thanks for the help everyone, I am excited to be finally be helping out with such a great effort, I remember working on a few things for the now defunct GameGo! Magazine and feeling so down in the dumps when it was discontinued (I was going to be featured in Tales of Hardcore, I believe in issue #3).

I have issue one (in print) and the never released issue #2 (in PDF) if they are needed here. I will look and see, if they aren't up, I may scan/upload them first since there are only two of them.

[KiwiArcader]

I created a couple of Atari manuals which you could get as they are a small download compared to other magazines here. They are in the Downloads>Misc section. I sized them to 1280 x xxx, eg just resized the width not height to keep the correct aspect ratio.

Some of the files here are created from raw scans with no cropping of extra widths etc ... I think Phillyman appends "r" to the filename for those to show they are raw ... and he will go back and crop them etc after he has done some more bulk scanning so they might not be ideal for a guide.

Hope that helps

[E-Day]

As far as .cbr vs .cbz, it doesn't make a difference. I have opened both in CDisplay, and neither is faster than the other.

And if you save it as a ZIP file, it doesn't matter what you change the extension to. Any magazine I have scanned or compiled and uploaded was saved as a ZIP and had the extension changed to .cbr. So if anyone whines that one is faster than the other, tell them to shove it . I prefer .cbr simply because I see the extension as standing for Comic Book Reader, even if that isn't what it means.

ZIP, RAR, .cbr, .cbz; all the same pile of soft, pale faeces

[meppi]

About that cbr/cbz thing.

We've tested this extensively in the past and does make a difference.

Depends on the system you're using though. The better your hardware, the less you will notice the difference when you flip from one page to the next, simply because your hardware is faster in loading up the data in the background.

What also matters is that you don't create your zip or rar files with a compression algorithm to make the zip smaller.

If you have the option, use an uncompressed or archive zip. The zip will then be the exact same size as the map you put your JPGs in.

And I'd be careful with the whole cbz/cbr thing, just to make sure.

We might not have encountered any problems with them so far, but you never know.

Rename a rar to cbr and a zip to cbz to be sure every program and OS knows what exactly the files are and how to use them.

For instance, when I first switched over from XP to OS X, my first mag I uploaded turned up corrupt on every Windows system.

Little did I know at the time that when I open my cbz/cbr files with Comicbooklover, the program writes a little image into the file so that I can see which issue it is by just looking at the pictogram. It can even be used in CoverFlow, like on an iPod or in iTunes.

But the Windows based cbr/cbz programs don't know what to do with it and tell you it's corrupt.

So I have to zip them up before opening them with CBL and use settings so that none of the OS X specific files are saved along with the JPGs.

For more ideas about how to go about scanning and editing magazines, take a look at the guide:

http://www.retromags.com/forums/Scanning-E...uide-t2727.html

I create my own magazines in this way, and the last couple of months I've been doing it at 1440 instead of 1280 and the difference in quality in quite big. So I would certainly go that way.

For examples of mine, you can download the latest Club Nintendo issue I did this way: http://www.retromags.com/forums/Club-Ninte...ue-file776.html

Or my last couple of Sega Saturn magazines, namely issues 19-23.

[E-Day]

I shall keep doing it the way I have been doing it. When I create the zip, I leave the compression at whatever WinRAR has it set at default. I can't remember off the top of my head what that is, but the compression of the jpegs seems to be nil or very very close to it.

Or, if you are like me, you that the cbr/cbz and the nfo file, tuck it away to where you keep your magazines, and also extract the cbr/cbz file to your desktop and read through it that way, deleting pages as you go so you know exactly where you left off. I rarely read magazines in CDisplay anymore.