If you want to share old photos online, or
enjoy your LPs on your iPod, digitisation is the way forward.
Today’s cameras and camcorders record
digitally – but most of us still have plenty of older analogue media, both
stuff we’ve recorded ourselves and movies and records we bought back in the
days of VHS and vinyl. From albums full of photographs and slides, to cupboards
packed with LPs, important memories are gathering dust and, in some cases,
literally fading away.
Here, we’ll show you how to convert old
photographs, records and video, often for free, into formats that will last,
and can be shared easily for all to see – which, after all, is why you pressed
the shutter in the first place.
Scanning photos
Most all-in-one printers can scan photo
prints with a level of quality that’s perfectly satisfactory for sharing on
Facebook and the like. Such hardware can be slow, however: scanning a few
hundred prints is likely to be a good day’s work. If you have a very large
number of photos, it makes sense to use a professional scanning service: expect
to pay around 10p per print. Slides can cost up to 69p.
Scanned-on
photos can be touched up with photo-editing tools, which means the digital
versions may end up looking better than the original prints
Alternatively, consider investing in more
capable hardware. We currently recommend the HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus
all-in-one (web ID: 372043) for its fast and very high-quality photographic
scanning ($369 inc VAT). Epson makes a series of well-regarded photographic
scanners, too, ranging from the $120 Perfection V33 to the $1050 Perfection
V750 Pro.
Unless your original prints are of
unusually high quality, a scan resolution of 300dpi will probably capture all
the detail that’s there; if your prints are in the common 10 x 15cm format,
this will give you the equivalent of a 2.1-megapixel image. Feel free to
experiment with higher resolutions if you have very large or sharp originals. For
the best quality results, consider scanning the negatives your prints were made
from: this will require a specialist scanner capable of very high resolutions
(see Slides and negatives).
Digitising doesn’t only make it easy to
share your photos: it also gives you an opportunity to improve them. After
scanning your images, you can use a variety of photo-editing packages to
correct colour casts and bump up the saturation to compensate for fading. You
may also be able to improve overexposed or underexposed images, but don’t
expect to work miracles: unlike photos taken with a digital camera, scanned-in
prints contain no extra hidden detail in the dark or light areas, so all you
can do is adjust the overall balance.
Editing tools can also remove blemishes
such as red-eye or spots on prints. You can crop out unwanted details, and with
a bit of care even large defects such as rips or creases can be fixed. Popular
editing tools include Adobe Photoshop Elements and the free Paint.NET: if
you’re more ambitious you can invest in professional photo-editing software
such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or the full Adobe Photoshop.
When it comes to archiving your scans, a
good working format is 24-bit PNG: this produces larger files than the popular
JPEG format, but it isn’t “lossy” like JPEG, so image quality won’t degrade
each time you save the file. Lightroom doesn’t support PNG files, so in this
case the TIFF format is a good alternative, though it takes up even more disk
space. Expect a 2.1-megapixel PNG to occupy around 2.5MB of space; a TIFF might
be twice that size.
Capturing video
If you thought scanning still images was a
chore, brace yourself. Capturing video often needs to be done in real time, so
digitising an hour of footage may tie up your PC for an hour, plus setup time.
This is worth doing sooner rather than later though: magnetic tape is a
volatile medium, and VHS tapes have a shelf life of around 20 years. Your kids’
school plays and sports days may already be on their way out.
The technical process of getting video onto
your PC will differ depending on the type of camcorder you have. With recent
hard disk-based and solid-state camcorders, your recordings are already stored
as digital files, which you can simply copy across to your PC over a USB link.
If your camcorder didn’t come with any editing software, you can use the free
VirtualDub application to make edits (www. virtualdub.org) – or treat yourself
to our recommended video editor, Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11 (web
ID: 367906).
The
free VirtualDub video editor is basic to say the least, but it’s adequate for
trimming your digitized videos into shape
With MiniDV camcorders, the process is more
complicated. The data is recorded digitally, but the cassettes can only play it
back in real-time, so transfers are slow. Many such camcorders transfer video
over FireWire, so you’ll need a PC with a compatible port, or an add-on
FireWire PCI Express or ExpressCard adapter. You’ll also need DV-specific
capture software: one free option is WinDV, which you can download from
http://windv.mourek.cz.
If you want to capture video from an older
tape format such as Hi8 or VHS-C, you’ll need dedicated video-capture hardware
to convert the camcorder’s video output to a digital stream. If you don’t still
have the camcorder, or you don’t want to make the time investment, you can send
your tapes off to be commercially digitised: services such as www.copymytapes.com
will digitise all sorts of formats from $15 per tape. They’ll even process VHS
videos, although for copyright reasons they won’t accept Hollywood blockbusters
or sitcoms taped off the TV – it’s your own footage only.
If you prefer to buy your own hardware,
good quality capture devices can be bought online at reasonable prices: the
Elgato Video Capture device costs $99 inc VAT and connects an S-Video or
composite source to any USB port, recording the incoming video and audio signal
as a 640 x 480 H.264 video file. That should capture all the detail in a video
cassette, but if you have the option, consider capturing at the higher DVD
resolution (720 x 576 pixels in PAL regions such as the UK). This way, you can
later archive your footage to DVD without any further transcoding.
It’s best practice to store the full-quality
captured video somewhere safe on your hard disk. If you want to make edits or
apply colour corrections, work on copies and export them in the appropriate
format. It may be tempting to archive your originals to DVD, but be warned:
it’s been estimated that optical discs could become unreadable after only a few
decades.
One post-processing question you may
encounter is whether or not to de-interlace the captured media. By default,
camcorders that record in standard-definition UK television formats will produce
interlaced 50Hz footage. This means that the first frame recorded (lasting 1/50
of a second) contains the odd-numbered horizontal lines of the image, and the
second contains even-numbered lines. When interlaced frames are shown at full
speed, full-resolution 25fps video is produced.
If you’re going to send out your video on
DVD to non-tech savvy relatives, de-interlacing will be done automatically by
the TV or DVD player, so there’s no need to do it yourself. If you’re uploading
video to YouTube or Facebook, though, de-interlacing the footage will ensure it
displays correctly.
