(sc)animu

This last few weeks I've been doing loads of scanning.

What's been good is I've really been sticking with it. Since the backlog started to grow I've had a couple of session where I did a few magazines, but nothing like I needed to in order to make a decent impression in it.

The backlog was getting really quite stupid - I had getting on for a years worth of magazines to scan by the time I decided to get my act together and by the time I got my new process flowing it had grown to around 15 months.

I've still got 15 months worth of new types, but for everything else I've taken it down to about 9 or 10 months. Of course, new types traditionally have the most images in them, so that's perhaps not quite as good as it sounds, but the main point is that I'm eating through the backlog at a much faster pace than I'm receiving new magazines.

In fact, my hope is that (barring any unforeseen problems) I'll be up to date by Easter. Given that Easter isn't until the weekend before my birthday this year, that's sounds closer than it is, but I think it's a goal that's strikes a good balance between realism and ambition.

I mean, even if I still have a few magazines left by then, all the bank holidays should give me the chance to finish them off. And there is a potentially big hurdle that could scupper my timings though.

That hurdle is the whole scan-stitching process.

My new scanning process is based around my new computer, which I ended up with after my games-machine update. I now use an A4 scanner, which means all of the magazine pages need scanning in two parts (all the Japanese anime mags are printed on pages larger than A4) and then using the automatic photostitch to stick them together.

Now I have been playing with my process, experimenting to see what works best in terms of input to the automatic photo-stitch thing in photoshop, but the results have been mixed. The main success has been that I've realised a lot of the pre-processing I've been doing is essentially un-necessary.

When I started with this new set up, I was making sure to crop and align each of the scans so that they would be 'easier' for it to stick together. However, it turns out that this is basically unnecessary - it doesn't appear to make a jot of difference to the end results.

This is good, because it's meant I've really been able to speed up the actual scanning. I managed to belt through 4 whole animedias in about a week, for example, which is really helping me catch up.

Except what it's also doing is creating a huge number of files that I'll then need to go back to in order to stick together and finish off. Now this would be okay, but it's a horribly tedious process.

But also, it's the type of job that can't be done while doing something else as well. While I scan I watch anime (which is what I'd intended this post to be about, but I've dribbled on so long I'm going to break the posts into two!), but I can't do that with photostitch. The actual automatic bit of the process is at that sort of length where it's not instant, but not long enough for you to let it run while you do something else.

But also, this is where the bad side to photo-stitch comes in - I can't for the life of me work out a way to get it to perform consistently. A lot of the time it's great, but then every so often it will just throw a total wobbler and repeatedly make a complete arse of sticking things together.

This wouldn't be bad if I could work out why and how to avoid it, but I can't. About the only thing that seems to consistently cause it a problem is when two images are quite simple (e.g. big block of colour), but even this doesn't universally cause it grief.

Anyway, the point is that I could end up in a situation where I simply transfer a backlog of unscanned magazines into a backlog of unstitched pictures.