Mysteries of frame finding

[davidcie]

I have been using my Epson V700 for many years to archive our family's collection of photos as well as for making the odd document scan. Having upgraded from the SE version that came with our scanner I set out to doing negatives and have not been able to come up with a reasonable workflow for batch processing hundreds of strips of 35mm film (pre-cut to fit into standard Epson 35mm holder) and from my point of view this boils down to the way frame finding works in SilverFast Ai.

I expected frame finder to find 35mm frames (24 x 36mm) but frame sizes detected by the tool are all over the place — anywhere from 23 to 24 and 35 to 36mm. (What is the rationale behind that is really puzzling to me.) "Allright, I'll just change that and copy settings to all frames" I thought. Unfortunately, this menu option copies all settings but frame sizes! Tried changing all of them by hand to 24x36mm but this tedious real quick as the sidebar jumps to a different scroll position with each frame selection change. Doing this for thousands of frames does not sound too great either.

Secondly, I expected frame finder to realize that filmstrip holder holds actual strips of film, where 99% of the time frames are the same distance from the border and same distance apart. Yet they're all over the place too and my photos come out cropped at some side. "Allright, I'll just select all frames in a column and set their X coordinate to the same number" I thought. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a way to do that. Manually adjusting frame placement gets tedious fast because it requires zooming in to each frame and that in turn forces a higher-quality rescan.

As a last resort, I thought I would just scan the entire frame holder and do the cropping and frame finding in some other program. Unfortunately, whenever I select an area larger than one fim strip, the entire picture comes out with a strong oceanic blue tint.

At this point I gave up and thought that as a novice SilverFast user should ask for input here. So I'll be glad to hear more seasoned users' advice on how you do your batch scanning. My goal is to have 24x36mm uncropped film frames at the output. How do I coerce "Filmstrip 35 mm holder" frame finder into behaving more rationally?

[LSI_Ketelhohn]

Please make sure you are using our latest update. Otherwise please contact our support through the "Request online support" in the SilverFast help menu.

Kind regards,
Arne

[davidcie]

Yes, using v8.8.0r10. Actually I upgraded from v6 SE only because I found the scanning experience unintuitive and missing features / expected functionality in the SE version. To my unpleasant surprise v8.8 is from my point of view not much of an improvement on this front