Slide Scanning - Your attention please!

Camille Salman (Cosmetology-retired) has enjoyed the quiet time of summer to digitize her slides. The Nikon scanner includes the option to scan one-slide-at-a-time, scan a small stack, or to scan film strips. Camille suggests that the bulk scanning of slides needs your attention. Do not plan on walking away from the equipment and returning to a completed stack. Instead, bring something else to work on while the slides are scanned.

It is important that your slide mounts be in good condition and are matched when scanning a stack. The images will be saved to the hard drive in a folder or sub-folders. The image files will be large! Burn them to a DVD to watch on a DVD player or your computer. Watch the Sunday newspaper inserts for sales on blank DVDs and CDs. So far we have successfully used CD-R, DVD-R and DVD+R media in our computers.

Scanning Slides

Liz Ginzberg, like many instructors, has many 35mm slides that are used during classroom lectures. She was interested in scanning her slide collection and making Powerpoint presentations for classroom and community presentations.

Come by to see our new Nikon Cool Scan can make your slides look good! For your starting point, use these slide scanner process and settings:

1. Create a folder for your work in My Documents > Faculty Files
2. Dust off your slide with canned air
3. Place all slides horizontally in scanner's bulk tray
   
4. Use the Nikon Scanner software
5. Scale to ____ %
6. Review in Adobe Photoshop
7. Save As - TIFF for long term archive (files will be very large - MB = megabytes)
   
8. Batch process for smaller file sizes

Plan on scanning four slides from start through final Powerpoint placement. It would be best to test seeing your scanned photographs projected in a classroom if you have time. Better now while you can adjust your scanning process steps!

Audio Lectures

Several colleagues are already adding recorded lectures to websites for students to review. In future posts I'll catchup with them and report on their approaches to audio lectures. For now, this is a report about what Patty Harris-Jenkinson is discovering for her use of narrated Powerpoint lectures. The equipment used for the test was a Blue Snowball USB microphone and Powerpoint on both Windows and Macintosh. A small setting on PPT for Windows to set sound quality was hard to find at first but critical to better quality audio. One advantage of PPT on a Macintosh is that a presentation can be saved as a Quicktime movie.

Each lecture will be saved in multiple ways: Powerpoint with animations, narrated Powerpoint with animations, Quicktime and Flash. We will compare the Quicktime and Flash versions looking for visual and audio quality and quick download/access times. Ultimately, Patty will upload her movies into her course on our learning management system (Blackboard).

Patty is working out the steps of this process so others will not have to do the same testing and troubleshooting unless they get different audio quality results. We use the New Media Lab, LR 110, to review how presentations look and act on Windows and Macintosh computers and convert presentations to other file formats.

Are you interested in recording audio for your students? Consider using Audacity, it's free. Audacity is an open-source audio editor for Windows, Macintosh and Unix operating systems.