So far in this series we've talked at an overview level, shared the quality differences between different ways of capturing so you can see for yourself and covered some potential buying guides. In this part we're going to assume you have now mostly decided a pathway and are ready to progress to make your first capture.

Getting the most from your player

• Always clean the heads with isopropyl alcohol and cotton buds or even better a chamois bud to ensure they are physically clean
• Be careful cleaning the rubber capstan, clean it lightly, over cleaning will (especially on older decks) make it slip and as a result you won't be able to use the deck until you replace or restore the roller. This happens due to older rubber capstans becoming hard with age and when you clean them too much, the dirt happens to be the only thing that was maintaining consistent grip and as a result you'll have problems with your capture

How to maximise the audio quality

Tape Mould - If a tape has mould on it, not only can it clog up your nice clean heads, but it will also affect the sound and picture quality. It is strongly recommended to do a general clean on these tapes before recording.

Tape Mould and other issues

Depending on your situation, there may be various issues with your tapes that could include mould, sticky tape syndrome, etched plastic housing that can cause tape breakage etc. As the years go by these tapes are going to get worse. If you're concerned about it and want your tapes to last longer, get them cleaned and store them in a dehumidified cabinet.

General Clean

First step here is to do a general external inspection of the tape. If there is white dust like in the picture, you will need to disassemble the tape and clean it. Unfortunately, it's basically impossible to find a tape cleaning device these days, so the only option available to most is to disassemble the tape and clean it by hand.

For this you will need:

• Cotton Buds / Or Chamois Swabs / Microfibre Cloth
• Isopropyl Alcohol
• Screwdriver - preferably Philips
• Can of compressed air
• Spare tape player
• Optional - Blank Cassette tapes that can be undone with a screwdriver

The below outlines the basic process I use:

1. Rewind the tape in the donor player
2. Remove the cassette and disassemble the case (If the case cannot be unscrewed and must be forced open, find a new blank cassette tape that can be unscrewed and transfer the magnetic tape into it. If possible, transfer the tape onto the new spools as well. You can still buy these online in various forms (or just buy some second hand blank tapes - preferably with the plastic seals still on.
3. With the cassette still open, blow away the loose mould with the can of compressed air (recommend do this outside or a place that can be cleaned afterwards)
4. Completely remove the tape spools from the cassette taking care to do so by holding on to the covering plastic protectors on either side. This will help prevent the tape from unravelling
5. Clean the inside of the case with isopropyl on a microfibre cloth. Also clean any spooling rollers, both sides of the plastic covering protectors etc. It's also a good idea to clean the leader path (first few cm's of the tape roll) manually as well as these cannot be cleaned by the remaining steps. Don't forget to clean inside the spool where the tape will go once it's been forwarded as well with isopropyl and I find a microfibre cloth on your finger is quite good.
6. Reassemble the case
7. Insert the tape into the spare cassette player whereby the front casing has been taken off so you can have direct access to the tape path
8. Fold a thin covering of microfibre cloth over a cotton bud and drop a decent amount of isopropyl alcohol onto the end of it, if this is too big, just use a Chamois Swab (though these can be hard to get)
9. Press the isopropyl covered cloth / swab / bud onto the outside facing part of the magnetic tape in the tape path on the right hand side (before it enters into the spool). It's very important to makes sure you do this on the right hand side when fast forwarding or the tape will jumble up and be damaged.
10. Fast forward the tape while holding the swab on the tape, until the end of the tape is reached. If you feel you need to add more isopropyl, you can do that by stopping part way and re-applying or another system of your devising
11. Once at the end of the tape, remove and disassemble again
12. From here, repeat from step 3 -8, except this time for step 8 put the microfibre cloth on the left hand side of the tape path (before it enters back into the spool and rewind. Like before it's very important to be on the left hand side to avoid damaging the tape
13. Open the cassette one last time and do step 3 again
14. Completed

Tip 1: It's safest to wear a full-face respirator with ABEK2P3 filters. Most types of mould can be hazardous to your health and should never enter your lungs or eyes, wash/wet clean your mask before removing it and showering. 

Tip 2: Practice this first on an unimportant tape. It's easy for the tape to unravel and end up in a mess.

Tip 3: If you see parts of the tape are coming off or the tape is making screetching sounds, you probably have sticky tape syndrome. To fix this, it requires baking your tape. For more information on currently identified tapes exhibiting this problem please see the Wikipedia article on the topic.

Tip 4: You will find a point where you can rest one finger on the player somewhere as a nice steady point while you hold your finger and cloth over the tape. Yes this is a bit hacky, but I haven't found a better way, please do let me know if you find one!

Once this is complete, you should now have a clean deck to play your tapes in and mould free tapes to give you the best audio quality possible.

You are now ready to do an actual capture!

NEXT: Capturing Analog Video Tapes - Part V - Capturing! (Coming soon)

Oh, and I also fixed the annoying footer at the bottom of the community forums.

D.A based in Auckland, New Zealand customer services go be on normal services. Highly Recommended.

D.A based in Auckland, New Zealand customer services go be on normal services. Highly Recommended.

Foreword

Capturing analog pictures, can be a slow and painstaking process if you want to do it right. Therefore, depending on your need, I will list the three personas in recommendations and procedures where it is meaningful to do so. If you do not know what I'm talking about yet, there is a brief page outlining personas here.

Unlike capturing some other analog media, photography capturing equipment is still reasonably available. I say reasonably because we are now getting into a situation where some of the (still sold) equipment such as high end Epson Scanners are seemingly not being further developed, the software is getting older and I'm not sure if we will start to see the market pull away from quality scanners at the high end due to market change. There will I think be a continuing need for some middle of the range gear for some time but if this suits an archivists need to bulk import e.g. a large number of 120mm negatives from your grandfathers photo stash (like I did), I could not say.

Storage

While not as demanding as video tends to be, you can use a surprisingly large amount of disk space if your focus is to archiving photos in high quality. Some may argue this is cheap however other things come into it too. If you archive at high resolutions and are scanning negatives for example, this can be very slow at high quality, which then needs more expensive scanners. Furthermore, you may find that you need to then create a second copy of lower quality images for sharing and figure out how to distribute the images to others in the family. And storage isn't just about today, it's about tomorrow. The longevity of storage media such as USB sticks is limited and requires you to re-copy it after some years in order to stop it from degrading. I cover long term storage options elsewhere on this site.

Methodology Overview

As I've said in my other posts there is always more than one way to do a task and capturing analog photography is no exception. And on top of that there is more than one type of analog image format to scan and not all scanners do all formats. For example, it is relatively niche to get a scanner that scans negatives. Also, if you just have a few paper photos you can get away with a relatively cheap scanner such as one that comes with your printer. If you have a lot of photos, you get to choose between how many years you are prepared to be scanning on weekends for, how much you're going to pay someone else to do it or how much you're willing to meet in the middle, e.g. buy your own device and save yourself some time. The methodology we use (which we will go over later) will depend somewhat upon what kind of format you need to ingest, how much of it you have and how much you care about the resulting output.

Differences in Equipment

Scanners

There can be a large difference in the quality and capability of scanner hardware. On the cheaper end of the spectrum, the all in one scanner / printer / fax devices seem to do a good job. However, they tend to have lower scan resolution, cheaper sensor types and limited colour depth. On the other hand a dedicated scanner (even on the cheaper end) tend to have at least double the scan resolution, have much better sensors, handle depth of field better (good for books) have higher colour depth and include extra features such as dust and scratch removal and film scanning capability.

Here's a quick table to help visualise that better:

Summary Equipment Needed

Paper Photo Equipment

Paper photos have the most widely available or easiest to obtain hardware of all the analog formats to capture. This is because there is no ageing mechanical playback device needed to play them back before you capture them. Have a look at the buying guide (TBC) after reading this for some suggestions on what to purchase.

• For the Impatient - Use either an All in one existing printer / scanner on top of your printer, or take them to a photo house which you can pay to scan them. If you're up for spending a bit of money and have quite a few photos, have a look at a Dedicated High Speed Paper Scanner such as the Epson FastFoto FF-680W, I did several thousand of mine using one of these in a single day.
• For the Libran - A mix. I'd get a dedicated scanner such as the v850 pro for special photographs that you want to have at high quality and a high speed scanner as well if you have thousands of others. If you notice something special, you can always scan that one again later. Bonus is the v850 pro can be used for your negative scanning as well
• For the perfectionist - A high end dedicated scanner that has the most colour depth and best sensor. Plus the high speed scanner too because even if you want perfection, I doubt you can spend the time required to scan that many photographs manually. Another option is to find a photo house to pay to do it, but the ones I've seen so far use the same high speed scanner mentioned here.

Negative and Slide Equipment

• For the Impatient - Take them to a dedicated photo scanning shop. There are basically no 'fast' options you can do at home, unless you only have a small number of negatives, in which case it's not worth buying a negative scanner anyway.
• For the Libran - Get a high end consumer scanner such as the Epson v850 Pro NZD$1900, there are not really any quality equivalents in this price range (or if you find one, let me know)!
• For the perfectionist - Plustek OpticFilm 120. This is a dedicated film scanner that can't do any paper scans (unlike the Epson v850 pro), however it's 2-3x the price at NZ$2500-3000. If money is no object a Hasselblad Flextight X1/X5 virtual drum scanner. Super high dynamic range but depending on the model NZD$15,000-25,000.

There are other options which may suit you better highlighted in the buying guide later in the series, the options above are chosen because they're still readily available new.

Next: Capturing Analog Photography into Digital Formats - Part II - Capture Differences