Hi All
I have just finished scanning Mike Ma's 'Hong Yuan' Collection epic book of Suo Zhenhai's VMIPBs.
It's called " Magic In Hand"
This book was reviewed in the ICSBS Journal about a year ago and several of us made efforts to buy copies via China Amazon-like websites. Misu bought a few copies in BJ for Forum members, and so did I for some Singapore members . But it's a very big book ( 12" x 12 " square and 1 " thick @ 270 pages ) so it's very heavy : 4.8 lb = 2.2kg . No joke to carry in luggage !
Hard copies are still hard to come by, but David Osborne is (as far as I know) still taking subscriptions for a bulk buy for the American continent. If I was travelling frequently to BJ as in the past I would be glad to buy copies and ship out from HK, but I'm no longer doing those trips , and frankly the work involved to package books individually for international shipping is a lot. It takes on average an hour to pack a book properly, and then there's the queue at the post office.
Therefore I have scanned the complete book for posterity ( Apologies to Mike Ma if he is reading this, but I'm sure he would like the record of his amazing collection to be distributed far beyond where his book can travel)
But scanning is a loooooooong and haaaaard process...
Our HK office has a super-professional work station that photo-copies/ prints/ scans / whatever. It's a huge machine and every time I use it I have to remember how to program it for the hi- res scans I need (typically 2MB for an A4 page in color). It takes on average 30 seconds to scan a page - the majority of which time is the physical effort and time to lift up and open the book, and centre it squarely on the scanner (nothing is worse than a scan that is 5-10 deg off square) because the scan process itself only takes a couple of seconds.
I always cuss myself over this stage because I get tired towards the end of a 1 -2 hour scan marathon and don't make the effort to place the book properly on the scanner. A few extra seconds effort / page at this preliminary stage saves tens of minutes / page later to do the corrections and re-scans
But then comes the really hard work, because every page has to be cropped and titled. That can take several hours , especially because for ease of scanning half the pages are best to be scanned upside down and so finally must be turned back through 180 deg by software .
The objective is to make every title number the same as the actual page number. I have learned a few short-circuit tricks to do all these things, but even the Microsoft Picture Manager program (standard with Windows) takes about 30-60 seconds time to execute a crop and/ or rotate . ( Hint : crop and complete
before you rotate ! Otherwise you lose half the pic )
Then strange inexplicable things start to happen - some pics go fuzzy after cropping, some pics don't crop properly and have to be re-cropped.... and some pics just vanish forever - don't ask me how or where they go , but it happens: the title remains but the pic is a total blank (Golden rule: create
at least two back-up files of the the complete scan before ever starting to crop and rotate) .
Then one finds that despite one's best efforts some scans are not exactly square so the bad pages must be re-scanned and slotted back in the page sequence. And then one finds one has missed out a couple of pages so all the subequent page numbers are out of step ( hint : watch the machine scan serial numbers and make sure they increase in line with the actual page numbers) .
And .. and... and !
Anyway the end result is two things :
1. A beautiful scan which one can pass on to others free of charge (This SZH scan is over 500 MB. )
2. Because of all the problems and checks and re-scans one ends up viewing every page over and over again during the 6 - 8 hour job of cropping and titling, which literally forces one to really study every pic in detail.
That's a lot better than buying a book, flicking through the pages casually for half an hour, and then leaving it on the bookshelf for the next few years unless for reference!
So although it has taken me about 8 - 10 hours to do this whole scan, that's 8-10 hours of concentrated work looking at Suo Zhenhai's amazing art work.
Well worth the time and effort ! If any of you ( Richard ? ) start to scan your books please feel free to contact me for some useful tips
The Data Base took thousands of hours to create : every pic was either scanned or downloaded. But that meant I studied every pic which you can now pull up in a microsecond once the Data Base is downloaded to your hard disc. Happy for you to have this convenience : that's what the BD was created for. And of course I use the DB pro-actively myself several times as day as my personal archiving system.
But putting together the DB and studying every pic was my real personal reward
Cheers
Peter
PS : The SZH book is now in the latest version of the DB