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Hi,

Although we are working in a paperless enviroment
we often need to scan images into the computers...

We currently have an Epson DX700F A4 scanner/printer and a Plustek A3
(both connected to PC's) and we dont use them with TVpaint.the plustek is ok for illustration and comics purposes but it is slow...

What we are looking for is a fast A3 scanner (probably scsi?)
so that we can scan all the artwork for a 12 mins film
(that wil be worked on 2K) resolution,
Since this will be a large project for the studio we will scan ink and paint all the A3 artwork and color the layouts and do additional composition and some animation).
We need to invest on a specific workstation and a fast scanner to scan all the A3 artwork and apply the correct timing from the xsheets on each sequence and scene and then start working on the colors on other workstations...
Another question i have is whether we will have trouble using a Mac Pro for such a task (knowing that there are not many supported scanners for Macs)...(of course the reason leading me to that is the 4Gb ram support from the OS with Tvpaint).
Finally i would like to ask if someone has ever tried snapping the pegged artwork with a high quality digital camera and then import it into tvpaint
for coloring etc...I remember reading a thread that someone was doing this on the tvpaint7 forums...
...thats about it i think ...
thanks for the patience on reading all this..

The last time I worked with paper the scanner we had in the studio was a Fujitsu fi-4750C which we used to scan drawings into ANIMO . The scanner was very fast and produced good quality scans (we scanned at 300 dpi) .
This scanner model seems to be discontinued now, but has been replaced by Fujitsu fi-5750C . We did not use the flatbed part of the scanner, so we leased the Auto Document Feed attachment and just used that part of the scanner to scan our drawings. I don't know if it's possible with the Fujitsu fi-5750C to purchase or lease the ADF as a stand-alone item or if it comes attached to the flatbed part of the scanner.

The disadvantage of the high-speed Fujitsu scanners , like most scanners , is that they don't offer support for Macintosh , so the Twain drivers work best with a PC . We purchased a cheap Dell PC which was dedicated to the task of scanning and that's all we used it for . The Dell was on the same network with the Macs so we could just grab the folders of scanned images and drag them over to the Macs to work on.

Unfortunately, this doesn't answer your question about how it would work for scanning images directly into TVPaint. Hopefully someone from TVPaint support can step in here and discuss recommended scanners or scanner driver specifications . However, for speed I can recommend the high-end Fujitsu ADF scanners such as Fujitsu fi-4750C .
We scanned over 40,000 drawings with very little trouble. I think one time we had to call the Service Technician to come out to fix it , and it turned out to be something very simple to fix. The biggest thing to remember is to constantly clean the rollers or else the graphite dust which accumulates on the rollers (graphite from the drawings) will start to smear the new drawings as they go through the scanner rollers.

We also had an Epson 10000-XL Graphic Arts flatbed scanner , which is an excellent scanner and fairly fast as flatbed scanners go ... but as it turned out was too slow for our production needs, so we moved to the Fujitsu which had a very fast Auto Document Feed . (we kept the Epson flatbed for scanning other artwork, mainly background paintings) There was an ADF attachment available from Epson for the 10000-XL , but I don't remember why we didn't get that and switched over to the Fujitsu ... ? It may have had something to do with the Fujitsu being better to use with ANIMO. Here is the link for the Epson Auto Document Feeder attachment for the 10000-XL flatbed . All in all, I think Epson scanners are more Mac friendly. Again, I'd hope that someone from TVPaint could answer your question about the compatibility between Epson scanner drivers and TVPaint . The information on the Epson page for the 10000-XL shows that the latest drivers are compatible with Mac OS 10.2.8 - 10.4 and Intel Mac OS 10.4.4 or later .

I found that the flatbed version of the Epson 10000-XL always produced very good quality scans and was very easy to use on the Mac platform , so perhaps with the addition of the ADF attachment it would be the best scanner for the job ?

Here at TVPaint we have an "Epson Perfection 3590 Photo" (not really a high-end scanner... only A4 and no ADF) and it works perfectly with our Macs, even thru the network (scanner attached to my dual-G5, scanning with TVPaint on a Mactel iMac).

For PCs, we use the autoloader of our color copier/printer/scanner, an its blazingly fast ! Somewhere around 60 pages per minute (yes, that's a page a second !, even in dual-sided scanning, but that's useless for animation).
It's a Canon iR6800C, but unfortunately no driver for Mac for the scanner part, although the printer part is very well supported on Mac.

Finally I would like to ask if someone has ever tried snapping the pegged artwork with a high quality digital camera and then import it into TVPaint
for coloring etc...I remember reading a thread that someone was doing this on the TVPaint7 forums...

I would like to know that answer to that question, too.
I imagine it would work fine if you had the correct equipment (copystand, lights, pegbar)

It is still fairly easy to find good quality copy stands with lights to mount a digital camera on; then it's simply a matter to add a carefully aligned metal peg bar to the base of the copy stand to hold the drawings in registration.

The most important thing is to find a copy stand with a glass platen attachment (optically pure glass) which will be used to press down on the drawings so that any folds or wrinkles on the surface of the paper will be flattened out and not captured by the camera when an exposure is taken.

It would not be as fast as using an Auto Document Feed scanner, but still not quite as cumbersome as the old days shooting on an Oxberry camera rig .

thanks for the info!!

(i was offline for over a month due to workers tearing apart the studio and me taking time for some brief pause )

We had a similar setup at the last studio i worked with
(fujitsu4750C for PC with USanimation for b&w scans and Epson 1000 for all the rest)

I started doing some tests with our old and cheap PustekA3 and it is really slow...

Anyway if i find anything i will update...!

thanks
j.

I'm making a personal film that utilizes the Fuji Scansnap S500 scanner.

It's great, has ADF, is super fast, but only handles 8.5 x 11 inch paper.
..

c