How is everyone going about scanning your film the first time through (low res index scans)? I’ve tried making jpegs out of camera, but NLP doesn’t like them. Are you scanning RAW and then batch-exporting to smaller jpegs? Any tips to make this a smooth and fast process? I shoot fairly decent volume, so full size RAWs of every frame will fill up my drive pretty quickly.
Question of balance between effort and drive space. I usually copy all negatives off the film and then trash the ones with obvious flaws before converting.
Index prints can be made from B&W conversions too. Many of my negatives are B&W anyway.
I’ve been all color lately, so the sizes get up there pretty quickly. My current process is to just run each new roll through the camera with the Valoi easy35 (fast!), then convert, export to jpeg, delete the raws. Works fine, but I was wondering if I was missing a more efficient way.
Back in the day I had one of those tabloid-size Epson scanners with the film lid, so I would drop a whole PrintFile page down and set a Vuescan grid over it to automatically scan each frame individually. That was efficient, although the color was generally iffy.
HDD space is rather cheap, so I never delete keeper RAW’s. Ofcourse I drop scraps.
I find scanning second time to get raw back is much more time consuming than dealing with digital files.
I use 23MB sensor what I find reasonable resolution for 35mm film. So 1TB HDD/SSD fits ~40.000 RAW’s. May I ask what is your RAW file size? Maybe it’s…overcompensating 
My scanning camera s 42MP, so about 85mb per raw. It could work , but the nature of first 'preview" scans is fast and not very careful, so I’d like to minimize those, and then carefully scan the best shots.
Hmm, interesting workflow. As I usually work with customer material what is 30+ years old, I don’t really do “not very careful”, so that could be the thing why I don’t see benefit of second scanning round.
For that 42MP sensor I’d suggest to check out Vlad’s test targets - just to validate that this extra MP really helps. What lens do you use?
Random suggestion, but at least something - that 42MB sounds like Sony A7R2, so maybe for “testshots” crab like A7 mark 2 or similar ~20+ MB cheap body? In my area those go around 600€.
I’m using a Sigma 70mm Art lens on the A7R2.I think I would just keep the current workflow rather than buy a second camera. Honestly, it’s not until I started looking into camera scanning that I heard about people doing full res scans of every frame! It was always contact sheet (or low res flatbed/lab scans), then scan or wet print the selects. I guess things have shifted a bit.
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If you want to save some space use compressed RAW format of your camera. At low ISO is indistinguishable and the WB keeps working the same. Anyway scanning twice is a waste of time, IMO, so I don’t see the point of the low red jpg scanning.
I think that two passes would take less time overall. When I make a final scan, I carefully grain-focus (opening up the aperture) and check the histogram, etc. If I did that on every frame, it would take forever.
Have you compared this manual approc to aputure priority with autofocus?
I run iso 100, f8.0, auto shutter (with my light it stays somewhere around 11/25-1/200) and I use autofocus.
Tested with Vlad’s targets - I can’t get better result manually.
I use auto everything, but on final scans I lock the focus wide open. I have not seen any focus shift after stopping back down. I adjust exposure comp so the red channel is not clipped, but is otherwise all the way to the right.