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For People Crazy About 2D Animation!

Acme Punched! is for people crazy about 2D animation. It may be enjoyed by beginners and others, but it is aimed at animators who know already something about the process of animation and the basics of character animation. In large part, it will attempt to provide a deep look into the problem solving that goes on in my head as I work out a scene, often in step-by-step posts that I will sometimes enter in "real time", without knowing in advance what the outcome will be. Mistakes and false starts will not only be included but emphasized, so that the creative process of animation will be portrayed realistically. And, while my own bias is for 2D drawn animation, many of the effects and principles discussed here can apply to CGI 3D animation as well. I hope the blog will prove useful and instructive for all.

-Jim Bradrick

Sunday, January 13, 2013

No. 26, Scanner Trouble

Mountain Lion Can Be Dangerous!


I am a long-time Mac user, and I felt I had gone too long without upgrading my operating system.  Last month I was still on plain Leopard, which was three upgrades behind.  Software was beginning to appear on the market that would not run on Leopard, so I had to first move up to Snow Leopard before I could move on to anything else.  But then I was able to leap over Lion to the current system, Mountain Lion.  Up to date once again, I could breathe a sigh of relief, until...

Until I attempted to scan a drawing.  First it crashed Photoshop, repeatedly.  Photoshop CS4 is what I have always used to import images from my scanner, a Mustek large-format flatbedl, the model A3 USB 1200 Pro.  I recently wrote glowingly about this scanner in my post Drawings Into Digital: Part 1--Scanning.  That was in early November of last year.

A paperless drawing.  Yes, I can do them, but I still want my scanner back!


Now I am out on a limb.  It turns out that Mustek does not have drivers for their scanners which work on OS 10.7 (Lion) or 10.8 (Mountain Lion).  For me, this is bad news.  My Epson Stylus CX5000 all-in-one (scanner, printer, copier) also will not work in scanning mode, but I could replace it for about US$80.  I can't replace my Mustek large format scanner so easily, and it is very important to my work.  As an animator who works on standard animation paper, which is 10 1/2" x 12 1/2", I have to have a large format scanner to get my hundreds--sometimes thousands--of drawings into the computer efficiently and in correct register.

My hope is that Mustek will soon provide the needed drivers, and I will be back in business.  My hope is that it is fair to say that they do not yet have the drivers--but that they soon will.

Anyway, for now I hope other Mac users who depend on their scanners will be alerted to this problem.  I will be posting some warnings on Linked In animation group sites also.

2 comments:

  1. Did you ever get a scanner driver to run your Mustek
    on Mac OS 10.8 ? Let me suggest you try VueScan.

    www.hamrick.com

    VueScan will work with most scanners. Another suggestion is to use one of the Brother line of 11" x 17" scanners such as the MFC-J651 DW or similar Brother scanners like the MFC- J6710 DW . You can find them for around $200.00 on Amazon.com .

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  2. Hi, David. Thank you for your comment and suggestions. Yes, I did find a solution; look for details in a new post I will be writing either today or tomorrow (May 29 or 30).

    ReplyDelete