High-Speed Scanning of 16mm / 35mm Microfilm, Microfiche, and Aperture Cards

All scanning is performed by Creekside's manufacturer-trained personnel on the latest generation of high-speed microfilm scanners.

• Auto Document Detect
• Color Depth
  • Bitonal (black and white)
  • 256-Color Grayscale
• Gamma Correction
• Processing
  • Sharpen
  • Despeckle
  • Crop
  • Deskew
  • Rotation
  • Black Border Removal
• Resolution: 100 -- 600 dpi (depending on application)
• Image File Formats
  • TIFF (monochrome / uncompressed / multi-page)
  • JPEG
  • CALS
  • PDF
  • PNG
  • JPEG 2000
  • many others -- contact us for details

Batch Processing Services

If you've already scanned your documents to digital files, we can make them better. Of course, Creekside Digital can also apply these processing options to scans we create for you from your microfilm.

Black Border Removal / Deskew

Often, raw images coming off of a scanner will be crooked and have black borders showing around the edges of the original document scan. This wastes disk space by making the document files larger than they need to be, and reduces Optical Character Recognition accuracy. Creekside Digital can remove the black borders from around your scans and straighten the document at the same time, which results in smaller file sizes that will be processed more accurately by OCR. And yes, we can process grayscale and colors images, with absolutely no loss of quality!

Before black border removal		After black border removal

Optical Character Recognition

Unlock the data in your scans! Creekside Digital can run Optical Character Recognition to create a layer of searchable text from your raw images. While the typical output of the OCR process is a PDF file with an invisible layer of text under the original image, the text content can also be exported in many other formats including raw text, Excel, and XML. Creekside Digital has OCR’d millions of documents for our customers, and we have the experience and capacity to handle jobs of any size.

Bitonal Conversion / Downscaling / Format Shifting

If you don’t need all of your documents to be color or grayscale, or stored at the high resolution at which they were originally scanned, Creekside Digital can help! Our batch conversion services can process thousands of images an hour to quickly reduce color depth, decrease resolution, and shift file formats – resulting in smaller files which open faster and take up less disk space to store.

PDF Compression

Using new PDF/A Compact technology, Creekside Digital can process your existing documents using PDF Compression software to reduce the size of your PDF files by 85% or more compared to standard PDF files – while retaining full resolution and color depth.

Lossless Scanning and Auditing

For older or poor quality film (unfortunately often used to store valuable historical records), an additional quality control step is usually necessary and highly recommended to ensure the complete capture of the reel and proper framing of images during the “cutting” process.  This process involves initially scanning the entire reel as a single “ribbon” image and then presenting a series of suggested detected frames to the scanner operator, who visually inspects the ribbon frame-by-frame to ensure the content is properly captured. 

Auditing a roll of 16mm microfilm -- click for detail

The operator has the opportunity to make adjustments and corrections to the frames before the final cut process.  This eliminates the possibility of the two most common problems with automated scanning – skipped images and incorrect cropping.  Furthermore, images can be processed independently of one another (e.g., to extract detail from a particularly dark frame). The ribbon can be saved in case any future changes are required.  Ask around -- few microfilm digitization vendors today have this capability.

Manual Tagging / Transcription

 In order to make raw digital content searchable, it must be tagged.  This is relatively trivial with type-based content such as newspapers, but can be a challenge with other types of records.  Often it is not possible to automate this process with older microfilm or film including handwritten / cursive script documents, and humans must manually transcribe and enter the documents’ content. 

Media

Digitized content can be delivered on a variety of physical media.  Note: FTP transfer is typically NOT an option due to the time and bandwidth required to transfer large binary files.  Types of media available include:

• CDs (700 MB max)
• DVDs (4.7 / 8.5 GB max)
• USB hard drives
• Others – contact to discuss