I just tried something today and I think it ended up pretty well…what do you think?
I figured out how to get the full holo pattern of any card and make it into a gif.
I am now planning to archive my personal collection in this manner so the actual holo pattern of each card is fully visible from a single image.
Now my business question…Is anyone here interested in having their collection archived in this way and/or willing to pay for it? It did take me quite a bit of time to get all of this figured out and it does take a while to do, but I am trying to gauge whether I could turn this into a side-business, or am I all alone here in thinking that this is really cool and no one else would want a digital copy of their collections like this?
Anyway, thanks for taking a look!
danakinzero
Edit: adding a few more that I have done now…still figuring out how to standardize the case appearance and exact sizing
Edit2: Did a raw card and was able to capture printlines for even greater details and condition recording of cards.
That is sick man. I have a lot of hard drives since I hoard a lot of data and this would be interesting. I tried something like this with different lighting patterns and mirrors to achieve that kind of thing but never thought of putting it into a gif. I would be interested.
This one took 5 hours today, but that was because there was a huge learning curve to figuring it all out on both the hardware and software side. I am going to try another card tomorrow and see if I can get that time down to an hour or two. I know I will be able to make it more efficient, but I don’t know by how much yet, I am just so excited that it worked and I had to share!
I can keep you all updated as I go and then I can have a better idea of what a fair price would be for both parties if anyone was really interested.
Probably something like a lower price per card, but a 10 card minimum or something like that.
This is great, I was thinking about trying something like this with a scanner but since you can’t really change the angle of the light (as far as I know), you have to take multiple scans with the card slightly tilted and somehow interpolate the images.
The way you’ve done it here is really nice, I’d recommend reversing the frames instead of looping back to the beginning to make it smoother
I can definitely make a perfect loop, it will just take more refinement.
This one took ~5 hours, but a lot of that was first-time experimenting. I am going to try again tomorrow and see how fast I can do it start to finish. I am guessing 1-2 hours for the next one and then I will work on making the process more efficient after I know it can be replicated.
I definitely hadn’t gotten that far with my thinking on it, but other TCGs too is an excellent consideration.
Definitely doable, I should be able to loop it properly as I get everything finalized, but I think just reversing the series for a “perfect” loop would actually look better, because then with the swirls you get to see them spinning clockwise and counterclockwise which is fun =) Thanks for the suggestion!
For the business side of things – I think this would be something cool to offer at like worlds or conventions… Since people could bring their cards to you and have you do it. I just know some people might not be willing to send a $10,000 card to you for scans even if it is amazing… if it makes sense?
That is a great thought! If/when they have meetups again, I will definitely try to make that happen!
That was one of the first things that I thought of is that the $$$$$+ cards people would not want to necessarily ship off and risk it getting lost just for digital archiving, but going to the large gatherings would be a great solution for the higher value cards!