Using a Portable Scanner at a Live Event

Ever been in the rush of setting up for a live shoot, perhaps in a setting with big image magnification (IMAG) screens, when you realize you don’t yet have the names for titles and credits?

The biggest concern in creating titles, crawls and credits on-site, especially at a graduation or wedding shoot, is the potential to misspell names.

If it’s only one or two names, it’s easy enough to find someone, write down the names and enter those into your TriCaster or other titling system.

But what if it’s 10, 20 or even 100 names? Do you really want to spend an hour typing those names in, right when you’re trying to get cameras set up and connect your streaming encoder to the internet?

Here’s a tip: carry a portable scanner in your field pack.

Chances are that all the names are already available in a printed bulletin or event guide, in the order of appearance, with the names spelled correctly.

Using a portable scanner allows you to lower the effort it takes to get these names into the titling system. Plus, today’s portable scanners are quite small and are USB-powered, meaning they don’t need external power beyond what your laptop or PC-based video mixing system provides.

I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of the paperless office, although I seldom get to the bottom of the piles on my desk, so I’ve used this interest from time to time to review various desktop and portable scanners for my Workflowed blog.

There are several makes and models on the market, ranging from the simple Doxie to the software-integrated NeatWorks/NeatReceipts portable scanner.

Neatworks is part of a full system that scans business cards, documents and receipts, so it’s a good solution if you try to control the deluge of receipts needed for expense reports. Doxie, on the other hand, is a simple scanner that works with integrated software on your Mac or PC to create Acrobat PDF or JPEG documents.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is the key software tool to use with your portable scanner: Neatworks has OCR built in to its software application, while Doxie relies on the programs on your computer, such as Acrobat Pro, ReadIRIS 12, or Abbey FineReader to convert the scanned image into useable text.

While most workflows I review keep the PDF image intact, burying the OCR output beneath the linked image that a user sees, in field production you’ll instead want to convert your OCR output into a separate Word or text document.

This document can then be moved over to the TriCaster or titling system via a USB flash drive, and each line can be copied and pasted into the titling software.

It’s best to check the names against the printed event guide, though, as OCR is not always 100% accurate. For blocks of text, it often averages about 85% accuracy, unless the font is a bit overblown (as may be the case on some wedding programs).

The iPhone approach. For those of you who use an iPhone, there’s an even easier way to convert the files into useable text: take a picture.

I’ll say upfront that snapping a picture clear enough for OCR is a bit of a challenge. The camera on the iPhone 3G/GS is barely adequate for the resolution needed for OCR, and it doesn’t perform well in less than ideal lighting situations. The iPhone 4′s camera, with almost double the resolution of the iPhone 3G’s camera, though, will certainly do the trick.

As with any operation on the iPhone, there’s a manual way to do things, or there’s an app that will do it for you. In this case, the app I suggest is called ScannerPro.

ScannerPro converts images into PDF documents, is capable of doing multi-page PDFs—from multiple images—and can even password protect the PDF.

Once the image is captured and converted into a PDF, the file can be uploaded to Dropbox for simultaneous access on your Android phone, iPhone, and Mac / WIndows laptop or desktop.

Doxie also has the ability to drop scans into Dropbox; I could spend a whole article talking about ways to use Dropbox to enhance your production workflows, but I’ll leave that to you to explore.

In addition to uploading files to Dropbox, Scanner Pro can also Google Docs OCR to convert scans into editable text files on your Google account.”

Google Docs uses OCR based on the GoogleBooks experiment Google is performing, where it scans in many books to make them searchable online.

“OCR works best with high-resolution images, and not all formatting may be preserved,” a blog post on Google’s OCR warns, adding that “the original images will be included in the new document to make it easier for you to correct mistakes. Supported languages include English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.”

So, whether you carry a portable scanner for highly accurate OCR, or choose to take pictures with your iPhone, the end goal is the same: eliminate the need to type in all those names during the last few minutes of a live production setup.

Tim Siglin (tims [at] braintrustdigital.com) is chairman of Braintrust Digital, a digital media production company specializing in training, corporate communication, government, historical preservation, documentary, and business marketing and development. He is a contributing editor to EventDV and Streaming Media.