Transcript
Micah Sargent (0:00)
Coming up on Hands On Tech, let's take a look at how we can keep around really good hardware even if modern software doesn't seem to support it. Stay tuned. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech. This is the show where I, Micah Sargent, take your tech questions and and do my best to answer them. This of course is the way that you get your toughest tech questions answered and you out there who are listening can email us Hot Twitch TV if you have questions of your own. Now, the question that comes in for this week's episode comes in from someone named J.P. and J.P. writes in with the following I work for a dear friend who passed a couple of years back and JP says I'm still helping the family. A well known action sport photographer who shot images from 1960 till about 2020ish. So obviously we were working prior to digital photography. So a majority of his images are in physical slides. I've been helping him scan and print some of his archives. I've run into a computer software slash scanner issue. We've been working with the Hasselblad FT646 and the software. The newer Apple software will not open a dot fff file which is what it produces. The computer I'm running it on is on his legacy Software of Mojave 10.14.6 to be able to keep opening the files. I'm worried about the longevity of the computer and I would love to be able to upgrade it or buy a new one. Do you know of a workaround for a software upgrade since Hasselblad has stopped doing it? Or am I stuck keeping the computer in the past? Or is there another way to scan negatives from 4.5 down to 35 millimeters that compares to the Hasselblad still would like to be able to keep it. So let's start by talking about what's going on here. The fundamental issue that you're experiencing here is the shift in macOS away from 32 bit applications to 64 bit applications. And whereas some out there tried to figure out ways to support both, macOS is an exclusively 64 bit operating system at this time and unfortunately that older software that opened those dot FFF files no longer works because it is still 32 bits and Hasselblad has moved on to new software that is 64 bit macOS. Mojave 10.14 was the last version of macOS to support older 32 bit applications. Catalina 10.15 and all subsequent versions only run 64 bit applications. Flex color was the software at the time that did run and control that Flex tight scanner that you had. And so that's why it doesn't work on a modern Mac. And, you know, moving on to this new focus, Phocus software hasn't updated it. So let's talk about what we can do here. This isn't an uncommon issue for photographers, and it's something that in my research I saw a lot of people experience. And one of the main solutions that I saw is the option to keep the scanner around and keep the hardware around to just be a scanning station. Because that Hasselblad scanner is a phenomenal scanner that is legendary for its ability to process these images. Right? And so it's a great piece of hardware that while it's still working, you shouldn't get rid of. So you can do something called dedicating, which is where you take your PC, in this case the Mac, and you say, this is just going to be the machine and the station that I use for being the scanner of these images or the processor of the scanning. Right? So don't upgrade the OS on this Mac. And then just to keep it safe and secure and to kind of be mindful of the possibility of security breaches and that kind of thing, don't connect it to the Internet, keep it disconnected, just have it connected to that scanner and use the Flex Color software on that computer. But you talked about longevity, you talked about concerns about this machine. So what you're going to want to do is create a complete bootable clone of this Mojave system drive on an external ssd, right? So what you're essentially doing is even if that machine were to die, you could find another machine of that era and be able to use that in its place by having this ssd, this external storage that has it on there. Or if it's just a drive that dies within the Mac, replacing that drive with a new one and then being able to run it from that. There are two applications that many a Mac user use for something like this. Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper will be able to help you out in this situation. So creating essentially clones of the system and give you not just the rest of the system, but also that software that you have. So do that as soon as you possibly, even if you don't decide to dedicate this Mac just yet, get Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper now and get an SSD and make a clone of this system. That's incredibly important because again, you may run into a situation where you can't get that software even anymore. If you were to switch to a new system or this system were to die and, and you try going to Hasselblad's website and turns out, you know, in the next couple of years they've decided to remove the download for it and you can't get access to it anymore. So you want to keep the software, you want to keep this hardware. That's the way to do it. But I've got great news. Very exciting. I told you, I told you that a lot of photographers run into issues like this.