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Best shipping method?

Mon Feb 05, 2007 12:56 pm

I'm almost ready to ship my first big show to my brother who lives in another state. I've been working on it for more than a year so I want it to arrive safely and before their anniversary next week.

I was planning to wrap it in a DVD box (sold at the post office), then pack that in one of the small shipping boxes from the P.O.

Do I need to mark the package in any way to tell the handlers to please not drop it in water or send it through an x-ray machine in transit? :shock:

Is there anything else I need to know -- or is this no different than shipping anything else?

Thanks,
Jen

Mon Feb 05, 2007 1:38 pm

I mailed several dvds to my family (one who lives in Al.) with no problem through the post office and I just use bubbled envelopes. To play it safe you may want to mark the box "dvd".

Re: Best shipping method?

Mon Feb 05, 2007 2:13 pm

Jenn wrote:...I was planning to wrap it in a DVD box (sold at the post office), then pack that in one of the small shipping boxes from the P.O.

Do I need to mark the package in any way to tell the handlers to please not drop it in water or send it through an x-ray machine in transit? :shock:

The x-ray scanners won't hurt it, nor will much else they can do to it short of shredding it or cutting it in two. If you're nervous about it, send it priority mail with a tracking number (50c extra) so you can see that it got there and when. Insurance won't get you anything so skip that.

One thing I would do for something that important is send two--one package with two DVDs. Unless your family is a lot different from mine, the most likely source of damage isn't in the mail, it's after it gets there. :!:

Mon Feb 05, 2007 3:12 pm

FedEx or UPS, if you want it to get there for sure, and on a tight schedule.

Mon Feb 05, 2007 7:22 pm

Thanks everyone. I will ship with confidence!

Jen

Mon Feb 05, 2007 7:32 pm

I have mailed a number of DVD's around without any problem. The
standard DVD case fits snugly inside a #0 "Jiffylite cushioned mailer"
They are just a brown padded envelope designed to protect stuff.
You can get them at any office supply store and I have not had any
complaints from people. If you really want to be safe, mail two of
them several days apart so they don't get run over by the same
truck each time ... :lol:

mikey

Fri Feb 09, 2007 9:12 am

:lol: Mikey.... yeh, best to be prepared for that worst case scenario!

I shipped only one because I had already deleted the ISO file before I backed up my show files, and didn't feel like recreating it again on the night I was preparing the package for shipment. Hubby bought a bubble package at the post office and mailed it in that.

Thanks,
Jen

Fri Feb 09, 2007 9:20 am

For what it's worth, I think I'd keep the ISO around for a
while (I do). Unless you are making LOTS of different
shows or are really cramped for disk space, it isn't that
big (well for today's disks -- I still remember how HUGE
the 1.2 megabyte floppy was that I had ... errr still have
downstairs actually :lol: ). Last couple of drives I got
were 400 gig Seagates at Fry's on sale for $120 each.

mikey

Fri Feb 09, 2007 7:01 pm

Mikey, I already recreated the ISO night before last and burned a new copy to DVD. I will keep it at least until the remainder of them are burned (for the rest of the family) and, you're probably right, I may as well leave it, it's not taking up a lot of room.

From 1.2 MB to 400 GB!!! Amazing!

Jen

Fri Feb 09, 2007 9:22 pm

Amazing is right. 20 years ago storage was a 160KB floppy. Now we're >160Gigabytes -- that's a factor of a million or a factor of a thousand per decade. :shock: If that continues, and there's good reason to think it will, that means we'll be dealing 160 TeraByte drives in another decade. 8)

Fri Feb 09, 2007 10:41 pm

Imagine all the pictures we could store on that 160 TB drive! :wink:

Sat Feb 10, 2007 7:05 am

About the same number of pix as now :lol:
Back then a scanned (we didn't have digital cameras yet)
picture was maybe 100k - now many of our digital
cameras shoot at between 3 and 10 megs per picture
depending on the mode ... and sensor sizes and number
of megapixels are still increasing !! Look how big a
psd file is where you have been making lots of changes.
Many people who scan slides with the high rez scanners
talk about 40-50 meg scans (although I don't understand
why). Disk space is like garage space -- you will fill
whatever you have :lol:

mikey

Sat Feb 10, 2007 6:41 pm

Mikey - Yep. I wasn't looking at it from that angle. Thanks. :)

Sat Feb 10, 2007 9:03 pm

gpsmikey wrote:Many people who scan slides with the high rez scanners talk about 40-50 meg scans (although I don't understand why).
mikey

For film scanning, you have to scan at very high res if you want to end up with all the info on the slide/negative and get a scan that will print large. In my (limited) experience so far, 2400PPI is really minimum recommended, 3600 is better with Kodachrome slides. Doing the math on a ~1.5 sq in image scanned at 2400PPI, 24, 36 or 48 bit color depth will give a raw scan in the 25-100MB range and I want to save the result as an TIFF with lossless compression. Typical file sizes have been in the 20-40MB range. And that's why two 260GB drives and a 300GB external aren't a luxury at all. One of my "round tuit" projects is scanning the several thousand 35mm slides neatly filed behind me and slowly deteriorating. :(

Sun Feb 11, 2007 6:35 am

Thanks Dick -- yeah, I understand the math, it just seems
odd that I can get all I want from a 3 meg pix from my
Nikon D70s, but I am supposed to go to 40 megs from
a slide from an older camera that did not have the lens
my Nikon does. True, some film used to have HIGH
resolution (I used to play with Kodak High Contrast Copy
film - a BW Pancromatic ASA 64 film that if you missed
by a half stop either way, you got either black or clear
negatives. The grain structure on that film was astounding
though and Kodak indicated the "degree of enlargement"
was usually limited by the optics, not the grain.)
Where that film excelled was for aerial photography which
is notoriously "flat" - really worked cool shooting down
on a good day from a couple of thousand feet !!

I miss the smell of fixer in the morning :D

mikey
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