No scanner? Use your phone
MIXD lets you capture painted contact sheets with your phone camera. No flatbed, no upload, a QR code and a file.
- Product
The question we got asked most was "do I need a scanner?" For a long time the answer was yes. Plenty of people don't own one these days, and hauling forty wet pages to a copy shop is no fun.
So we shipped phone capture. You still print, then paint the sheets. Capture now happens on the phone in your pocket.
How it works
- Upload your video to MIXD and select Phone camera before you print.
- Print the sheets. Page one has a QR code up top, with frames under it.
- Paint, scratch, collage, whatever you like. Just keep the gutters between the frames clean.
- Scan the QR code on page one with your phone. MIXD opens in the phone browser.
- Hold your phone over the pages. MIXD picks up every frame that is sharp and fully in view, straightens it, and counts it. You don't tap a button for each frame.
- Download the
.mixdfile, put it on your computer (AirDrop, cable, email to yourself), and drop it into MIXD.
After that it behaves like a scan. Frames stay in the right order and you export the video.
Nothing gets uploaded
The whole thing runs on the phone. It finds the frames, crops them, and packs them into an encrypted .mixd file. No server sits in the middle and you don't need an account on the phone. You copy the file over yourself. A bit old school, we know. Better that than storing your artwork on our servers.
Tips for a clean capture
- Light counts more than the phone. Daylight or a lamp from the side, not straight on, so the paint doesn't glare.
- Get close enough that a few frames fill the screen. You can shoot the whole sheet at once too, MIXD captures every frame it sees.
- Missed a frame? Scan again and download another file. Files from the same session merge and skip frames you already have.
- If a frame is still gone, MIXD holds the previous frame there so the video doesn't skip.
Still have a scanner?
Keep using it. Scanner is still the default, and a flatbed works with phone-mode sheets too. Include page one in the batch so MIXD can tell which session the frames belong to.
If this is new to you, start with how to print video frames to paint on.