Film Archives: Needs and Requirements
In the D-Cinema Age

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Nicola Mazzanti
Consultant, Film Archiving and Preservation
FIAF Technical Commission

Paul Read
M.Sc., Ph.D., FBKSTS. Paul Read Associates (UK)
Consultant Film and Digital Cinema Post-Production
FIAF Technical Commission

Journalists, technologists and now chief executives of film manufacturing organizations are predicting the demise of film in favour of digital cinema projection within a few years. When that will occur is still uncertain, but when it does the increased cost of print making, even if still possible, will increase the intrinsic value of all film elements and restrict archives (and all distributors) to digital formats for virtually all access and display.

With this change come several new imperatives and the archives member of the ACE (the European Association of Film Archives) engaged in defining challenges and issues in finding potential practical solutions to some of these problems. The first step of this work consisted in defining user requirements through a survey of film archives’ needs and aspirations:

1. In the medium term, but perhaps very soon, there needs to be some universal open access route for storing our digital versions of film, able to generate whatever version is required for access. This package should hold data that makes its D-cinema output, whether for in-house or distributed us, a near-authentic reproduction of the many characteristic film systems and formats of the cinema’s 110years. Many aspects must be respected; for example the visual and aural characters of original image quality, photographic system, format, frame rate, aspect ratio, resolution equivalence, and projection conditions. The package should also be able to output lower quality versions for all other access purposes.

2. Archives already hold many digital versions of their film holdings and need to be able to access all these in a common parallel and browse-able manner too.

3. In parallel with increasing digital access will be diminishing conventional film projection; content will then represent the cinema alone. Linking the digital content with their film origins is descriptive metadata, and a new (or almost new) metadata not so far widely recorded. Metadata will become the only link with visual and aural characters of original film cinema, and these may only be retained as “technical metadata”. This data hardly exists in film archives today. It needs to reach back to record how the original process operated, pass through the elements digitized and the digitization process, and stretch into the digital chain used for restoration, format conversions, compression and every piece of data manipulation .

4. If archives are to retain tangible links with the film origins and create, manage and utilize this technical metadata archivists will need to be trained to understand the original film technology, in all its vast complexity and variation, as well as the content’s digital future.

A remaining issue still waits for an answer: when film in archives finally decays and no alternative preservation route is available the transfer to a digital version for its long term preservation will be essential. There is at present no alternative technology, and this technology has no long term security in any way comparable to the storage in optimum conditions of analogue photochemical film.

 

Nicola Mazzanti
Nicola Mazzanti has been active in the field of film archiving and restoration for over 20 years, starting as a Film Archivist, and as a founder and director for over 10 years of the Bologna Film Festival, dedicated to film history and preservation.

As a preservationist, he founded and directed an internationally renowned film restoration laboratory, and in this capacity he is responsible for the analog or digital restorations of hundreds of silent and sound films. He also teaches and writes about theory and practice of film archiving and restoration, and is a Member of the Technical Commission of the International Federation of Film Archives. Currently he is an independent consultant in Europe and in the US on major projects involving the transition of traditional Film Archives to Digital technologies for preservation and access.

Paul Read
Paul Read joined Kodak Ltd in the UK in 1960 (after studying chemistry, biology and mathematics at University College, London), working in applied research, teaching, lecturing and commissioning technical motion picture film facilities throughout Europe and Asia. In the 1960's, Paul spent two years at Eastman Kodak in the USA, with Ph.D. studies at RIT in (photographic) chemical engineering. He joined Kay Laboratories in London as Operations Director in 1973, and in 1979 set up as an independent technical consultant specializing in project and technical management of new technology in the film and TV industry. Since then, clients have included companies, government departments in many countries, the courts and insurance companies, with visiting teaching posts in universities.

Since 1989, a long term interest in archive film lead to the legal guardianship of the British Pathé collection, membership of the Gamma Group, and involvement with the EU project Archimedia on behalf of a London client, Soho Images, and technical consultant on film restorations, initially using conventional film, now digital techniques. Since 1997 clients have included digital intermediate feature film post-production companies in Europe. Consultant on several European Union film research projects including FIRST, 2000-2003, and EDCine, 2006-current. Member of FIAF Technical Commission. Fellow of BKSTS.Author of many papers on motion picture technology and archive film restoration, including A Short History of Cinema Film Post-production, Polzer, Potsdam 2006, and, with Mark-Paul Meyer, Restoration of Motion Picture Film, Butterworth Heineman, Oxford, 2000.