Interview With The LOC Film Preservation Library Supervisor

[misteranalog]

Interview With The LOC Film Preservation Library Supervisor:

http://library.creativecow.net/weissman ... congress/1" target="_blank

[momsne]

Very interesting article by Ken Weissman, well written and full of interesting facts. There is one technical faux pas though, concerning the difficulties associated with transferring films to digital media. The Library of Congress should and easily could convert its film library to an .avi format like XviD, .mkv or .mp4 for backup purposes. Thousands of those digital movie files can be stored on a single 4TB external hard drive. Each film as an individual digital file with the title name and other identifying information. Nothing beats 35mm nitrate film for image quality but 900 feet or more reels of film take up a lot of storage space and are costly to move in large quantities. If I can downsize movies on DVDs I bought to XviD files that I then store on a 32GB microSDHC flash memory card, the LOC should have guys there who can digitize their film reels of old movies to a digital format. Twenty movies in XviD format, recorded at 1,500 KBit/s, can fit on 32GB microSDHC card smaller than your thumbnail. Movies that will play back in DVD quality. Using same microSDHC cards you find in smartphones. All the LOC has to do is look at the widespread use of bit torrent files on the Internet. And microSDHC cards never catch fire. They sure are easy to misplace, though.

[pookybear]

Not this again. <.<

Same old dreams of how easy it is to do it in digital. Most unfortunately all the formats you mentioned are
consumer formats and none that are archival. Movies in archival formats take up terabytes of space on
servers not megabytes on a thumbdrive. >.>

Pookybear

[Spiny Norman]

Yes, you may be a bit too quick in calling that a faux pas. Those compressed formats are derivatives (if that is the correct term) for end use. Oh, I admit, for various purposes it would be an extremely handy thing to have digital copies of everything. But you need a "rich master" to fall back on.

The problem is partly changing formats or changing insights. Already you mention 3 file types. A few years from now there will be another popular video compression. Are they to re-encode everything at that point?
If they'd thought like that 30 years ago then the entire film collection would now only exist on betamax. Or betamax, copied to VHS, copied to DVD... and that would tell.
EYE in Amsterdam had many silents digitized years ago... They saved them in the mpg1 format! Worst choice ever, even at the time that must've been clear.

[momsne]

Sure, you can argue, film archives must use only archival type preservation methods. No consumer technology shortcuts allowed. Previous postings at Nitrateville mention how many old Hollywood films are still available for viewing thanks to the 16mm reduction prints made in the 1950s from 35mm film nitrate prints. TV stations then broadcast 16mm prints to black and white small screen televisions. Other old movies survive only in Kodascope 8mm format. Film history shows that the more copies of a movie made and the wider the distribution of the movie, the better the chance is of that movie surviving to a ripe old age. Maybe not for several centuries but at least to the present. A popular movie like "Convention City" did not last 20 years.

IMHO, naysayers who look down on current consumer digital technology are "bubble boys" living in an unreal world. The same world as the giant media conglomerates, with their copyrights still in effect on movies that no longer exist because film studios once treated movies as short term assets not worth the cost of preserving. Thanks to the incredible increase in CPU processing speed and the giant drop in the cost of storage media, along with new encoding software, anyone, even the Library of Congress, can create digital files of films at a very reasonable cost.

I haven't seen any comments here about how ridiculous it is for a film archive to store movies on VHS tape, a medium that has maybe 240 lines resolution and low longevity. Anyone out there with a VHS player use it much lately? The way to go for mass distribution of movies is digital, whatever the format, XviD, x264 and so on. Hollywood studios are really against consumer digital encoding, the same studios that have given us lately such works of art as "World War Z" and the "Twilight" movies.

The article excerpt below deals with the Universal film vault fire in 2008. I wonder if any of those EK prints lost in that fire ever got transferred to a digital format for preservation. Probably not.
---
Prints of classic films lost in blaze
June 04, 2008|John Horn and Susan King | Times Staff Writers

In addition to the ruined "King Kong" attraction and the burned New York street scapes, the Universal Studios Hollywood fire has claimed another casualty: perhaps hundreds of classic 35-millimeter film prints, the studio said Tuesday.

The prints were high-quality copies of decades-old movies, not original masters, which are stored in a Philadelphia vault, the studio said. But the loss of the copies in Universal's scorched vault building, which the studio had not yet quantified, could affect several upcoming screenings of classic films at museums, festivals and repertory theaters.

[Spiny Norman]

I haven't seen any comments here about how ridiculous it is for a film archive to store movies on VHS tape, a medium that has maybe 240 lines resolution and low longevity.

As far as I know, they don't. The VHS is used for easy viewing, but not as the true archive format.

Film & quite some television surviving because of 16mm copies is true, but what exactly is the lesson that we should learn? What does it mean for consumer copies today which are sometimes no longer on any tangible medium?
Also, 16mm is deemed by some (like the BBC) to be too low in quality to be released on bluray. You seem to forget the picture quality that you propose to throw away just like that. What if all you have is an avi (xvid codec) and you want to project it on a big screen, HD or with a beamer? Then you'll see the difference. If you go to the cinema (one that's been converted to digital projection) the movie that you'll see came on a 1 or more TB hard disc, and not on some 4 GB flash drive or something. It would look right crappy if it had.
No, I'm sorry, it's ludicrous to suggest this kind of shortcut. Also, if the solution were that simple, people would've figured it out already.

Did you ever consider this: If civilization ends and all computer knowledge is lost, future archaeologists will never be able to read our DVDs or hard discs. A grammophone record and a film print with optical sound on the other hand... All they got to do is figure out the correct rpm or fps and voilà.

[pookybear]

Spiny you have the matter nailed shut here on this topic. Shortcuts are just that shortcuts. Like you said comsumer
grade digital files do not look good blown up on a big screen. And as for the arguement by Momsne the more copies
the better cause of lack of Studios in the last 100 years is something that has passed. Now with a venue for "milking"
even more money decades later with rereleases of films it pays to save them. In the past this was not the model.
Once seen it was old news and to be forgotten. So yes large groups of films were lost and some only on 16 or 8 mm
copies. We have to live with that. However, making the point that something should be saved as a Mp4 as a quick
archival process is just nuts when the tools and technical know-how of doing it right is right there. Once again
shortcuts are just that shortcuts. How different it would have been if 35mm copies where made this whole time for
all films, then the 16 and 8 mm copies would just be that comsumer grade copies. Archives should focus on making
the best copies possible and leave DVDs and Blurays for the studios to put out on the market.

Or do we need to open the can of worms of the fail BBC internal Youtube like project. <.< A huge waste of funds
that could have gone to saving old poperties instead of yet another a digital pipedream.

Pookybear

[Spiny Norman]

Thanks. Mind you, I wouldn't mind if the LoC stopped making copies onto film and changed to digital. But it would have to be high resolution uncompressed avi or something even better (similar or better to what is used in cinema's right now).

[momsne]

To each his or her own. Just don't ever download a .mkv file trancoded from a 10GB blu-ray disc of a recent movie, complete with multiple digital soundtracks. You can project that file on a movie screen and it will look good. And it is a specious argument to say that film is different than digital technology because film uses a physical device, a projector, to show movies. You might as well say that sock puppets and marionettes do not depend on electricity so they cannot be outdated by changing technology circumstances. Ciao.

[Daniel Eagan]

And it is a specious argument to say that film is different than digital technology because film uses a physical device, a projector, to show movies.

I don't think anyone was making that argument here. They were arguing that it's better to have a 35 mm copy of a film than a low-res digital file that requires proprietary software to view and that will likely be obsolete in five years.

[Spiny Norman]

No, indeed I wasn't. I was simply musing on what might or might not be playable in the distant future.

To each his or her own. Just don't ever download a .mkv file trancoded from a 10GB blu-ray disc of a recent movie, complete with multiple digital soundtracks.

No, because that would probably be illegal! Moreover, that film's bluray disc exists only because there is a rich master somewhere. And that master exists because when they archived it, they chose for a high quality solution and not the cheapest, lowest acceptable quality. Otherwise you would not have been able to buy it on BR.
If this is done differently then later there'll be trouble. For example: You won't see a bluray disc of the original cut of Star Wars because it was only kept on laserdisc. It was copied to DVD, and its source was noticable, but still more or less acceptable. But they won't be able to magic back the bitrate & quality and turn it into a HD bluray edition. This happened inside what, 20 years? Who knows what the future may bring.
Similarly you can't convert an MP3 to an audio CD and expect to get the same quality. Or blow up a 16mm reduction and expect 35mm picture quality. Or take your analog photos that you scanned 10 years ago when economizing on pixels and MB, you might as well scan them all over again (if you still have them). Are you certain this kind of thing won't happen again when the next round of technological advances arrives?

This is the same for any visual content like rare manuscripts or photos that are scanned. It isn't just my opinion, there've been books written about digitization philosophies. The idea is that if you're going to digitize, you mustn't tailor your long term solutions to your short term needs.

I'll admit that end user equipment has really advanced. Last century you could never approach professional output with simple end user equipment, but that difference is gone. Apparently today's HD/BR is so good that 16mm kinescopes are not deemed suitable for conversion. But all the same you must be joking if you suggest the LoC should settle for scanning to low resolution, compressed files, throwing away a huge amount of data in the process just to economize on disc space. See my earlier example about EYE's spectacular waste of time, money, and storage space.

And, admit, wouldn't you have been a bit disappointed if an archive giant like the LoC was using the same video formats as you and me? I wouldn't find that very professional, or reassuring.