Greetings,
Jim Wheeler stated:
>I agree that film has a long life if frozen but how many archives can afford to do that?
Response:
This statement misrepresents the case for film archiving which remains the storage medium that is most future-proof, has the longest life-cycle, is technology independent, is the least maintenance intensive, and offers the best quality master material to produce and continue to produce a great variety of digital derivatives for all kinds of temporary current and future applications as new flavors appear.
At the National Film Board of Canada, in a situation of diminishing budgets, we have been very happy and fortunate that most of our productions have been based on film materials, as we have used them to produce any masters required to meet a string of past and current digital applications needs. Digital scanning, enhancement and re-recording on 35mm film of our super 16mm images will in the future upgrade their usefulness to meet today's and future increased display resolutions and color quality opportunities. We have fortunately not been convinced by the decades-long claims of video engineers that their acquisition solutions were more economical than film which they probably were in the short-run, but never were in the long-run, as redundancy and obsolescence have become part of that industry.
Archivists would also do well to question qualifications,and to pay attention to the expertise and the time-honored research results of the Image Permanence Institute and its scientists, a highly respected institution that is qualified to provide reliable advise on film longevity. For instance, the best knowledge we have is that for triacetate film to be preserved for 250 years, for instance, it only takes 55 degrees F, or 13 degrees C, and 20% relative humidity for fresh film to reach 0.5 acidity (the onset of the 'vinegar syndrome'). And any polyester-based film materials will never suffer from the 'vinegar syndrome'. At the same storage conditions, today's color photographic materials will take 450 years to reach 30% color dye loss for the least stable dye of early 1990s color slides, negatives and prints. In addition, the film industry produces Yellow, Cyan and Magenta pan separations on polyester stock to preserve valuable color film productions. I believe that 4k digital intermediates have a value-added contribution to make as such masters provide greater artistic opportunities and also enable non-standard film formats to be enhanced for exploitation using today's superior display technologies. One example is its use in producing 35mm blow-ups from 16mm and super 16mm film, and also from 35mm films to produce very good looking 70 mm Imax prints on much larger screens than for which 35mm material image structures were intended.
Freezing film is an option when a life expectancy of more than the 2000 years is desired that is offered by storage at 30 degrees F or -1 degree C for fresh triacetate film, or more than the 540 years for degrading film. When compared with the heavy maintenance, migration and technology obsolescence and replacement cost and the high risk of video and audio content loss when using current magnetic technologies, film archiving is and remains the more economical option.
Unfortunately, broadcasters are swimming in a wide variety of tape media (and an increasingly varied park of servers) as well as film materials. In their applications, today's technologies offer mostly costly options, one of which is to transfer film media content to a digital form. However, anyone tasked with such a major migration effort as we faced at the CBC/SRC, would again be well-advised to continue to maintain and store their valuable film materials, as they will outlast any of the digital alternatives offered today and tomorrow.
Wheeler further stated:
Film is in a special category but most images today are digital...I believe that both videotape and 35mm film are near the end of their life and Hard Disc Drives will replace both.
Response:
Again, Jim does not appear to be aware that the largest export of the U.S. economy is feature films that are based on 35mm film stock that is also the mainstay of much of prime time TV programming. It is universally standardized, and no equally economical alternative is even on the horizon. Hard disk drives are not viable alternatives to film and to suggest this does not reflect an adequate understanding of the film industry and its technologies. And about those digital still pictures that are being promoted to unsuspecting photographers, they themselves will see the day that their digital snapshots have become unplayable, unreproducable, and memories will become as 'fleeting' as they were prior to the advent of photography on film.
Wheeler argued:
There are around 60 digital movie theaters in the U.S. and about 120 total worldwide. Go to WWW.DLP.COM--Cinema for details.
Response:
In spite of relentless promotion and pressure by Lucasfilm and other television industry speculators, the uptake of digital cinema with its inferior quality to film and much greater expense for short-lived equipment has been abysmal. And predictably it has caused a number of the early speculators, among which Technicolor, to withdraw from the contest. The standards process for digital cinema has been hijacked by the minimalist compressionist community who with a television and telecommunications mindset as a reference, argue that less is more. This frame of mind, dictated by inadequate bandwidths and data transfer rates for support systems has become a greater priority than assuring that the experience of digital cinema will meet the needs of the film industry and theatre owners. They require that any technology to be acceptable, must be better than film is today.
This disqualifies the HDTV technology that is widely used and promoted as the basis for digital cinema. The prospects for such systems to become standardized in the film industry are like those of a film manufacturer arguing that film stock with only 10% or less of the normal color dye clusters will produce better cinema pictures! I have seen projected digital motion and still pictures that were superior to film this summer. But the technology required to present them to the public in theatres is prototype and technically not yet ready nor can it yet be produced at competitive prices. The timeline for that could be five to ten years, certainly too long to meet the expectations of many premature players offering their products in the motion picture theatre marketplace. Movie theatre owners rightly reject the current offerings of D-cinema.
In general I have no disagreement with the conclusion that many video media used today may be overtaken by their (planned) early obsolescence, but that is no news. But that applies to different industries than the motion picture industry.
These AMIA postings are archived. We would do well to verify our facts, and not to let advocacy and speculation replace science and expertise without stating the nature of our posting clearly. Thus we can avoid unsuspecting colleagues from misapplying their limited archival budgets to unsustainable, speculative or phantom solutions.
With best regards,
Ed H. Zwaneveld,
Director
Technological Research and Development,
National Film Board of Canada
December 2, 2002
After January 1, 2003:
Ed H. Zwaneveld
Innovation Strategist and
Change Coach for the
Entertainment and Media Industries
INNOVAID-E
16813 Boulevard Gouin O.
Ste. Genevieve, QC. Canada H9H 1E3
Tel: +1-514-620-5558
E-mail: Ed.H.Zwaneveld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Webpage: http://www.innovaid-e.com