Film Preservation Article

[Davideo]

This is a good analysis of film preservation as well as archiving digitally-shot "films".

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/ ... nd-pixels/

[wado1942]

That's very interesting. I think we all know these problems have laid in wait. The first CDs I made and stored in cases on a dark bookshelf stopped working in less than five years. I've had three DV cameras go bad on me, leaving me with 80 some odd tapes that can't be transferred. Luckily, most of the stuff I've shot on Super-8 and 16mm exist on at least two, sometimes three or four different types of media. The only answer to these problems is redundancy and as they said, constant migration. Nobody will be looking for my work 50 years from now, but one reason I got into this business in the first place was to preserve ideas and information. I started recording audio in 1995-1996 to preserve song ideas. I'm collecting just about any piece of equipment I can find inexpensively so I can continue preserving various media.

BTW, for anybody who watched the Superbowl, they still to this day have 16mm cameras working the field because they know film is the best archival medium.

[Will2]

I think this quote from the article speaks volumes about the issues archivists face...

If I found a reel of 35mm film in 500 years and didn’t know what it was, I could probably without too much trouble figure out a way to reverse engineer a projector. In any case, I can always look at the individual frames, even without a projector, and see what is there.

If I find a cache of Blu-rays and DCPs in 500 years, what do I have? Plastic waste. How do you reverse-engineer those media? Impossible. Without an understanding of the software and the hardware, you have zip. No way to look at it, no way to know even if it has any information on it.