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Topic: How are new films preserved today?
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
![](http://www.film-tech.com/ubbmembers/534a.jpg)
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-14-2003 07:25 AM
...but the original negatives will be on acetate, and we all know what will eventually happen to that.
The other crucial thing is to store them in appropriate temperature and humidity right from the start. Many, if not most of the restoration problems faced by archivists up until now have been caused by their having to dupe elements which have been stored for decades in conditions which are too warm and too damp. Such conditions accelerate the decomposition of both nitrate and acetate, and also colour dye fading.
A lot of research has been carried out in the last 20 years or so to establish the optimal conditions inside the vaults themselves, and new archive buildings going up now are taking this research into account. Until really quite recently the archive community has tended to place more emphasis on copying elements than storing them optimally, but this is slowly changing. The International Federation of Film Archives, SMPTE and other professional bodies all issue guidelines for storage conditions.
It is believed that a new acetate colour element stored appropriately (-18 degrees C and 20% RH, if memory serves me correctly) has a service life measured in centuries rather than decades. Storing it that way right from the start, rather than decades after the stock was manufactured, is potentially a huge advantage in ensuring a film's long-term survival.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
![](http://www.film-tech.com/ubbmembers/534a.jpg)
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-14-2003 10:52 AM
quote: Disk is cheap enough these days that storing your archival data on rotating media is a viable solution, especially with mirroring.
It is not yet cheap enough to archive thousands of feature films, uncompressed, at 4k resolution and at a price comparable to keeping the original film elements in a temperature and humidity-controlled vault at the appropriate levels. When you then factor in the costs of continual format migration, this option becomes even less economically attractive.
quote: It sure would suck if somebody telecined a movie, threw away the digital masters after making the DVD, and then the film prints "degraded" and nothing was left...
And it would suck a hell of a lot more if somebody telecined a movie, threw the film away and 10 years later discovered that the hardware was no longer available to read the digital media on which the telecine data was stored, or that the telecine was done using a compression protocol which was no longer supported by the next generation of software. But that, IMHO, is far more likely to happen.
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