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I will add the text of the article later today when I am on a real computer if someone does not add it before I get to it. IPadIOS is not allowing me to copy the story.
A film warehouse in Sao Paulo was partially destroyed by a fire Thursday just months after employees of the Cinemateca Brasileira had warned of such a disaster, accusing the government of deliberately neglecting the cultural institution.
Fifteen fire trucks and more than 50 firefighters battled the flames for over two hours, but were unable to save all of the cinematheque's warehouse, according to local television footage.
The fire started around 6 pm during maintenance work on the air conditioning system, the fire department said, adding that at least two rooms containing films and other files had been destroyed.
Fueled by the highly flammable acetate film material, the fire spread rapidly through the building housing over 2,000 film copies, according to local reports.
The warehouse that went up in flames was a secondary site and not the headquarters of the Cinemateca Brasileira, which boasts South America's largest film archive but has -- like many of Brazil's prized cultural collections -- been mired in allegations of poor government oversight.
Filmmakers, artists and employees have accused far-right President Jair Bolsonaro's government of "dismantling" the cinematheque.
In July 2020, the Sao Paulo public prosecutor's office filed a lawsuit alleging the federal government had "abandoned" the institution and withheld resources, while questioning the absence of a manager to administer it. The following month, the cinematheque effectively ceased to function after 41 officials resigned.
Thursday's fire was "a foretold tragedy," film critic Lauro Escorel told GloboNews television.
In April, a "Manifesto of the Workers of the Cinemateca Brasileira" warned of the risk of a fire, due to the lack of care "with the material, the equipment, the databases and the buildings."
The film warehouse is the latest repository of Brazil's rich cultural history to go up in smoke after the 200-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro was gutted by a 2018 inferno, and a fire damaged the Portuguese Language Museum in 2015.
Conservationists have called for better protection of and funding for the country's cultural and scientific heritage.
This may sound harsh, but you can ask yourself loudly if there was actually anything lost here... Many of those archives that don't invest in proper fire protection, won't invest in proper storage conditions either. So, what was actually left of this cultural heritage before the fire, besides a bunch of cans filled with toxic vinegar slush?
I guess this is one thing were digitization can help, at least if done properly: You can fairly easily make backup copies.
You can bet they lost a brazillion movies in this foie. But in all honesty, I am pretty sure it is the Cuban archives that archivists are really interested in...
Nitrate and acetate film base have been proven (by accelerated aging tests) to be very, very stable in long term storage, as long as the temperature and humidity are both kept low. Doing this is very expensive, both in plant and energy. I'm guessing that this is why the HVAC system was being worked on when the fire started.
As for digitization helping, there are two gotchas. The first is the ethical one, i.e. the preferability of storing archival records in their original medium. The second is that you've still got to store the digits after you've created them. The cost of doing that is coming down, but datacenters are not free to build and run. Incidentally, the last I looked into this, the cost of having Iron Mountain store six cans of 35mm for you was about the same as having Amazon Web Services store 15TB of data (about what a typical 4K feature in DPX files comes to).
There isn't enough information in the public domain on which to base a properly informed opinion about this incident, but my gut reaction is that as with many of the old school FIAF archives, this was a totally government-run and funded outfit, and therefore highly vulnerable to political risks: in this case, the government not regarding archives and records repositories as a priority for tax money. The most stable collecting institutions have traditionally been those that are based on a blended mix of tax funding, philanthropic donations and endowments, and for-profit access work (e.g. the licensing of materials in their collections). Most if not all of the really bad film archive fires over the last century have happened in "all eggs in one basket" institutions, from the Cinémathèque Française in 1959 to the Universal backlot in 2008.
Isn't Iron Mountain that corporation you give you valuable data and assets, if you want to never see them back again?
Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage goes for about $1 per TByte/month. DPX files are uncompressed, I guess you can save at least half of it by applying some industry standard, non-destructive compression, maybe even a bit more. I don't know what Iron Mountain charges per can of film, so it's hard to compare.
Many archival data storage standards, including the ones commonly used by moving image archives, call for no compression, the main reason that compression and decompression requires the use of software that may be restricted by IP ownership, and may not always be compatible with computing hardware in use in the future. So storing your master files in a compressed format is roughly equivalent to storing your nitrate at room temperature and humidity, in a vault with no fire suppression system - a significant risk.
Another issue to throw into the mix is that I was comparing the price of outsourced services for film and digital archiving. The rules of governance of many public media archives (e.g. public records legislation in the case of government archives) and of governing bodies makes doing this problematic, and in practice, very few of the "legacy archives" do this, although they do outsource lab and digitization work (with the resulting copies returning to the physical custody of the archive). FIAF's Code of Ethics states:
Archives will respect and safeguard the integrity of the materials in their care and protect them from any forms of manipulation, mutilation, falsification, or censorship.
It could be argued that any outsourced long-term storage violates this, because you do not have any direct control over the safeguarding of integrity, digital compression could be said to be a form of manipulation, and if a third party vendor decides to censor (e.g. you have politically sensitive content stored with a third party that decides that it violates their policies and deletes it, which Amazon, among others, has a track record of doing, a widely publicized example being when they kicked Parler off AWS with almost zero notice) and you don't have copies of the material in question under your direct physical control anymore, it's gone.
So for all these and other reasons, the legacy archives tend to want to keep their holdings under their own roof. That increases the cost of preservation (because you don't have economies of scale on your side), and heightens the risk posed by fires and other disasters.
Many archival data storage standards, including the ones commonly used by moving image archives, call for no compression, the main reason that compression and decompression requires the use of software that may be restricted by IP ownership, and may not always be compatible with computing hardware in use in the future
This sounds completely bogus to me.
Huffman coding has been around since 1952. Analog television has been using Run-Length Encoding since 1967. (I just looked that up.) PKZIP was released in the late 80's with a note saying that the file format would always be free for competing software to implement. (Every KDM that shows up in my email is zip-compressed.) Patents on LZW compression all expired in the early 2000's.
And many more; these are just the ones that I can think off off of the top of my head.
Things like future implementations of contemporary video and audio formats should be a much bigger concern than simple file compression algorithms. Heck, anyone can write a RLE function in less than 20 lines of C; Huffman in around 100 lines if you'd rather have that. A written description of either including diagrams would take up less than two pages.
I can see an argument against using something like H.264 for your long term archive, but I see no valid reason to avoid something like a gzip-compressed tar or possibly even a zip file.
We don't allow compression because we don't like it might be a valid argument on its own. But we don't allow compression because we're concerned about future implementations is just a flimsy justification and and easily debunked poor excuse.
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