Archiving and Future proof your past and memories
Films are subject to degradation over time. With exposure to heat, moisture or acids the acetyl groups which are attached to long chains of cellulose which form the film base are broken from their molecular bonds and free acetic acid is released with a characteristic smell of vinegar. This is known as vinegar syndrome. As the degradation progresses the film base becomes brittle and shrinks.
Also damage to the film (caused by tears on the print, curling of the film base due to intense light exposure, temperature, humidity, etc.,) all significantly raise the difficulty of the preservation process. Films may simply not have enough information left on the film to piece together a digital copy, although careful digital restoration can produce stunning results by gathering bits and pieces of buildings from adjacent frames for restoration on a damaged frame, predicting entire frames based on the characters’ movements in prior and subsequent frames, etc. As time goes on, this digital capability will only improve, but it will ultimately require sufficient information from the original film to make proper restorations and predictions.
We offer several formats for digital archiving so you don’t face the issue of losing the content of your films.
How to choose the right format for ARCHIVING ?
- disc format…
- External Hard Drive
- Digital files format for the Cloud
From external hard drive, archive files, editing standard (DNX, Prores), DVD and Bluray or light files for internet, once scan and color correction are done, it’s easy and inexpensive to provide various formats.
Each format has its advantage and inconvenience. A good archive format will keep as much information as possible. Usually a sequence of TIFF files in 24 or 48 bits for negatives. Such an amount of information will require an external drive.
An editing format such as DNX or Prores will be compressed but contains enough information to apply color correction
MP4 files conversely are very light, used in blurays or the Cloud. Heavily compressed they don’t use much storage but they are designed for display only. Trying to edit them is considered bad practice