Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Digital imaging 'saves' artworks?

This is topic Digital imaging 'saves' artworks? in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-11-2002, 07:15 AM:

This story has just appeared on BBC News Online.

Perhaps the scientist who invented the digital camera might be interested in this...

Doesn't anyone realise that digital data stored on magnetic or optical media is proving almost impossible to archive? I wouldn't mind guessing that the original paintings in the National Gallery will last a lot longer than the digital photos...

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 03-11-2002, 01:40 PM:

Digital data archiving is a major headache. One of the dirty secrets of IT professionals is that unless extraordinary efforts and expense are made to ensure long-term retrievability of archived digital information, you can pretty much figure anything that was archived 7-10 years ago or more is now going to be very hard to retrieve. Tapes are notoriously flakey to begin with, plus tape backup technology is constantly changing, plus the software used to create the archives keeps evolving, not to mention the changes to the OS that the backup s/w runs on. CD/DVD is better, but still shouldn't be relied on over the long haul. The only way to ensure long-term viability of the archives is to periodically move the old archives to new "modern" digital media. Repeat every 5 years or so.

Posted by Dave Williams (Member # 299) on 03-11-2002, 02:13 PM:

My brother just completed last year a three year project at his performance theater, going through and saving the sound and video archives from the deteriorating mag tapes.

I believe it was more than four hundred hours of magnetically recorded video and multitrac audio had to be painstakingly played on rebuild and obsolete equipment, digitized, and enhanced to bring them back to at least CLOSE to thier orginal quality.

While it was necessary to use mag tape to record what was done, it sat in storage while its playback technology became unaccessible. And remember, MAG TAPE DEGRADES!!!

As for the new digital source, it is stored on the highest quality of recordable cd-r available, and placed in more than one location, in the case of catastrophy.

SOme digital preservation is really a good idea, but oil paintings? I can see using digital imaging to trace degradation, and for archiving purposes, but I hope that this step doesnt keep the curators from the necessary upkeep of these artistic treasures.

NOW TO FILM... there is some film that definately should be digitally stored, and hopefully lost forever... hint hint so called mr lucas...

I hope that number 2 is better than number 1, i know i usually feel better after a good number 2...

Dave

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-11-2002, 05:34 PM:

Survivability of media is a very big problem when it comes to digitally archiving data. I've gone through lots of headaches with my business. I abandoned tape backup several years ago, moved over to Zip discs (and those things screw up pretty easy actually) and then on over to CD-R/RW.

The only thing I can do to keep safe is by making redundant backups of all my data. Typically a backup means making at least 2 copies of the archival volume. Then we have our entire supply of data files copied redundantly and stored in different places (so we'll be safe in such an event that the shop burns down or is completely ransacked by burglary).

Archiving films on digital media is an even bigger problem. Video storage formats are usually data lossy in quality --a practice totally unprofessional for the still image archiving industry where RGB TIFF and CMYK TIFF are the standard. Scan resolutions are often too crude in nature to capture all the detail in a 35mm film frame. A 4-perf 35mm frame has roughly 12 million pixels worth of real detail on the negative (if not more). An 8-perf 35mm still camera image should be scanned at 4,000 X 6,000 pixels to be able to get much of the detail out of the frame (provided the film scanner has the optical hardware resolution to address that level, which few do). A 4K by 6K RGB TIFF file is 68MB, and at CMYK 91MB. It is kind of difficult to keep the integrity of files that large unless you burn a CD and then put it in a climate controlled vault.

Good quality film negatives can last for several decades, and that is longer than the viability of most any type of digital media (at least for now). It is not a bad thing to digitally archive images. But you still need to keep the film negatives and take proper care of them.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 03-11-2002, 10:34 PM:

Bobby Henderson said: "Good quality film negatives can last for several decades".

When stored properly (cool, dry and vented), it's much longer than that! We're still watching great episodes of "I Love Lucy" shot almost half a century ago on 35mm FILM. Cable TV is full of the great shows from the 60's and 70's, most of which were shot and archived on FILM. Movies like "2001 A Space Odyssey" still amaze us on the big screen:
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/support/technical/storage1.shtml
http://www.fpcfilm.com/US/en/motion/FPC/pro-tek/protek_main.html
http://www.fpcfilm.com/US/en/motion/FPC/pro-tek/pt_preserve.html
http://www.fpcfilm.com/US/en/motion/FPC/pro-tek/pt_vault.html

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 03-11-2002, 10:53 PM:

When it comes to video archiving one must remeber that there is a large quantity of tape of the saturnV rockets that can't be played as there is no playback units available
I still have large quantities of nitrate prints from the 20's and 30's that are still playable to this day
The amazing thing is that to this day 35mm film is the only world wide universal standard yet people are determined to throw that away

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-12-2002, 05:31 AM:

I find it rather surprising that no-one is trying to market a data archiving system which records digital data photographically onto film (like Dolby digital data blocks, only using the entire surface area of the film). This would give you the best of both worlds: the data integrity of storing information digitally, plus the known longevity of film when it is archived in the appropriate environmental conditions.

If I were to be really cynical I would point to the increasing turnover of businesses which specialise in 'continual format migration', i.e. copying magnetic media off obsolete formats at regular intervals. A carrier that is known to be reliable for several centuries would surely blow quite a hole in their market! OK, there is still the software issue (can you decode the data into images, sound or whatever once you've read it?), but this would solve half the problem.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 03-12-2002, 07:22 AM:

quote:
Gordon said:
The amazing thing is that to this day 35mm film is the only world wide universal standard yet people are determined to throw that away

That is an excellent point. 35mm has been extraordinarily resilient. It's still an incredible format. Of course this doesn't mean that we shouldn't look to improve things if we can. But we should definitely not have so much haste to abandon such a wonderful format until we have a new format that is better in every conceivable way possible, or at least most ways.... the important ways.

Having a digital version of an oil painting would seem a bit counterproductive. Once it is digital it is no longer the original oil painting. People would literally be admiring a picture of the original in museums. It just wouldn't have the same impact. Maybe we can invent teleportation. Then we just save everthing that teleports to a digital file stored on a 1.4 meg "high density" floppy disk (who would ever need more than 1.4 Megs for anything?). Once the original painting is destroyed by wandering vagrants it would be easy to just rematerialize another!

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-12-2002, 10:58 AM:

The way I read the National Gallery story, the idea wasn't to create a digital replacement for the original picture, but to sort of 'scan' the painting so that in years to come, the digital representation will give them something objective to compare the original against to see if and how the dyes in the oil paint have changed.

Nice idea - the only flaw is that they probably won't be able to read the data when they come to make the comparison...