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Two decades into the digital age, Hollywood studios are not turning their motion picture film assets into digital archives, report the studios' archive executives. But the execs say they're constantly being second-guessed by technology advocates for not trusting computer archives.
"A number of readers will roll their eyes and say, 'This man is crazy in this day and age to not put that much faith in digital,'" says Phil Murphy, the head of Paramount Studios' archives in L.A. "But for our asset protection, we are prone to archive in a format that is as agnostic and neutral to technology change over the decades as possible."
Paramount is not alone in this view: at the Entertainment Asset Management Conference in West Hollywood in January, senior vault executives at Universal, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox and MGM all confirmed that 35mm film remains their most trusted medium for archiving their visual assets.
"35mm has been around since the beginning of the industry," Murphy explains. "We don't need accelerated aging tests to tell us what will happen. We have reels we can take out that have been in those conditions for x number of years." Studio vault execs say they have not found a digital asset management solution for their films that they're confident they'll be able to access in 15 years and beyond.
"We have no way of knowing as a world or industry that x number of years from now we'll be successfully able to retrieve that data," Murphy says. He points to the simple example of word processing documents that people created five or ten years ago that they can't open today on their PCs. There are more than a few recording media formats for which it's now difficult to find hardware, including 2-inch quad videotape and magneto-optical disk drives.
For now, the studios are sticking with their tried and true media archive process. Gray Ainsworth, who oversees worldwide distribution at MGM in L.A., says the studios commonly archive a master in its original medium; archive all the source material used to create the master; store their archives in environmentally controlled vaults; store high-quality copies of masters in geographically separated locations; and produce and store separation masters for all films.
Archive directors look at the master copy of a film or TV production as the highest quality original: whether the master medium was 35mm, 16mm, or 65mm, or in the case of TV productions, D1, Digital Betacam, or D5, a studio will preserve it in that medium. "We want to have the original material in our possession," explained Murphy. "There's nothing like the clarity of the original."
The studios also preserve most of the source elements behind the master. Murphy explained that when a feature film production wraps, it can generate up to 300 12x12x15-inch cartons, filled with reels, outtakes, production notes, audio tracks-including all the stuff from the cutting room floor. The cartons are typically loaded into larger boxes, bar-coded, entered into an inventory system and stored in the vault. As an example of the size of these archives, Paramount's worldwide inventory includes 2.5 million items; MGM, more than a million.
To archive all these masters, source materials and other media assets, the majority of the studios maintain environmentally controlled vaults on their lots. Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures/Columbia and Paramount all maintain their own vaults; MGM and other film production companies contract with third party archive vendors such as Iron Mountain, Pro-Tec/FPC and Hollywood Vaults.
David Wexler, owner of Hollywood Vaults, explains that ideal physical media vaults are climate controlled-(45 degrees Fahrenheit at 25 percent humidity)-filtered for air impurities and protected by security and fire suppression systems.
As another method of protecting their assets, the studios commonly separate their archives geographically storing high-quality copies of masters in vaults across the country or overseas. For example, Paramount leases vault space in London, Canada, Hong Kong and Tokyo, while MGM maintains geographic separation between Los Angeles, Pennsylvania and London. Both studios lease space from vault vendors operating out of reconfigured salt and limestone mines, which provide cool, dry conditions for preservation.
To protect film assets, the studios regularly make separation masters. Labs make three copies of the original negative on black and white stock, each one tinted either yellow, cyan, or magenta (YCMs). The black and white stock does not fade like color film, and is not as attractive to potential thieves or vandals, Ainsworth said. Decades down the road, a studio can turn the YCMs into blue, green and red copies to recombine a color negative.
The need for better preservation of assets began in the 1980s, as the home video market opened a new substantial revenue stream. The subsequent success of DVD releases-and the expected bonus footage-continues to drive the studios to improve their archive practices.
Despite the reliance on conventional archival techniques, archive directors say they foresee a time when they will store their feature films and TV productions in digital archives-on servers stored in environmentally controlled, secure vaults. The evolution will likely happen when there's a distribution architecture in place to deliver these products as data directly to exhibitors and consumers' homes. Said Ainsworth, "We don't see a reason to digitize our library until such a time that we can actually manipulate and distribute it as data. That world hasn't matured enough yet, but we're keeping an eye on it, doing a lot of experimenting to prepare." Ainsworth confirmed MGM is actively preparing its library for that day by upgrading raw material for eventual digital distribution.
Ainsworth said before he'd consider a digital archive solution, it would have to provide three features: robust, provable security; affordable storage of huge, high-resolution motion picture files; and an easy process of manipulating the files.
He explained, "We're good at doing lots of different manipulations in the videotape world. We can convert, add text, clean up and upgrade the quality of the image and sound. That all has to exist in data as well it all exists today in videotape.
"We're searching for a nexus where those three things come together," he added. "In order for us to commit to that world, we have to see all of those things are satisfied at a price equal to or less than what we pay now."
- "Archiving in the Digital Age: Is Hollywood Still For Reel?," John Courtmanche, Media Line News http://medialinenews.com/, April 14, 2003 http://www.medialinenews.com/issues/2003/april/cover.shtml
Directory: http://www.larryblakeley.com/Articles/storage_archives_preservation/
File Name: john_courtmanche20030414.htm
Post Date: March 25, 2005 at 12:15 PM CST; 1815 GMT