Dear Laurence Jarvik,
 
I have to completely agree with Dr. Enticknap. Film preservation is most
cost effective, preserved on chemically based tri-acetate or polyester film
stock. Indeed, given the lack of shelf life of any and all digital media,
video is best preserved on film. Film and TV archivists agree on this
point.
 
Digitalization is still an extremely expensive proposition. Film archivists
would love to use digital equipment to clean up surviving film master
positives or to recolorize color films that have faded to magenta
(generating a new film negative), but at the moment such restoration work
is only available to the major film companies who can afford to sink 1/2 a
million to one illion dollars per feature film into such a product.
 
Secondly, the problem is not the digital process itself, but the carrier of
the digital information. Unless stainless steel disks are used, all plastic
carriers are subject to extreme degradation with 15 to 20 years vs.
hundreds of years for film stocks. Certainly, digital information can be
transferred without generational loss, but the cost of making new masters
every twenty years is also prohibitive (time, labor, material).
 
Some day these problems may be solved, but,  take it from me, there are no
simple solutions at the moment. Indeed, one of the biggest headaches our
nation faces is that all electronic government documemts (millions!!!!)
will disappear within a few years.
 
Finally, I have to reiterate a point made by several other posters, namely,
that film is film and not video. Just as I'm not interested in a photocopy
of a painting, I will always prefer a film image to a video, that is unless
the video image was originally generated on video.
 
 
Jan-Christopher Horak
Director
Munich Filmmuseum
Former President, AMIA
 
----
Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama.