On Wed, 25 Feb 1998 16:54:37 -0500 Filmmuseum wrote: > I have to completely agree with Dr. Enticknap. Why does everyone keep calling me doctor? Even when (and if) I finish the PhD I have been advised by friends never to use the title - apparently if you do, people start to ask you what cold remedy to buy or if you'd take a look at their sprained ankle etc... > 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. The photocopy of a painting analogy has been used, I seem to remember, by certain writers on the AMIA list to argue against archiving video by telerecording (UK)/kinescoping (US) it onto film. Their preferred solution (and I get the impression that the most vigourous proponents of this policy seem to be those involved in commercial videotape restoration) is continual format migration. I guess this means that the act of "preserving" involves a financial commitment to keep copying the material across formats at regular intervals. However, given that so many analogue and digital video formats exist - many of the latter involving compression - I would have thought that the act of copying between formats had the potential to "change" the image just as much as telerecording/kinescoping it would be. Do the latter and that will be the first and last time any format migration is needed. > 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. Given that digital film scanners and recorders (e.g. Kodak's Cineon) were originally designed for vfx work in the production industry, do you think the time is imminent when they will become cost effective for archival purposes? I would have thought that the companies who market these things would have identified archives as a massive, untapped market. Leo Enticknap University of Exeter, UK ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama.