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.