Digital technology entering
film archives
Introduction
History of cinema is accompanied by technological changes. As a result, in the
last century, a multitude of film formats have been created, modified and have,
in many cases, disappeared.
The recent introduction of digital technology for image reproduction has
brought about what is probably the most radical change in cinema history. The
shift from analogue to digital is changing not only the way films are being made,
but also the way films will be preserved and restored in the future.
Along with the changes introduced by digitisation, new challenges face film
preservation, on a theoretical as well as on a practical level. Some of these
challenges are discussed here. Three important European projects, dedicated to
research and development in the field of digital restoration, preservation and
access of audiovisual heritage, will be presented as examples of how the archival
community is dealing with the new technology. In this article the point of view
and the practices of film archives will be highlighted.
Impact of digital on film production: editing, special effects and
post-production
In the last two decades digital technology has deeply affected the way films are
made. The major impact has been on editing, special effects and post-production
in general.
Upon the introduction of off-line editing (first as video and later as digital
editing), the art and craft of film editors has changed radically. They have
abandoned viewing tables, film splicers and piles of film trims, and have started
working with computers, where films can now be edited and re-edited at a speed
never imagined before.
Similarly, digital technology has revolutionised the way special effects are
created. A variety of hand-made tricks (make-up, mechanical robots, miniature
scale reconstructions) and photo-optical effects (multiple superimposition,
back-projections, animation techniques) require now computer expertise. Scenes
are nowadays, partially or entirely, generated by using 3D computer graphics.
Characters can be added to a scene where an actor is talking to thin air, as for
instance in all the scenes where the 'human' Frodo is talking with the
computer-generated Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Or a complete scene can be
computer generated and animated: recently we have seen Spiderman abandoning
Toby McGuire's body and becoming a 100% digitally generated character
jumping around in a virtual city landscape. Not to mention the impact of 3D
computer graphic on animation films.
During post-production, scenes containing digital special effects were, at first,
produced separately and were added to the rest of the analogue film during
editing. This was an awkward and not very efficient route as each scene of a film
had to be treated differently. More recently, a so-called 'digital intermediate'
process is being introduced. Here, the whole film is digitised, including the
scenes where no digital effects need to be applied. The whole process (editing,
special effects, colour grading) takes place in the digital environment. Only
when the digital intermediate is completed, the film is printed back onto a film
negative. This film-to-digital-to-film workflow is becoming common practice
today, even for films without special effects. At this point a question could arise:
why is film still being used at all? It would indeed be easier to do everything
digitally, from shooting to projection. There are many answers to this question:
technological reasons (digital technology is in a still too rapid development),
economical issues (risks for investing in new hardware are still too high) and
aesthetical considerations (many filmmakers are not ready to abandon film
completely in their creative process).
Despite the situation mentioned above, examples of digital projections are
growing by the day.1 Similarly, filmmakers operating in different contexts (from
Scandinavian Dogma to Hollywood mainstream) have abandoned the known
territories of traditional filmmaking to discover the new possibilities given by
digital video. And if digital technology has drastically changed film production,
its impact on film archives has not been less important, as it will be discussed in
the following sections.2
Impact of digital on film archiving: preservation, restoration,
access and presentation
Film archives' main tasks are to collect and preserve films, and to make them
available to the public. Original film elements are preserved for the long term
and new projection prints are made, as much as possible true to the original
films. Since films decay in many different physical and chemical ways, e.g.
shrinkage, colour fading, tears, scratches, restoration often becomes part of the
preservation process.
Together with public screenings of the restored films, access, in a form other
than a film print (video for instance), is another important service offered by
film archives to researchers, students and professionals.
Film archives are often associated with piles of cans crowding large vaults. Film
archives around the world indeed hold film cans by the millions. If one considers
that it takes about three kilometres of film (six large cans) for a ninety-minutes
viewing pleasure, one hundred years of filmmaking, even though a great deal of
films were lost along the way, make a fantastic length of film strip. Although
GIOVANNA FOSSATI
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GIOVANNA FOSSATI DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY ENTERING FILM ARCHIVES
1 The number of theatres offering D-Cinema projections is increasing. In the Netherlands digital projection
in the form of E-Cinema has been introduced in a network of art houses around the country. This
phenomenon is growing in the rest of Europe (see www.docuzone.nl and www.cinemaneteurope.com).
For more on D-Cinema see: www.digitalcinema-europe.com,www.ibc.org,www.nab.org.
2 See also: Giovanna Fossati, Notes on JTS 2004 - Preserving the Audiovisual Heritage - Transition
and Access, in: FIAF Journal of Preservation, Brussels, December 2004.
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