A huge number of movies and television shows are held in studio vaults and in television archives.  With high-definition television and high-bandwidth connections to the home, there has never been more demand for bringing content out of storage and making it available to consumers.  Old films have very high resolution and can be easily scanned and compressed for digital distribution.  But before this can happen, minor imperfections such as scratches and dust need to be removed to meet rigorous image quality standards set by the studios and networks.

Film scanners equipped with infrared (IR) illumination and Kodak’s Digital ICE software can automatically detect and correct scratches and dust so they are invisible to even the most critical viewers. The Kodak Digital Ice software operates by analyzing the familiar red, green, and blue channels along with the extra IR channel to provide an accurate per-pixel defect matte.  The defect matte is used to identify which pixels to adjust so that scratched pixels can be restored nearly to their original values.

Dr. Gabriel Fielding is a Senior Technical Staff member of the Entertainment Imaging division of Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester NY. He writes algorithms for image sequence enhancement, high-speed image analysis, and computational stereo vision. He has written software for a wide range of Kodak products including scanners and digital cameras. He was actively involved with the Image Interchange Format Committee at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood, CA. Gabriel received his PhD from Drexel University in Philadelphia. His research interests include parallel and distributed algorithms for high-speed image processing, artificial intelligence, and consumer applications for stereo vision.

Aleksander Bach

Aleksander Bach is an award-winning commercial director based in Cologne, Germany. The son of a photographer, Bach was born in Poland and moved to Germany with his parents as a boy. He studied audio/video engineering and piano at the Institute for Music and Media in Düsseldorf, and completed his education in the graduate program at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. Bach has won two consecutive Young Director Awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, in 2008 and 2009, and a Gold Award at the 2009 New York Festival. The 2009 winner at Cannes was a black-and-white documentary-style spot for the Red Cross titled “Stars,” which was photographed by Peter Matjasko on 35 mm film. Bach’s resume also includes inventive music videos and a music documentary. Here, he opines about the state of international commercial filmmaking:

A lot is changing in European commercial production. That’s partly due to the worldwide economic crisis, but the underlying structure of how the business works is also completely changing. In the classic model, a director in the commercial industry is represented by a production company. Lately, I have clients and agencies contacting me directly. They call and ask whether I am interested in writing a story. If I say yes, they brief me about the commercial. The lines of communication are getting shorter, because it’s more efficient. That’s necessary since at the moment, budgets are shrinking. For me as a director, that’s great. I have the chance not only to direct my interpretation of a storyboard, but sometimes I’m also able to write the spots myself, either with the agency or directly with the client.

The Society of American Archivist defines Archival Media as ‘resistant to deterioration or loss of quality, allowing for a long life expectancy when kept in controlled conditions’.
If we try to apply this definition to the different types of storage media currently used in the motion picture workflow as it is structured today, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to find many media that fit this definition: other than film, that is.

Whether the production in question uses hard drives, CD’s , tapes or DVDs to store their content, there is always the very real probability that a hard drive will crash, that a tape will get scratched, that the format used will be obsolete and render the information unreadable in a few years (even if the information is still intact). What good does it do to have perfectly good information that you cannot access?

Milt Shefter is president of Miljoy Ent. Inc., a company that offers media asset preservation and access strategies to those who own large libraries of moving image, recorded sound, and video content. Miljoy helps them to preserve and protect what they now have and develop strategies to deal with issues and problems that may arise in the future. On ‘Film. No Compromise’, the recent Kodak DVD, Shefter talks about preserving images for the future. Here, he expands on those comments.

When I started college, I had an aunt who asked: “What are you going to study?” I said, “Television”. And she said, “That’s wonderful! Television repairmen make so much money. I just had a tube changed last week.” And, then a few years later I got involved with media asset preservation, and my aunt asked: “What is that?” I said, “It’s preservation.” And she said, “Oh, that’s much better. Funeral directors make more money than television repairmen.” She never quite caught on.