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Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

To play Devil's advocate, keeping the originals isn't just keeping, it means a commitment to maintaining them in an environmentally controlled space, following all fire prevention standards, in an organized fashion. It's easy to see why they would be wanting to cut down those costs to zero, especially due to forthcoming digitization and storage costs.

On the other hand, it's also clearly an issue of controlling who has access to the material - I highly doubt it will be simply dumped online for free. So once you take it out of the live, high maintenance archive, you will not throw it in the rubbish or donate them to a friendly NGO, since that might limit your ability to control it in the future.

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An organisation is offerring to do the retention, as mentioned not only in the article itself, but directly in its subhead: "A charitable foundation asked CBC for time to find a storage space for the archive, but was turned down."

CBC are destroying the records regardless.

That is something I will never understand. What are they worried about exactly, rights infringement?

And why do they want to keep it? Even old film has a low resolution, let alone magnetic media. Do they expect to be able to better digitalise the same media that will be in worse state (more decay) in a distant future?

For some media, this is absolutely the case. Particularly films that are slightly damaged, or seriously damaged, it's well worth holding onto the material in order to wait for better techniques to become available.

Case in point, this recent restoration of Morecambe and Wise by BBC R&D: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-fi...

They laser cut the film apart, then used X-ray microtomography to scan the film and some very clever software to unwarp layers from the 3D data produced by the X-ray microtomography process. Not exactly something we could've done 5 years ago.

Now that was an excellent read, quite astounding.

Please post to HN front page and re-post as updates occur!

BBC archivists also figured out how to recover colour information from black-and-white film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjK-b4x9ZmQ

This is a great read about the restoration of a lost archive, but it is worth noting that in this case the source material was similar to what is being converted and destroyed now: analogue video tape recordings from a low-resolution source material. The source was recorded in PAL/NTSC/SECAM and the conversion process can be completely lossless and still end up with a copy that has every bit of information that was on the original.

In the case of the Morecambe and Wise recordings, this was video to film (with an additional step to try to lose information in the first conversion so that the scan lines were less visible) so the interesting technique here was simply in restoring a degraded source. Unlike scans of film negatives, there is no way a new process or technique is going to dig out information that the original low-fidelity recording system was simply unable to capture.

It's not uncommon to see vital documentary footage that was crudely digitized twenty or more years ago, to a resolution that was less than standard TV resolution at the time. It looked okay on TV then, but looks horrible now, and the originals are lost forever (since that was the point of digitization, to save rent money in the long run.)

Two examples from France: in 1998 AFP digitized the World Cup 98 pictures. In 800x600... Now they simply have no easy access to their '98 archive. From 1999 on, INA (French national archives) digitized videos in MPEG2 8mb/s 4:2:2 @MPML. That was supposedly "good enough" in comparison with the old media it came from (and was an admitted standard for archives worldwide back then). Actually, it was the only not unreasonably expensive solution, but in retrospect the quality quickly was deemed completely unusable and everything had to be digitized again in the past few years.

Yeah but film has grain and at one point your resolution becomes finer than the grains. At that time you know new technologies won't bring much more precision.

Now if the support is in poor conditions, perhaps the technologies mentioned in the other posts are worth considering. But if it is a tape or film stored in decent condition, it is unlikely that future techniques will add much to current ones.

That was the logic behind the choice of MPEG2 8mb/s @MPML: you're full (SD) resolution, full color, so you're better than the source (for instance, U-Matic is ~200 lines of ~250 points and a 4:2:0 color space). However, the switch to HD broke all expectations, because the low resolution of U-Matic captured in full SD and upscaled to HD is awful. Somehow that doesn't work out; you must capture even the very low resolution supports with a resolution as close as possible to the target work format (a so-called pivot format). Maybe upscaling the current HD JPEG2000 archives to 4K will fare better, and maybe they'll need to digitize everything from analogue once again...

It's not that bad if they're keeping the originals. Scanning in 4k HD in 1998 would not only have produced files too large to be processed and stored practically by computers of that time, but there was no scanning equipment capable of that. Also gives them a nice justification for their budget year after year.

But that would have destroyed the incentive - to save on rent for future decades.

In 2003 I did a consulting gig for the _Forum des Images de Paris_ who planned to convert their movie archives to digital. Back in early 2003, scanning the existing video and film stock in HD of any kind (720i/p or 1080i/p) was incredibly expensive and not generally available (most post houses simply hadn't any HD scanners or video capture cards yet, except for high-end film work); I unfortunately had to advise them to stick to SD...

Yes.

Magnetic tape is hard to keep. Film is even harder, it is flammable and decays as well. Needs controlled atmosphere to keep well.

Funny that you mention that. Polyester film is widely used for long-term archival, precisely because it so stable.

You're right, but analog signal degrades, and humidity can cause mould.

Digital data tapes have a nice layer of error correction on top.

Better than film, but still requires some care.

Digital storage needs sophisticated hard- and software to read, which thus needs to be archived as well (and how would you do that; no hardware has that shelf life), or, you re-archive everything every ~10-15 years (as is done today).

In contrast, I can read anything from the Barbarastollen with a magnifying glass and sunlight, today and in 500 years.

> Better than film

I bet in the very long term it's not. I suspect that error correction on digital tape is only meant to address the problem of magnetic spots flipping or fading over time, but the tapes are throwaways as soon as there's detectable physical degradation or disintegration. Contrast with analog tape (or to speak to your point, film) which can be handled in all kinds of crazy ways (cleaning, baking, coating, etc.) in order to get at least a partial or imperfect copy of the original made.

B&W film will live in a shoebox in the attic for 100 years and be retrievable just by shining a light through it. Digital media becomes inaccessible very quickly; I have floppy disks I can no longer easily or reliably read...

https://100speed.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/film-degradation/

No.

The cellulise acetate used for 16mm films up through the 80s has to be kept in humidity and temperature controlled environments or it breaks down quickly into acetic acid which accelerates the process further.

Cellulose acetate film was introduced to replace highly unstable nitrate stock in the 30s. With in a decade of its introduction, archives were reporting significant degradation and it was realized that it needed to be stored in climate controlled conditions. It wasn't until the 80s however that serious efforts were put into preservation or development of better archival mediums.

Of course this was touched on in the article. Wikipedia had more information.

"maintaining them in an environmentally controlled space, following all fire prevention standards, in an organized fashion" just means putting them into a storage unit. I'm pretty sure my cable bill is higher than those storage costs.

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