How Archivists Saved Damaged WWII Film

How Archivists Saved Damaged WWII Film for 'The Cold Blue'. Chuck Thompson. Popular Mechanics. May 23, 2019.
    Shrinkage is the biggest problem with old film according to the article. To use original footage for a new movie, the archivist transferred 15 hours of 16mm film to 4K for the World War II documentary The Cold Blue. The film stock that was shot in 1943 has shrunk since it was created. Kodachrome maintains its vibrancy, but tends to lose pliability and moisture over time. All of the outtakes had shrunk to an average of 1.4 percent, which is "considered an immediate preservation risk. Once the film reaches that stage, it’s difficult to preserve the film photochemically because the pitch of the sprocket holes won’t seat accurately on the sprocket teeth of the printers, causing registration and stability issues on the new copy".  “Photochemical preservation” means preservation of a film by printing a new copy on new film stock and then developing and fixing the image  using traditional photographic processes.

The largest outtake reel had 36,880 frames, at 922 feet long, generating 2.6 TBs of data for 25 minutes of run time. The entire project generated just over 80 TBs of material. The preservation DPX files were wrapped with Bagger and written off  LTO-6 tape. The  three copies of the tapes: one in near-line storage, another is offline, and the last that is sent offsite to maintain geographical separation. The original film was returned to its 25-degree Fahrenheit vault, which slows down any deterioration that may continue.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Data Storage Outlook 2019

Digital Data Storage Outlook 2019. SpectraLogic, May 2019. [Download]
    The fourth annual Data Storage Outlook report from Spectra Logic looks at the management, usage and storage of data. Some notes on data:

• A 2018 IDC report predicts that the Global Datasphere will grow to 175 zettabytes (ZB) of digital data by 2025, though this report projects that much of this data will never be stored or will be retained for only a brief time.The amount of “stored” digital data is a smaller subset.
• While there will be great demand for storage, a lack of advances in a particular technology, such as magnetic disk, means a greater use of other storage mediums such as flash and tape.
• Increasing scale, level of collaboration, and diverse workflows are moving users from traditional file-based storage to object / web storage. Rather than attempting to force all storage into a single model, a sensible combination of both is the best approach.
• There is a need for project assets to be shared across a team so they can be the basis for future work. An example is video footage that needs to be used by teams of editors, visual effects, audio editing, music scoring, color grading, and more. 
• The lifetime of raw assets is effectively forever and they may be migrated across storage technologies many times

Digital Preservation Matters.