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Archiving your work


schnozzle

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How are you folks archiving your work? If you've shot a project that you're really proud of, do you expect that it will still exist in some form in 50 years? Archival stability is a big issue among still photographers but I don't see it often addressed among cinematographers.

 

I'm especially interested to hear how people who use digital systems handle this. I have yet to use a digital storage medium that has not failed on me, sometimes for no apparent reason. Floppies, hard drives, zip & jaz disks, cd-r's, dvd-r's...I've had examples of all of these work fine and then suddenly show up as unreadable.

 

Any thoughts?

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Part of my day-job involves sending old film footage to a central office for telecine. I've had film cross my counter that dated back to the 30's, even ancient kodachrome, and it looked absolutely crisp and fresh. And this is stuff stored by ameteurs, in an attic or a box in the closet somewhere. I've become a good friend to these people, giving them a "sneak peak" by using my viewer.

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I think that digital systems are flawed in two respects:

 

They do not have proven track record;and

the hardware or software required becomes obsolete very quickly so you are left continually updating.

 

This is the problem with all the memories people are currently capturing on digital cameras, unless they take a lot of trouble to archive the files, including labeling and logging which pictures are what, and then also updating them in line with new hardware/software.

 

Whereas with film you take the shots, have them processed, and then even if they are just chucked in a box in the attic, they will always be there and a quick glance will tell the owner what they are. Whereas with files and disks etc there they so easily get wiped, corrupted etc unless there is good organisation, which most people do not do.

 

Matt

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Hi,

 

I think that things like CD-ROM with ISO-9660 filesystem, and other related media such as DVD-R, is probably a reasonably good bet. They should be kept dehumidified so as to minimise the likelihood of the aluminium recording layer oxidising.

 

Magnetic storage media is a much poorer bet. Traditional problems involving gradual HF loss due to the rotation of the Earth's magnetic field, along with progressive and spontaneous demagnetisation, are less of a problem with digital media unless it gets really, really bad, but the coatings are still flakier (in more than one way!) than optical disc.

 

The long-term worth of hard disks is a constant issue - I tend to dump them after about eighteen months just so they don't fail in use, let alone their archival longevity. They do not tolerate shock or extremes of heat and cold very well, and it is technically difficult to read hard disks given just the magnetic platters, if the electronics fail or become inaccessible due to obsolescence of the interface technology.

 

Phil

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Oops. I just noticed that I posted this in the wrong forum, it should have gone into general discussion. Can it be moved somehow?

 

Anyway...yes, I THOUGHT that cd-r's and dvd-r's should be stable, but there are two points to this that I've run across, which are: (1) I've had a few (not a lot, but enough to scare me) carefully-stored cd-r's and dvd-r's fail on me for no reason that I can figure out, and this in a matter of months, which I don't think is long enough to attribute to oxidization, and (2) there's no guarentee in the digital world that today's hardware and software encoding standards/formats will be supported even 10 years down the line. I imagine that dvd's will be with us for a while, but I have friends who got sold on Syquest disks ten years ago and...well...too bad for them.

 

As for film itself: yes, I trust the archival properties of Kodachrome and black and white (as long as it's not on nitrate). But what about the vast majority of film shot today, which is on color neg? How well does it hold up?

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Hi schnozzle. It's great that you're posting under this forum, even if you didn't mean to ;-) I'm probably crossing into Mr. Pytlak's territory here, but I understand that, if properly stored, color negative will last 100+ years before fading occurs. Mind you, this is in a temperature and humidity controlled vault. For truly archival storage, Kodak still recommends making color separations onto three strips of black and white film ala technicolor. They make a special black and white film solely for this purpose, although I doubt that many movies actually make it to separation. Frankly, most people only care about the "here and now", so they couldn't care less about what future generations will be able to see which is a shame. Why else would people abandon Kodachrome in favor of Ektachrome or film in favor of relatively unstable digital media?

 

Regards.

~Karl Borowski

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Mmm...yeah, that's the thing, how many of us have access to a temperature & humidity-controlled vault? Well, maybe some of us do, but I'm not so lucky.

 

Me, I do most of my work on 2D computer animation software, so I'd have to get them transferred to film before I could think of archiving them. I would like to do that, though...hmmm....

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Oh yeah, about the vault...this pertains more to still photography, but I think the principle's the same:

 

Did anyone happen to see a copy of "Another Vietnam"? It's pretty fascinating, it's a book of combat photos taken by Vietcong (rather than American) photographers. One really interesting thing was to see how well the individual photographers had maintained their negatives over the course of 30+ years. One guy had kept his in a plastic bag behind his bathroom sink, and of course they were pretty deteriorated, but one guy buried his, I think in a cannister of some kind, and they were in beautiful condition. So maybe the DIY equivalent of a vault is to bury your negative?

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