The New Zealand Film Archive collects, preserves, and provides access to over 120,000 film and video titles and 300,000 items. It has over 40 staff members. The Archive stores films at facilities in Wellington and Plimmerton and uses technologies like digitization and data storage on tape and hard drives to preserve and provide access to its collection. Risks to the collection include physical dangers, technological obsolescence, data integrity issues, and over-reliance on single systems or formats. The Archive aims to balance preserving everything with maintaining quality.

1. Film Archive headquarters, 84 Taranaki St, Wellington
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

2. Film Archive cafe and reception
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

3. Film Archive Medialibrary
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

4. The New Zealand Film Archive
120,000 titles
300,000 items
40 + staff
Collect - acquisition, accessioning, cataloguing,
research and commercial access
Protect - storage, preservation, digitisation
Connect - screenings, exhibitions and website
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

5. How will we store our films?
How long will they last?
Film Archive storage at Plimmerton
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

6. Wednesday, 4 April 2012

7. MWA Flashscan HD for 8mm, Super8mm and 9.5mm
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

8. Wednesday, 4 April 2012

9. First 1 GB hard drive, the
IBM 3380 introduced June 1980
weight - 250kg, capacity 2.52GB
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

10. Film Archive data storage
Generation total in TB
LTO 3 164
LTO 4 889
LTO 5 189
Server 40
total 1282
LTO is the acronym for Linear Tape-Open,
an open standard for digital data tape
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

11. UNIVAC I, March 1951 stored data using liquid mercury,
the next model used magnetic tape
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

12. IBM729V from early 1960’s
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

13. Film was Easy (fear of the Black Box)
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

14. Last Film Search,
Dunedin 1998
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

15. Videotape formats
Analog tape formats Digital tape formats
1" Type B video tape (Robert Bosch GmbH) Betacam IMX (Sony)
1" Type C videotape (Ampex, Marconi and Sony) D-VHS (JVC)
2" Quadruplex videotape (Ampex) D-Theater
2" Helical Scan Videotape (Rank Cintel) D1 (Sony)
Betacam (Sony) D2 (Sony)
Betacam SP (Sony) D3
Betamax (Sony) D5 HD
S-VHS (JVC) (1987) Digital-S D9 (JVC)
W-VHS (JVC) (1994) Digital Betacam (Sony)
U-matic 3/4" (Sony) Digital8 (Sony)
VCR, VCR-LP, SVR DV
VERA (BBC experimental format ca. 1958) HDV
VHS (JVC) ProHD (JVC)
VHS-C (JVC) MicroMV
Video 2000 (Philips) MiniDV
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

16. Video codecs (from wikipedia)
Lossless compression
Alpary Lagarith - Lagarith Codec (VfW codec),
Animation (qtrle) - QuickTime, FFmpeg FFmpeg
ArithYuv LOCO - FFmpeg (decoder only)
AVIzlib - LCL (VfW codec), FFmpeg LZO
! ! CamStudio GZIP/LZO MSU Lossless Video Codec
Dirac lossless - libdirac, FFmpeg PNG - CorePNG, FFmpeg
(decoder only) !! SheerVideo
FastCodec Snow lossless - FFmpeg
Fraps - FFmpeg (decoder only) TechSmith Screen Capture Codec (TSCC)
FFV1 - FFmpeg - FFmpeg
H264 lossless - x264 (encoder only), Ut Video[5] - FFmpeg (decoder only)
FFmpeg YULS
Huffyuv - FFmpeg ZMBV (Zip Motion Block Video) Codec
JPEG 2000 lossless - FFmpeg
ZRLE used by VNC
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

17. Lossy compression More video codecs
Audio Video Standard (AVS) OpenAVS - FFmpeg
FFmpeg InterVideo Video Decoder
Blackbird FORscene video codec Ligos LSX MPEG-2
Cineform MainConcept MPEG-2
Cinepak - FFmpeg (decoder only) TMPGEnc
Dirac - Schrödinger, dirac-research, FFmpeg
!! H.263 - FFmpeg H.263 (libavcodec)
DV - FFmpeg (decoder only)
Firebird [1] Original FORscene video codec MPEG-4 Part 2 (MPEG-4 Advanced
H.261 - FFmpeg H.261 (libavcodec) Simple Profile)
MPEG-1 Part 2 (MPEG-1 Video) 3ivx
Cinema Craft Encoder DivX
Elecard MPEG-1 Decoder/Encoder Elecard MPEG-4 Decoder/Encoder
FFmpeg libavcodec
Ligos LSX MPEG-1 HDX4
MainConcept MPEG-1 Nero Digital
TMPGEnc Xvid
! ! H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2 (MPEG-2 Video)
Canopus ProCoder
Cinema Craft Encoder
Elecard MPEG-2 Video Decoder/Encoder
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

18. Lossy compression (continued)
Indeo 3/4/5 - FFmpeg (decoder only)
MJPEG
FFmpeg Pixlet
Morgan Multimedia M-JPEG Apple ProRes 422 - FFmpeg
Pegasus PICVideo M-JPEG RealVideo - FFmpeg
PICVideo Snow Wavelet Codec
JPEG 2000 intra frame video codec Sorenson Video, Sorenson Spark - FFmpeg
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC or MPEG-4 Part 10, Tarkin
CoreAVC Theora - FFmpeg (decoding only), libtheora
Elecard AVC Decoder/Encoder VC-1 (SMPTE standard, subset of Windows
MainConcept Media Video)
Nero Digital FFmpeg (decoder only)
QuickTime H.264 VC-2 SMPTE standard (a.k.a. Dirac Pro)
Sorenson AVC Pro codec, Schrödinger, dirac-research
Vanguard Software Solutions VC-3 SMPTE standard - Avid DNxHD,
x264 (encoder only) FFmpeg
FFmpeg (decoder only Windows Media Video (WMV) WAX
OMS Video
On2 Technologies TrueMotion VP3/VP4, VP5, VP6, VP7, VP8;
! under the name The Duck Corporation: TrueMotion S,
! TrueMotion 2, FFmpeg (decoder only)
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

19. Wednesday, 4 April 2012

20. JPEG2000
Created in 2000 by the Joint Photographic Experts Group
- Flexible codestream, scalable compression
- provides for both Lossless and Lossy compression
- complex encoders/decoders
- ISO standard
- Digital Cinema standard
- initially slow to gain acceptance
- licensed but coding system available free
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

21. [New Zealand infantry] - 1914
recently scanned at Weta Digital
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

22. Upstream, John Ford, 1928
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

23. IBM 1401 Data Processing System from 1959.
From the left: 1402 Card Read-Punch,
1401 Processing Unit, 1403 Printer.
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

24. Risks
earthquake fire tornado tsunami
arson vandalism theft litigation
ignorance war depression indifference
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

25. Technical Risks
Obsolescence - hardware & software have a
finite lifetime
Data Integrity - latent errors, ingest errors, transfer errors
Single Point Loss - single copy vulnerable to machine error,
human error or natural disaster
Mono Culture - singular technologies can suffer
Compression - mathematically lossless, perceptually
lossless, lossy compression
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

26. Jedi Archives, Coruscant.
Star Wars. Episode II
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

27. Keanu Reeves as
Johnny Mnemonic
1995
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

28. Wednesday, 4 April 2012

29. Wednesday, 4 April 2012

30. Wednesday, 4 April 2012

31. Dreamtime (or how Goodbye Pork Pie becomes a legend)
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

32. Wednesday, 4 April 2012

33. Wednesday, 4 April 2012

34. Wednesday, 4 April 2012

35. The Automated Archive
no more boring tasks in your paperless office
Digital deposit, accessioning and cataloguing through
metadata and crowd sourcing
But getting everything digitised is hard on humans
The Distributed Archive
safety in numbers
Compact storage and many copies means less risk of loss
More reliant on complex technology and material
can still burn and drown
The Everything for Everyone Archive
quantity vs quality
We can keep everything and have it instantly available
We may lose control of the content and will that devalue it?
Wednesday, 4 April 2012

36. The Digital Archive promises
a bright future
We just have to keep up with it
jamielean@nzfa.org.nz
www.filmarchive.org.nz
Wednesday, 4 April 2012