JTS: The Program

Preserving the AudioVisual Heritage - Transition and Access
PROGRAM
Schedule, Speakers and Abstracts
Schedule
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Image archivists are faced with a bewildering array of digital image capture, storage, and display devices. The characteristics of these devices have a strong influence on image quality, but it is often unclear to the archivist how to choose among competing devices, and what device parameters to use for capture, duplication, storage, or display of particular kinds of imagery.

In this tutorial, we will present the fundamental aspects of image science as it applies to digital continuous-tone imagery (both still and moving). We will explain how tone, color and detail are represented in the digital domain. We will explain the importance of the nonlinear coding of lightness in digital image systems, and outline the foundations of accurate reproduction of color. We will explain the capture, storage, and display of spatial detail, culminating by explaining why sharp images are not always good and blurry images are not always bad. Upon the completion of the tutorial, you will be able to estimate how many megabytes (or megabytes per second) are required to represent imagery at a given quality level.

OpenEXR is a high-dynamic-range image file format that was originally created for digital visual effects production. The file format has been designed to represent images from a variety of sources (film, digital cameras, computer graphics, etc.) as faithfully as possible, without compromising on image quality and without requiring excessive amounts of storage. The format is reliable and has been tested extensively in production on millions of image files.

In 2003, after validating OpenEXR by using it extensively in production, ILM released the new format as open-source. The format is free and the source code is publicly available, under a royalty-free license that allows integrating OpenEXR into commercial and open-source software. This presentation will discuss the attributes that, while specific to OpenEXR - floating point pixel data, lossless data compression, image channels that extend beyond RGB, attributes in the file header for storing image information, simple implementation as C++ library - should make this file format a suitable option for archiving images digitally.

An increasing number of broadcasters and organizations are considering the digitization of their media archives. Implementing digital media libraries so as to ensure the proper preservation of legacy archives has been recognized as a priority. Yet, many organizations are faced with a paradox: although strategic, these digitization projects are postponed because of budgetary constraints. As a result, little attention is paid to the opportunity and necessity to archive day-to-day programming and use that as a starting point of a digital archiving campaign. This paper, a follow-up to one recently presented to AES in Berlin, discusses several case studies and suggests a new approach to implementing a pragmatic archiving strategy - one that will get approval and support from management.

Audiovisual archives hold a responsibility for the preservation of cultural heritage covering all spheres of musical, artistic, sacred, scientific and communications activity, reflecting public and private life, and the natural environment, held as published and un-published recorded sound and image. This paper presents a forthcoming document, which sets out IASA policy in the form of guidelines, and is intended to provide guidance to audiovisual archivists on a professional approach to the production and preservation of digital audio objects. This includes the production of digital surrogates from analogue originals for the purposes of preservation, as well as the recording of original material in digital form intended for long-term archival storage. This document concerns itself with sound carriers or formats, but not with piano rolls, MIDI files or other systems, which are player directions rather than encoded audio. The Guidelines are produced by members of the IASA Technical Committee

When the 35mm Cinemascope format became popular in the mid-1950's, 20th Century Fox film corporation decided to create a unique format that they called Cinemascope 55. This format was a 55mm wide by 8 perforations high image produced using custom made anamorphic lenses. Since the format was used on only two films, "The King and I" and "Carousel", and the 55mm format was not a successful one, preservation of these titles from the original negatives has been problematic.

This presentation will outline the steps needed to work from the original 55mm camera negatives to restore the films. A new 55mm wet gate optical printing system was developed. This new system had to deal with the issues of smaller than normal perforations, recombination of badly shrunken separation masters, repairing severely faded opticals, and repairing torn sections of the negative that could only be remedied with 4K scanning and digital manipulation. Illustrating this presentation will be a newly made film, shot in scope, detailing the step-by-step processes involved in the development, machine engineering and printing techniques used to complete the project. The project highlights common and inherent archival issues related to creation and implementation of methodologies for preservation of obsolete or unique formats.

You can encounter smooth pitch variation over long timescales ("wow") on almost any analogue recording medium, and it is one of the most disturbing artifacts encountered when listening to old and/or badly transcribed recordings. There are several mechanisms by which this can occur. One is a variation of the rotation speed of the medium during recording or playback. A second, specific to discs, is eccentricity in the playback process. A third occurs when magnetic tape stretches unevenly during playback or storage.

In some cases it is possible to make mechanical corrections for these defects, but such approaches are generally impractical. Therefore, this paper outlines a signal processing approach for the detection and correction of wow, in which we use the degraded audio to estimate the instantaneous amount of pitch variation, and then recreate the undamaged signal from the existing data. The approach used is as general as possible in order to correct a wide range of related defects.

In recent years, many archives and repositories have been threatened or damaged by severe flooding, earthquakes and acts of terrorism. The effects of these disasters can seriously compromise records stored at these repositories.

Over the past half century, an enormous amount of data has been archived on magnetic tape and, when disasters strike, whether natural or man-made, this data is at risk. In order to protect valuable economic and cultural records, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of what happens to magnetic tape in various disaster scenarios and what steps have been successful in minimizing losses.

For over two decades, an ongoing study has been examining thousands of tapes from multiple disaster sites around the world. Recurring exposure patterns have been identified and the effects of various disaster scenarios on the media have been analyzed. Numerous recovery procedures have been tested and methods of restoring tapes to usable condition have been developed, refined and successfully applied. Observations have also been made on the mishandling of compromised tape material and the negative effects that can result from the application of inappropriate protocols.

This paper will provide an overview of findings on what has and has not proven successful in protecting and recovering magnetic tapes from actual disasters. It is based on the examination of tapes recovered from a wide variety of disaster sites. It will discuss general damage patterns observed and highlight a few key damage avoidance measures that proved highly effective at protecting materials and minimizing loss at the disaster sites where they were employed. It will also review handling techniques and recovery protocols that have repeatedly proven successful at maximizing the recovery of compromised tapes and which protocols may not be appropriate with some formats.

A large percentage of video footage recorded during the last four decades used analogue signal representation. High-quality archiving of this material is possible - even under the restrictions set by the limited budgets of small archival institutions - by applying accurate digitisation and storage in a linear, uncompressed form.

Magnetic tape proves to be a viable target storage medium at present and for the foreseeable future, especially when high-performance computer tapes are used that have been designed for reliable and fast data storage for critical applications requiring high data security.

Our paper gives a survey of our PC-based archival system and explains the qualitative, technical and financial aspects that led to the system configuration. It discusses the advantages and the drawbacks for the archival process and explains the current workflow and the different forms of access for the user. Finally it offers guidelines for future additions and possible adaptations to upcoming standards.

By Josh Pines
Technicolor Digital Intermediate
Jim Fancher
Thomson Corporate Research

The deployment of digital intermediate technology for the production of feature films presents an acute problem for preservation. Should YCM color separation masters be made from the digital intermediate negative or from the original scanned negative? The original film negative contains more information than is captured with today's ubiquitous 2K scanning, intermediate processing and recording technologies. However, the original negative lacks certain critical visual data, such as color correction and spatial information that will only be introduced at the image manipulation phase of the digital intermediate process.

Preservation of the digital intermediate negative through conventional YCM color separation manufacturing is not a preferred choice for several reasons, including the expected generational loss of resolution, which is characteristic of that process. Separations made from the original scanned negative will lack the added metadata inherent in the digital intermediate process. Therefore, additional steps need to be taken to ensure the metadata is archived and retrievable. Just saving metadata generated in the digital intermediate process on data tapes is not necessarily an economically viable alternative and the value of that data in the future is questionable due to the rapid evolution of digital systems and format obsolescence.

This paper will cover details about these problems and particularly the fragile nature of digital data. The authors will present a viable method for the preservation of visual metadata information using a combination of traditional film manufacturing tools and digital technology.

The project's objective is to provide technical solutions and integrated systems for a complete digital preservation of all kinds of audio-visual collections. Institutions traditionally responsible for preserving audio-visual collections (broadcasters, research institutions, libraries, museums, etc.) now face major technical, organisational, resource, and legal challenges in taking on the migration to digital formats and the preservation of already digitised holdings. Technical obsolescence and physical deterioration of their assets imply widely concerted policy and efficient technical services to achieve long-term digital preservation. The principal aim is to build-up preservation factories providing affordable services to all kinds of collection's custodians in order to manage and distribute their assets. Coordinator for the PrestoSpace initiative is the Institute National de l'Audiovisual, with participation from approximately 35 additional European partners, including film collections, audio and video archives, and a range of industrial and academic technology providers.

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VisualAudio: An Optical Preservation Technique
for Phonographic Recordings
By Sylvain Stotzer
Ecole d'Ingénieurs de Fribourg

The optical retrieval technique called VisualAudio provides a way to retrieve sound information from an analog disk without any mechanical contact. The process is straightforward: we take a picture of each side of the disk using a dedicated analog camera, and we scan the film and process the image in order to extract the sound. It can be used to retrieve the sound of old records that are in such bad shape that no regular stylus and turntable can be used. A working prototype has been built and has retrieved the sound from several records.

Project coordinators -- Ottar Johnsen, Frédéric Bapst, Christoph Sudan, Sylvain Stotzer - Stefano S. Cavaglieri, Pio Pellizzari
Ecole d'Ingénieurs et d'architectes de Fribourg - Fonoteca Nazionale Svizzera

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Digital Re-Registration of Separations
By Andrew Bonello
Cinesite, Los Angeles

A recent project at Cinesite in Los Angeles involved full restoration of the film "Williamsburg: The Story Of A Patriot" from 35mm Vista Vision separation masters. This work involved defect and scratch detection and repair, dye-fade correction, color correction, and re-registration of the Vista Vision separations. Cinesite used existing digital techniques for some of this work, and developed new techniques to address other areas.

In particular, this presentation concentrates on recombining scanned film separations in an automated digital framework. Manual alternatives are labor-intensive and error-prone. By making use of image deformations and channel matching within an efficient sampling framework, the technique robustly re-registers scans from Academy to Vista Vision format.
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Canadian Audiovisual Vault Inventory Report
By René Villeneuve
Villeneuve Media Technologies, Inc.
Executive Vice-President, SMPTE 2003-2004

In 2003, The AV Preservation Trust commissioned a survey to assess the size and scope of the many facilities that conserve Canada's Audiovisual Heritage. Among the issues and concerns identified by the custodians are the lack of funding for processing and cataloguing all the assets they have on hand. The need for better-adapted environments for those elements that are jeopardized by advanced deterioration (such as films affected by the "vinegar syndrome" that require cold storage to slow down this decay) remains an important issue as fewer than 20% of the facilities surveyed provide appropriate storage conditions.

Although the larger vaulting facilities such as the CBC, the NFB and the Library and Archives Canada have not yet reached their full capacity, the smaller and more diversified regional facilities (public and private) are unable to cope with the growing demand for space to store audiovisual assets.

This report will present the findings of this study that provides an overview of the current situation in Canada. While highlighting many of the technical shortcomings of Canada's audiovisual vault facilities, it also underlines the growing efforts (technical and otherwise) that are being deployed to improve the situation in both public and private sectors.

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FIRST - Film Restoration and Conservation Strategies
Towards Standards and Recommended Practices in Archival Films, Digitisation for Conservation, Restoration and Access
Presentation Coordinated By Nicola Mazzanti, FIRST Project Manager
and Paul Read, FIRST Consultant

Thanks to a complex and articulated program of activities, meetings, workshops and research, scheduled over a two-year period, the Project FIRST aims at creating the conditions to produce sets of standards or "recommended practices" for the digitalisation of archival materials for the some specific uses - mainly for conservation, restoration, access/low resolution distribution.After having met the support of other important partners as IFTA (International Federation of Television Archives) represented in the Consortium through RTBF (Radio Television Belge de la Communauté Française de Belgique) and ORF (Osterreichischer Rundfunk, Austria), INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, France), BELGACOM (the leading Belgian telecommunication company), EMF (European Multimedia Forum, UK), ACE submitted the project to the IST Programme in April 2002. The project was finally approved and started its work in July 2002, under the title of FIRST - Film Restoration and Conservation Strategies.

There are five main areas of interest for the FIRST project: 1) Archival film digitisation, 2) Restoration by digital processes for different uses, 3) Storage technologies and policies of digitized archives, 4) Cataloguing and retrieval of digitised film archives with focus on on-line management and retrieval, 5) Strategies for distribution and access of digitised archive material with focus on on-line management and delivery.

This report will concern the final Guidelines and Recommended Practices at the conclusion of this 2-year study.

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Abandoning Analog: The Case for Digital Audio Archiving
Panel Presentation Coordinated By Robert Heiber
President, Chace Productions

The archive world has hotly debated the concept of digital archiving of sound and picture assets for a number of years. Compression, a sore sticking point for image archiving, is fortunately not an issue for digital sound archiving, as the decreasing cost of digital storage has made high resolution audio, 48kHz - 96kHz at 24 bits a practical reality.

As more and more original and restored audio content is created digitally it becomes difficult to press the issue of making analog "archive" copies. Yet this continues to be standard practice in many quarters as part of a long experience in the reliability of analog recordings. Perhaps the "just-in-case" analog copies may no longer be necessary with improvements and understanding of digital audio asset management.

Abandoning Analog: The Case for Digital Audio Archiving is a panel of leading industry experts with a representatives from motion picture post-production, the record industry, digital asset management enterprise, and digital storage technologies. Each will present, from their area of expertise, the key criteria and advantages of digital audio archiving that demonstrate archival analog assets are no longer required.

Panel Speakers:

Digital Media: Advantages & Liabilities
By Keith Watanabe

Keith will compare and contrast archival performance characteristics of typical post-production analog and digital media. He will discuss the opposing interests of computer technology companies versus archivists needs. Keith will detail several industry instances that will aid in navigating this digital path forward.

Facing the Inevitable:
Waving Goodbye to Analog Tape and Hello to Digital Files
By Larry Blake

In spite of the fact that all indicators show that analog recording won't be around for much longer, major movie studios persist in the delusion that they are being responsible by backing up their film sound material to analog formats. This paper will outline the backup method utilizing hard drives and data tapes that is better, less expensive, and faster than current analog techniques. The presenter will be wearing a Kevlar vest.

Abandoning Analog in the Music Recording Industry:
From a Commercial Perspective
By John Spencer

Today, most commercial recording projects utilize some type of digital recording technology. It may be used in the creative process itself or in the creation of digital files that are distributed to the public. Analog tape is usually employed for its subjective sonic characteristics, sometimes referred to as "warm" or "less harsh than digital". For those projects that are born digital, an analog copy is NOT an exact copy. Many commercial record labels are in the process of changing delivery requirements to reflect the changing landscape of how recordings are made, also eliminating the need for analog "safeties". Institutions will have to follow this trend using Enterprise IT best practices as libraries increase their digital holdings. The eventual demise of analog tape manufacturing will only intensify the need for a digital infrastructure.

Requirements for Archiving of Digital Media Content
By Gavin Schutz

The proliferation of digital media content - and the ability to generate derivative works at will - represents a unique challenge for the archivist. In addition to rapidly developing standards for file and network based content, the archivist must deal with emerging technologies relating to versioning, encryption, watermarking and DRM as part of the overall effort in preserving the value and longevity of the asset. I will cover some of the issues that must be addressed as part of the preservation process and offer some solutions designed to accommodate migration to the new media platforms.

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Twenty Years After:
Degradation Survey of a Large Collection of Optical Discs
By Alain Carou
Bibliothèque nationale de France, département de l'Audiovisuel - Section conservation

Compared to challenges such as analogic formats obsolescence or archival data management, safeguarding our contemporary audio and video heritage on stamped optical discs can look a minor issue. As far as one has experienced until now, this type of carrier benefits from chemical stabiliy, mostly superior to that of WORM carriers, for example.

However, several series of CDs and more recently DVDs are known to have degraded notably in just a few years, due to defective manufacturing processes. Knowledge concerning this problem has been shared by publishers, archives and individuals when the degradation process has grown fast and obvious. Now, for heritage purpose, it is necessary to trace the decay of carriers as soon as possible, before they can be perceived in playback, in order to organize migration to new carriers.

Bibliothèque nationale de France's Audiovisual Department began in 2002 a systematic survey of its collections (200,000 CD, 10,000 DVD). It started with a series known for important defects. But beyond this simple control, BNF engaged a comprehensive investigation year-by-year of samples.

This paper will adress the technical and statistical issues of the survey : equipment, method of sampling, test parameters, interpretation of the results. It will also provide the results found so far.

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Digitally Generated Color Separation Masters
By Phil Feiner
President, Pacific Title and Art Studio

The latest film-to-digital-to-film post-production process for motion pictures, the Digital Intermediate, represents a new problem for preservation, and perhaps also a new opportunity. The data files which source these intermediates are often fugitive and difficult to recover or deploy by the time the film has entered the "library" phase of its existence. Data files captured on LTO or DFT2 data tapes are sitting on vault shelves of production companies or in archives in untested form. But these files do offer the possibility of recording out perfectly matched and registered black-and-white color separation masters at the same resolution as the digital intermediate, and these synthetic elements may comprise a part of a preservation regime for the Digital Intermediate. The test material to be screened was scanned at 4k, processed at 2k and recorded back out to color separations at 4k, then recombined and printed conventionally.

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The Application of New Technologies Required for an Automated System for Audio and Video Migration
By Jim Lindner
Media Matters, LLC

In order to build a next generation system for the automated migration of AV content to either Tape or Files - new technology needed to be invented that was not available. These technologies included:

A new robotic handling system designed to handle different formats gently and reliably for automatic insertion into VTR's and other processing equipment.

A new system that analyzes the audio and video quality on a frame by frame basis in real time and detects errors and logs them, as well as providing information to an "expert system" that uses artificial intelligence to make assessments on the quality of the tapes being played back and makes adjustments as necessary.

A new tape cleaning system that actually finds physical defects on the tape while cleaning the tape.

Encoding systems to digitize the content in real time, as well as a series of management systems that allow the entire system to be monitored remotely and run on site in an archive.

Central to the research and conclusions of the PrestoSpace projects, this presentation will briefly describe how these individual components work as well as how they work together as part of a larger system that changes the way that migration of content will be done. This presentation will also briefly discuss the need for Lossless compression and some of the requirements of such a format for archival applications.

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International Standards on Preservation of Information Recording Materials
By Peter Z. Adelstein
Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology.

The value of recorded information has become of increasing importance as materials age and data is lost. This has resulted in a marked increase in standardization activities by the International Standards Organization. Today there are twenty-one published standards in this field, of which eleven have been printed since the paper on this topic at the Paris 2000 Joint Technical Symposium. An additional ten standards are in various stages of development. This paper is a review of the progress during the past four years and a discussion of current activities.

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Assessing Storage Environment for Mixed Media Collections:
The IPI Media Storage Quick Reference
By Jean-Louis Bigourdan
Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology

Identifying Suitable Storage Environment for the Preservation of Mixed Media Collections: The IPI Media Storage Quick Reference

Since storage is the single most important factor for preserving media stability, IPI has focused on developing environmental-based preservation strategies. It is recognized that climate conditions impact the physical survival of films, audio and videotapes, photographs, CDs and DVDs. Each medium has its own needs in terms of optimum storage, and standard recommendations reflect these requirements. As a result, a given storage may provide a suitable environment to one media and cause damage for another type of media. Archivists dealing with mixed media collections are often facing that dilemma. Most important questions are: Is the current storage environment adequate? What environment does the collection need? Often, environmentmental compromises may be the only practical way to go. The IPI Media Storage Quick Reference (MSQR) was developed to assist archivists in making informed decisions for a wide range of materials either kept in separate storage, or as it is more likely, as mixed media collections.

This presentation will provide basic information in terms of media stability, will develop a simplified strategy for optimizing the life span of mixed media collections, and introduce the MSQR, a new tool for collections managers.

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How Many Pixels In "Lawrence of Arabia?"
By Dr. William Glenn, Florida Atlantic University
John Galt, Panavision
James Pearman, Panavision

As archivists and restoration specialists are now using digital imaging systems to provide a digital record, and often use digital imaging tools to "restore" lost or degraded image content, it will become increasingly important to have the means to assess the data content of images prior to digitization. This will be important both to ensure that the techniques employed do not reduce the information content of the original images and, equally important, do not over-sample unnecessarily. The latter is critical because many images of historical or cultural importance may have no immediate or obvious commercial value and the cost of digital archiving and restoration will often be a determining factor in deciding whether or not to digitize and "restore" the image content.

Imaging specialists have many tools to examine the performance of lenses, film emulsions, cameras, etc., and to predict the cascaded performance of imaging systems. However, these techniques, useful as they are in predicting final image content before the fact, tell us nothing about the information content of the existing image.

This paper will first examine the latest techniques used in image system analysis using, as an example, the original camera and lens system employed in the photography of "Lawrence Of Arabia". This will be correlated with an experimental technique used to determine the information content of existing images.

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Long-Term Storage of Video in the Digital World
Panel Presentation Coordinated by Jim Wheeler
Tape Restoration and Archival Services

It is now possible to store over two hours of uncompressed high-quality video on a single medium and at a reasonable cost. This savings in space and cost means that Hard Disk Drives or DataTapes are the answer to our search for an archival digital medium for video.

What are the pros and cons of these new technologies as archival media for video?

The speakers will discuss these new concepts for storage of digital video, the costs and densities of the Hard Disk Drives or DataTapes that are on the market now, and the advantages of storing video in data formats rather than conventional video formats.

Panel Speakers:
Ian Gilmour
ScreenSound Australia
DataTapes

Jim Wheeler
Tape Restoration and Archival Services
Archiving on Hard Disk Drives

Jim Lindner
Media Matters
New Ways to Migrate Video

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Understanding High-Magenta, Cyan-Dye and Red LED Readers - Implications and Strategies for Optical Soundtracks
Panel Presentation Coordinated by Robert Heiber
President, Chace Productions

The biggest change in optical soundtrack technology since the introduction of the digital optical sound formats in the early 1990s is currently underway. These changes - high-magenta and cyan dye optical soundtracks and red LED (light emitting diode) readers - have a significant impact on asset managers, archives, restoration professionals and repertory exhibition. This presentation will explain how these changes in optical soundtrack technology affect not only the sound elements in storage but also the creation of new soundtracks for the future. The background surrounding this change and the current status of this transition will be discussed. Audio examples will demonstrate problems that may be encountered and the panel will present strategies for dealing with the issues that range from exhibiting legacy material on red LED readers to using tracks manufactured prior to this change for new prints. Guidelines will be distributed to attendees.

Panel Speakers:
Dr. Alan Masson, Eastman Kodak Co
Douglas Greenfield, Dolby Laboratories

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Longevity of Tape and Optical Media Testing -- ISO Standards
By Ian Gilmour
Senior Manager, Preservation and Technical Services, ScreenSound Australia
Chair, AMIA Preservation Committee

A report on the work of the ISO TC42 WG-5/AES SC03-04 Joint Technical Committee. Formerly being conducted by the ANSI/PIMA committee, this will provide an update on the tape and optical media tests and the progress of care and handling guidelines. A discussion of the progress of this research in the international context of standards and policy guidelines, incorporating ISO, AES, SMPTE, and how they relate to the IASA, AMIA and FIAF guidelines.

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Audiovisual Content in the Digital Domain -
Digital Mass Storage Systems for Archives
Chaired by Ian Gilmour

Archives are currently grappling with the necessity of building huge file storage systems to manage a wide variety of media. This presentation will provide an update on the evolution and experiences of specific archives in implementing Digital Mass Storage Systems.

ScreenSound, Australia - Ian Gilmour
National Library of Norway - Trond Teigen
Library of Congress -- Mike Handy

A report on the use of Open Archive Initiative protocols to make cross-platform database searches possible through one interface. This approach allows for on-line access to tens of thousands of documents originated in a wide variety of formats, from film to technical drawings and periodicals, from corporate document archives to radio programs. This paper details a specific project to document the industrial and cultural heritage memorabilia related to an offshore oilfield in Norway.

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