7 ms·

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

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.

raverbashing 9y ago
Yes. Magnetic tape is hard to keep. Film is even harder, it is flammable and decays as well. Needs controlled atmosphere to keep well.
- blattimwind 9y ago
  Funny that you mention that. Polyester film is widely used for long-term archival, precisely because it so stable.
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    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.
    - blattimwind 9y ago
      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.
    - justin66 9y ago
      > 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.
- gaius 9y ago
  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...
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    https://100speed.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/film-degradation/ https://100speed.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/film-degradation/
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    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.
dredmorbius 9y ago
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.
- naasking 9y ago
  That is something I will never understand. What are they worried about exactly, rights infringement?
cm2187 9y ago
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?
- ixf 9y ago
  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-film-archive-restoration 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.
  - eltoozero 9y ago
    Now that was an excellent read, quite astounding. Please post to HN front page and re-post as updates occur!
    - jdietrich 9y ago
      BBC archivists also figured out how to recover colour information from black-and-white film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjK-b4x9ZmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjK-b4x9ZmQ
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - evgen 9y ago
    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.
snarfy 9y ago
"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.

raverbashing 9y ago

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

blattimwind 9y ago
Funny that you mention that. Polyester film is widely used for long-term archival, precisely because it so stable.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  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.
  - blattimwind 9y ago
    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.
  - justin66 9y ago
    > 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.
gaius 9y ago
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...
- raverbashing 9y ago
  https://100speed.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/film-degradation/ https://100speed.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/film-degradation/
- cptskippy 9y ago
  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.

dredmorbius 9y ago

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.

naasking 9y ago
That is something I will never understand. What are they worried about exactly, rights infringement?

cm2187 9y ago

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?

ixf 9y ago
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-film-archive-restoration 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.
- eltoozero 9y ago
  Now that was an excellent read, quite astounding. Please post to HN front page and re-post as updates occur!
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    BBC archivists also figured out how to recover colour information from black-and-white film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjK-b4x9ZmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjK-b4x9ZmQ
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- evgen 9y ago
  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.

snarfy 9y ago

"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.