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Two examples from France: in 1998 AFP digitized the World Cup 98 pictures. In 800x600... Now they simply have no easy access to their '98 archive. From 1999 on,

by wazoox 9y ago

Two examples from France: in 1998 AFP digitized the World Cup 98 pictures. In 800x600... Now they simply have no easy access to their '98 archive. From 1999 on, INA (French national archives) digitized videos in MPEG2 8mb/s 4:2:2 @MPML. That was supposedly "good enough" in comparison with the old media it came from (and was an admitted standard for archives worldwide back then). Actually, it was the only not unreasonably expensive solution, but in retrospect the quality quickly was deemed completely unusable and everything had to be digitized again in the past few years.

cm2187 9y ago
Yeah but film has grain and at one point your resolution becomes finer than the grains. At that time you know new technologies won't bring much more precision. Now if the support is in poor conditions, perhaps the technologies mentioned in the other posts are worth considering. But if it is a tape or film stored in decent condition, it is unlikely that future techniques will add much to current ones.
- wazoox 9y ago
  That was the logic behind the choice of MPEG2 8mb/s @MPML: you're full (SD) resolution, full color, so you're better than the source (for instance, U-Matic is ~200 lines of ~250 points and a 4:2:0 color space). However, the switch to HD broke all expectations, because the low resolution of U-Matic captured in full SD and upscaled to HD is awful. Somehow that doesn't work out; you must capture even the very low resolution supports with a resolution as close as possible to the target work format (a so-called pivot format). Maybe upscaling the current HD JPEG2000 archives to 4K will fare better, and maybe they'll need to digitize everything from analogue once again...
  - ajnin 9y ago
    It's not that bad if they're keeping the originals. Scanning in 4k HD in 1998 would not only have produced files too large to be processed and stored practically by computers of that time, but there was no scanning equipment capable of that. Also gives them a nice justification for their budget year after year.
    - Nomentatus 9y ago
      But that would have destroyed the incentive - to save on rent for future decades.
    - wazoox 9y ago
      In 2003 I did a consulting gig for the _Forum des Images de Paris_ who planned to convert their movie archives to digital. Back in early 2003, scanning the existing video and film stock in HD of any kind (720i/p or 1080i/p) was incredibly expensive and not generally available (most post houses simply hadn't any HD scanners or video capture cards yet, except for high-end film work); I unfortunately had to advise them to stick to SD...

by wazoox 9y ago

cm2187 9y ago

Yeah but film has grain and at one point your resolution becomes finer than the grains. At that time you know new technologies won't bring much more precision. Now if the support is in poor conditions, perhaps the technologies mentioned in the other posts are worth considering. But if it is a tape or film stored in decent condition, it is unlikely that future techniques will add much to current ones.

wazoox 9y ago
That was the logic behind the choice of MPEG2 8mb/s @MPML: you're full (SD) resolution, full color, so you're better than the source (for instance, U-Matic is ~200 lines of ~250 points and a 4:2:0 color space). However, the switch to HD broke all expectations, because the low resolution of U-Matic captured in full SD and upscaled to HD is awful. Somehow that doesn't work out; you must capture even the very low resolution supports with a resolution as close as possible to the target work format (a so-called pivot format). Maybe upscaling the current HD JPEG2000 archives to 4K will fare better, and maybe they'll need to digitize everything from analogue once again...
- ajnin 9y ago
  It's not that bad if they're keeping the originals. Scanning in 4k HD in 1998 would not only have produced files too large to be processed and stored practically by computers of that time, but there was no scanning equipment capable of that. Also gives them a nice justification for their budget year after year.
  - Nomentatus 9y ago
    But that would have destroyed the incentive - to save on rent for future decades.
  - wazoox 9y ago
    In 2003 I did a consulting gig for the _Forum des Images de Paris_ who planned to convert their movie archives to digital. Back in early 2003, scanning the existing video and film stock in HD of any kind (720i/p or 1080i/p) was incredibly expensive and not generally available (most post houses simply hadn't any HD scanners or video capture cards yet, except for high-end film work); I unfortunately had to advise them to stick to SD...