7 ms·

‘Films are vulnerable’: The battle to preserve Eastern Europe’s analogue movies (2022)

132 points by robtherobber 4y ago

simontheowl 4y ago
Same is unfortunately true for a lot of Eastern European music. There are thousands of great soviet recordings of various classical and folk pieces that have never been digitized. And the current atmosphere over there is not honed in on preserving art. A lot of the recordings are only available on 50-60 year old vinyls which are getting harder and harder to find in a decent condition. Been digitizing a lot of my favorites in my spare time.
runjake 4y ago
I remember back in, probably the late 1990s or early 2000s, when my org was scrambling to copy analog media to "immortal" digital CD-Rs. 20 years later, they went into some of the archives to discover that most of the CD-Rs were unreadable. The material had degraded severely enough that the material had observable pits (holes) in them. Plan accordingly. Digital copies require it, too. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  The dyes used in writable CD's are fairly long lasting, as are the dyes used in writable Blu-Ray. There are some writable DVD's which use a media similar to Blu-Rays but they are unusual. This book talks about the sordid story of fugitive color media: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html how wedding photographers got blindsided when, 20 years later, people discovered that Kodak prints and negatives of their special day were severely faded. Or how Hollywood woke up in 1980s and realized there was big money in old movies and went looking for a solution: early on there was the bad idea of splitting out the three colors into three separate wheels, but later people realized that color film lasts much longer if you keep it in the freezer.
  - thatoneguy 4y ago
    The first organic dye (cyanine) used for CDRs back in the '90s rotted faster than the more expensive phthalocyanine (20-50 years vs 50-100 years)[1]. [1] https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
  - dylan604 4y ago
    The separating into 3 B&W negatives of the RGB separations was (is?) still a thing. In 2012, I was involved in film restoration projects that used laser recorders to take the processed digital files to 35mm B&W negative. The fun begins on trying to restore from one of the archives. Film shrinks and at different rates depending on how they are stored. So scanning each of the R+G+B negatives is one things, but getting them stacked and aligned taking into account the distortion distinct to each frame x3 is just glorious!!
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      That’s why you are better off keeping the negatives in the freezer
- digitallyfree 4y ago
  If your only digital archives are on cold media (e.g. optical disks, tape, offline HDDs) and are never replaced you have a problem. Keep them on readable hot storage that can be easily checked and upgraded over time and that should not be an issue. I've lost personal archives on CD-R/DVD-R myself and now I keep my archives stored hot on ZFS (has redundancy + bitrot protection), with additional hot and cold backups that are checked regularly. When disks fail they are quickly replaced, thus ensuring that the data is on relatively "new" as opposed to aging media. The article also mentions the problem with old/proprietary file formats for digital media which can't be opened in the future. Someone I knew actually had a story about how he had pictures stored in some obscure digital format (this was in the 90s when digital cameras were in their infancy) and he had to set up a equally old computer and software just to get the images reexported into something more modern. For something like this again regular checking of the archives (and keeping them hot) helps. Also I'm pretty sure the most basic standardized formats like BMP and JPG aren't going away for a long time.
  - Roark66 4y ago
    It is interesting, could you say more on how old were CD-Rs that failed and what percentage roughly failed? Also how were they stored? I hear a lot of this information, but personally my experiences are diametrally opposite. I've never used cdrs to store really important data, I have all this on hdds, but about 30 20 year + old CDRs I recently found in my storage (stored in a dark cold - sometimes wet basement) are all fine. Same with hard drives that haven't been touched for the same amount of time.
    - digitallyfree 4y ago
      The CD-Rs were around fifteen years old, stored in plastic boxes in my house (in rooms with HVAC). A couple of them failed in a set of twenty or thirty I think. I do have 20+ year old CD-Rs that still work fine though. For hard drives I have had ones that were mysteriously corrupted after being unused for six years or so, but others that were readable after fifteen. It partially is the luck of the draw.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
If you want to watch some of these films and other old East European films with English subtitles: https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/ https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/ Searchable by decade and by country
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  Bookmarked, thanks! Sadly no Yuri Norstein. I know he's an animator, but I figured he's famous enough to be on there. A couple of years ago there was a new 2K transfer of all of his (released) films too.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    2k scans? Were they only 16mm or 8mm films?
    - vanderZwan 4y ago
      I honestly don't know, but I'll take 2K over the 360p upscaled videos I've seen on YT so far
      - dylan604 4y ago
        I agree. Hope I didn't sound snobby about "2K only" scans. I know that the smaller film sizes don't hold up well to greater than 2K scans. It could also be a limit of that's the only scanner that was available to them.
        topranks 4y ago
        They “hold up” just fine to higher-res scans. Perhaps won’t reveal more detail, but there is no real issue in general with scanning them at higher resolution.
        dylan604 4y ago
        Except the grain becomes the size of your face, but yeah, other than that, nothing wrong with it =) Seriously, it depends on the method of scanning. There's so many people that do 8mm projection to a camera rather than scanning. It is the most affordable in transfer prices, but affords the least flexibility. Maybe projecting to a camera recording in a RAW format might up that flexibility, but who's going to do that? Film chains like a Spirit would have a limit on how much it could blow up the image before becoming a digital scale. Some of the larger archival scanners that offer features like triple flash scans have a scanner that also has a certain resolution where the small size of the 8mm frame would again need digital scaling to fill frame. 16mm gates allow for compensation of that frame size, but I've never even heard of an 8mm gate for the higher end scanning equipment. This has always been the limitations as I've understood them. Plus, the grain does get much more pronounced with the higher res scanning, so I was only partially joking at the start. Granted, it has been about 10 years since I was personally heavy into handling film, so maybe something has been released? What are you familiar with that allows "no real issue" with higher res scanning?
sam_lowry_ 4y ago
The article is so wrong that I do not know where to start. First off, historic Western films are no less vulnerable, because businesses do not want to deal with copyright issues, and citizens are taught from the childhood that sharing is stealing. OTOH, copyright is still a fairly new idea in Eastern Europe, so fans tend to digitize and share more often. Compare rutracker to the pirate bay. Even in its heyday TPB did not have the level of commitment of the community that rutracker consistently exhibits for 18 years already. P.S. Here is the Lighthouse (2006) refered in the first paragraphs in FHD quality [1]. Enjoy. [1] https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5979083 https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5979083
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jedberg 4y ago
  > First off, historic Western films are no less vulnerable, because businesses do not want to deal with copyright issues, and citizens are taught from the childhood that sharing is stealing. This is completely inaccurate. There is big money in storing original film prints. There are a ton of commercial warehouses (mostly in/near Los Angeles) that specializes in such things. The copyright remains with the studio, but the actual print is stored in a warehouse. The bigger issue is the opposite -- because of real estate prices, the warehouses keep moving, and sometimes they sell off part of their collection to another warehouse. The owners of the films have no idea where their originals are. When I worked at Netflix we would often have the problem where a studio sold us the rights to stream something, so we would ask for the original print to digitize it, and it would take months to track down which warehouse actually had the original print. But once found it was easy to digitize because it was usually in really good shape. Eastern Europe doesn't have the film economy to support such warehouses.
  - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
    Your keyword is "storing" while I am speaking of sharing. The number of films revived by Netflix is small compared to those largely forgotten.
chadlavi 4y ago
Film is vulnerable, but at least the CEO of a streaming service can't just capriciously decide to delete it. Also servers are just as vulnerable to fire, earthquake, sabotage, etc.
WalterBright 4y ago
It seems like the primary obstacle to film preservation is copyright law. Allowing people to freely copy those old films means they are far more likely to survive. Sometimes I hate copyright law. I bought a set of all the Rocky+Bullwinkle cartoons. Surprise, surprise, the original music was removed and replaced with some generic noise. The cartoons are just unwatchable. Married with Children also replaced their Sinatra theme song with some generic awful music. I just have to grind my teeth and fast forward over that.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  Copyright is a ban on historical preservation. Having to wait more than a century just to not fear legal reprecussions for trying to do something about history is abysmal.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Copyright is amyloid plaque for the global brain.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Copyright is a barrier, but not the only barrier. For example, Hollywood is finding out the hard way that all the LTO tape libraries they bought to archive movies onto are incurring large migration costs, since nobody makes the same format tape drives for multiple decades. Every other digital storage medium also requires periodic data migration. The assumptions and budgets of pre-digital preservation projects was that "archival conditions" and original (non-exploding) media was enough. The ideas that you're probably having in your head - i.e. of using BitTorrent and the hard drives of strangers with a data hoarding addiction as cultural preservation - would have been absolutely ludicrous any time before the Internet. Nowadays it's vaguely feasible that at least the Internet Archive or Wikimedia could handle the data storage requirements for full-take cultural preservation. My personal opinion is that these sorts of modifications to a creative work to dodge a relicensing obligation should be prohibited by some kind of moral rights regime. The original creators are being done a disservice by having the music stripped to cut costs. But the US in particular is extremely hostile to that sort of thing (despite having agreed to implement it in treaties).
jacquesm 4y ago
Old celluloid is also crazy flammable. The activation energy very low and even during the manufacturing process explosions happened. Archival storage of old celluloid prior to digitization is not something you want to undertake in quantity without the proper gear and storage equipment, as well as a fire extinguisher. The problem with the film is that as it ages it becomes even more flammable than it originally was and it has a huge surface area to react with (unlike say a billiard ball or a pen made of the same material). Quite a bit of historical material was lost to time in several huge fires. To make things worse: it doesn't necessarily require a source of ignition. https://www.nontoxichub.com/celluloidfilmhazards https://www.nontoxichub.com/celluloidfilmhazards Not quite at 'stuff I won't work with' level but definitely worthy of respect.
- userbinator 4y ago
  To make things worse: it doesn't necessarily require a source of ignition. Nor does it require oxygen to burn; from your link: Cellulose nitrate contains chemically combined oxygen in sufficient amounts to allow burning and decomposition without the presence of air.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Yep. Scary stuff. Quite a few archives went up in flames over the years.
    - daniel_reetz 4y ago
      I have worked with/adjacent to several film archiving projects and yes, there's a fire extinguisher in the room but no, it's not like people work in fear. At all. You're not totally wrong, but people who work on archiving film in real life are much more concerned about vinegar syndrome and decay (not to mention copyright). Most old film is just rotten and stinks like vinegar. It crumbles in your hands.
ThinkBeat 4y ago
Yes but what to convert it to and who will store it? There should be a UN like international effort to set up resources for storing digital media (books, music, film, tv, games, journals, comics etc) for the long term. A few hundred years for sure. All digital media made in the entire world and all that can be digitized stored from the beginning until the end. A constant accumulating treasure. Doesn't have to be streaming, but there should be a way for a person to request a copy. (if permissible by the copyright holder) One thing that hurts me to think about are the hundreds of thousands of books that you cant read. The book has a small run, never republished, and for the most part never to be seen again. I wish each one was submitted to the above archive, The copyright holder is making 0 by holding is hostage from people reading it. Allowing people to read it thus would not lead to less of revenue. Perhaps a system of micropayments for still copyrighted but will never be seen again media. I say books because I love books, but movies, etc as well. All of it. I have started making a tiny effort myself by scanning and typesetting book published by members of my family a ways back. I know that Library of Congress has a lot of good stuff, but it only collects fromt he US (I think) In Norway Nasjoanlbiblioteket has a lot of stuff that is Norwegian.
- danuker 4y ago
  All I can tell you is that distributing via torrent will significantly increase the effective bandwidth.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

132 points by robtherobber 4y ago

Same is unfortunately true for a lot of Eastern European music. There are thousands of great soviet recordings of various classical and folk pieces that have never been digitized. And the current atmosphere over there is not honed in on preserving art. A lot of the recordings are only available on 50-60 year old vinyls which are getting harder and harder to find in a decent condition. Been digitizing a lot of my favorites in my spare time.

runjake 4y ago

I remember back in, probably the late 1990s or early 2000s, when my org was scrambling to copy analog media to "immortal" digital CD-Rs. 20 years later, they went into some of the archives to discover that most of the CD-Rs were unreadable. The material had degraded severely enough that the material had observable pits (holes) in them. Plan accordingly. Digital copies require it, too. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

PaulHoule 4y ago
The dyes used in writable CD's are fairly long lasting, as are the dyes used in writable Blu-Ray. There are some writable DVD's which use a media similar to Blu-Rays but they are unusual. This book talks about the sordid story of fugitive color media: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html how wedding photographers got blindsided when, 20 years later, people discovered that Kodak prints and negatives of their special day were severely faded. Or how Hollywood woke up in 1980s and realized there was big money in old movies and went looking for a solution: early on there was the bad idea of splitting out the three colors into three separate wheels, but later people realized that color film lasts much longer if you keep it in the freezer.
- thatoneguy 4y ago
  The first organic dye (cyanine) used for CDRs back in the '90s rotted faster than the more expensive phthalocyanine (20-50 years vs 50-100 years)[1]. [1] https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
- dylan604 4y ago
  The separating into 3 B&W negatives of the RGB separations was (is?) still a thing. In 2012, I was involved in film restoration projects that used laser recorders to take the processed digital files to 35mm B&W negative. The fun begins on trying to restore from one of the archives. Film shrinks and at different rates depending on how they are stored. So scanning each of the R+G+B negatives is one things, but getting them stacked and aligned taking into account the distortion distinct to each frame x3 is just glorious!!
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    That’s why you are better off keeping the negatives in the freezer
digitallyfree 4y ago
If your only digital archives are on cold media (e.g. optical disks, tape, offline HDDs) and are never replaced you have a problem. Keep them on readable hot storage that can be easily checked and upgraded over time and that should not be an issue. I've lost personal archives on CD-R/DVD-R myself and now I keep my archives stored hot on ZFS (has redundancy + bitrot protection), with additional hot and cold backups that are checked regularly. When disks fail they are quickly replaced, thus ensuring that the data is on relatively "new" as opposed to aging media. The article also mentions the problem with old/proprietary file formats for digital media which can't be opened in the future. Someone I knew actually had a story about how he had pictures stored in some obscure digital format (this was in the 90s when digital cameras were in their infancy) and he had to set up a equally old computer and software just to get the images reexported into something more modern. For something like this again regular checking of the archives (and keeping them hot) helps. Also I'm pretty sure the most basic standardized formats like BMP and JPG aren't going away for a long time.
- Roark66 4y ago
  It is interesting, could you say more on how old were CD-Rs that failed and what percentage roughly failed? Also how were they stored? I hear a lot of this information, but personally my experiences are diametrally opposite. I've never used cdrs to store really important data, I have all this on hdds, but about 30 20 year + old CDRs I recently found in my storage (stored in a dark cold - sometimes wet basement) are all fine. Same with hard drives that haven't been touched for the same amount of time.
  - digitallyfree 4y ago
    The CD-Rs were around fifteen years old, stored in plastic boxes in my house (in rooms with HVAC). A couple of them failed in a set of twenty or thirty I think. I do have 20+ year old CD-Rs that still work fine though. For hard drives I have had ones that were mysteriously corrupted after being unused for six years or so, but others that were readable after fifteen. It partially is the luck of the draw.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

If you want to watch some of these films and other old East European films with English subtitles: https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/ https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/ Searchable by decade and by country

vanderZwan 4y ago
Bookmarked, thanks! Sadly no Yuri Norstein. I know he's an animator, but I figured he's famous enough to be on there. A couple of years ago there was a new 2K transfer of all of his (released) films too.
- dylan604 4y ago
  2k scans? Were they only 16mm or 8mm films?
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    I honestly don't know, but I'll take 2K over the 360p upscaled videos I've seen on YT so far
    - dylan604 4y ago
      I agree. Hope I didn't sound snobby about "2K only" scans. I know that the smaller film sizes don't hold up well to greater than 2K scans. It could also be a limit of that's the only scanner that was available to them.
      - topranks 4y ago
        They “hold up” just fine to higher-res scans. Perhaps won’t reveal more detail, but there is no real issue in general with scanning them at higher resolution.
        dylan604 4y ago
        Except the grain becomes the size of your face, but yeah, other than that, nothing wrong with it =) Seriously, it depends on the method of scanning. There's so many people that do 8mm projection to a camera rather than scanning. It is the most affordable in transfer prices, but affords the least flexibility. Maybe projecting to a camera recording in a RAW format might up that flexibility, but who's going to do that? Film chains like a Spirit would have a limit on how much it could blow up the image before becoming a digital scale. Some of the larger archival scanners that offer features like triple flash scans have a scanner that also has a certain resolution where the small size of the 8mm frame would again need digital scaling to fill frame. 16mm gates allow for compensation of that frame size, but I've never even heard of an 8mm gate for the higher end scanning equipment. This has always been the limitations as I've understood them. Plus, the grain does get much more pronounced with the higher res scanning, so I was only partially joking at the start. Granted, it has been about 10 years since I was personally heavy into handling film, so maybe something has been released? What are you familiar with that allows "no real issue" with higher res scanning?

sam_lowry_ 4y ago

The article is so wrong that I do not know where to start. First off, historic Western films are no less vulnerable, because businesses do not want to deal with copyright issues, and citizens are taught from the childhood that sharing is stealing. OTOH, copyright is still a fairly new idea in Eastern Europe, so fans tend to digitize and share more often. Compare rutracker to the pirate bay. Even in its heyday TPB did not have the level of commitment of the community that rutracker consistently exhibits for 18 years already. P.S. Here is the Lighthouse (2006) refered in the first paragraphs in FHD quality [1]. Enjoy. [1] https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5979083 https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5979083

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jedberg 4y ago
> First off, historic Western films are no less vulnerable, because businesses do not want to deal with copyright issues, and citizens are taught from the childhood that sharing is stealing. This is completely inaccurate. There is big money in storing original film prints. There are a ton of commercial warehouses (mostly in/near Los Angeles) that specializes in such things. The copyright remains with the studio, but the actual print is stored in a warehouse. The bigger issue is the opposite -- because of real estate prices, the warehouses keep moving, and sometimes they sell off part of their collection to another warehouse. The owners of the films have no idea where their originals are. When I worked at Netflix we would often have the problem where a studio sold us the rights to stream something, so we would ask for the original print to digitize it, and it would take months to track down which warehouse actually had the original print. But once found it was easy to digitize because it was usually in really good shape. Eastern Europe doesn't have the film economy to support such warehouses.
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  Your keyword is "storing" while I am speaking of sharing. The number of films revived by Netflix is small compared to those largely forgotten.

chadlavi 4y ago

Film is vulnerable, but at least the CEO of a streaming service can't just capriciously decide to delete it. Also servers are just as vulnerable to fire, earthquake, sabotage, etc.

WalterBright 4y ago

It seems like the primary obstacle to film preservation is copyright law. Allowing people to freely copy those old films means they are far more likely to survive. Sometimes I hate copyright law. I bought a set of all the Rocky+Bullwinkle cartoons. Surprise, surprise, the original music was removed and replaced with some generic noise. The cartoons are just unwatchable. Married with Children also replaced their Sinatra theme song with some generic awful music. I just have to grind my teeth and fast forward over that.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Copyright is a ban on historical preservation. Having to wait more than a century just to not fear legal reprecussions for trying to do something about history is abysmal.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Copyright is amyloid plaque for the global brain.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kmeisthax 4y ago
Copyright is a barrier, but not the only barrier. For example, Hollywood is finding out the hard way that all the LTO tape libraries they bought to archive movies onto are incurring large migration costs, since nobody makes the same format tape drives for multiple decades. Every other digital storage medium also requires periodic data migration. The assumptions and budgets of pre-digital preservation projects was that "archival conditions" and original (non-exploding) media was enough. The ideas that you're probably having in your head - i.e. of using BitTorrent and the hard drives of strangers with a data hoarding addiction as cultural preservation - would have been absolutely ludicrous any time before the Internet. Nowadays it's vaguely feasible that at least the Internet Archive or Wikimedia could handle the data storage requirements for full-take cultural preservation. My personal opinion is that these sorts of modifications to a creative work to dodge a relicensing obligation should be prohibited by some kind of moral rights regime. The original creators are being done a disservice by having the music stripped to cut costs. But the US in particular is extremely hostile to that sort of thing (despite having agreed to implement it in treaties).

jacquesm 4y ago

Old celluloid is also crazy flammable. The activation energy very low and even during the manufacturing process explosions happened. Archival storage of old celluloid prior to digitization is not something you want to undertake in quantity without the proper gear and storage equipment, as well as a fire extinguisher. The problem with the film is that as it ages it becomes even more flammable than it originally was and it has a huge surface area to react with (unlike say a billiard ball or a pen made of the same material). Quite a bit of historical material was lost to time in several huge fires. To make things worse: it doesn't necessarily require a source of ignition. https://www.nontoxichub.com/celluloidfilmhazards https://www.nontoxichub.com/celluloidfilmhazards Not quite at 'stuff I won't work with' level but definitely worthy of respect.

userbinator 4y ago
To make things worse: it doesn't necessarily require a source of ignition. Nor does it require oxygen to burn; from your link: Cellulose nitrate contains chemically combined oxygen in sufficient amounts to allow burning and decomposition without the presence of air.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Yep. Scary stuff. Quite a few archives went up in flames over the years.
  - daniel_reetz 4y ago
    I have worked with/adjacent to several film archiving projects and yes, there's a fire extinguisher in the room but no, it's not like people work in fear. At all. You're not totally wrong, but people who work on archiving film in real life are much more concerned about vinegar syndrome and decay (not to mention copyright). Most old film is just rotten and stinks like vinegar. It crumbles in your hands.

ThinkBeat 4y ago

Yes but what to convert it to and who will store it? There should be a UN like international effort to set up resources for storing digital media (books, music, film, tv, games, journals, comics etc) for the long term. A few hundred years for sure. All digital media made in the entire world and all that can be digitized stored from the beginning until the end. A constant accumulating treasure. Doesn't have to be streaming, but there should be a way for a person to request a copy. (if permissible by the copyright holder) One thing that hurts me to think about are the hundreds of thousands of books that you cant read. The book has a small run, never republished, and for the most part never to be seen again. I wish each one was submitted to the above archive, The copyright holder is making 0 by holding is hostage from people reading it. Allowing people to read it thus would not lead to less of revenue. Perhaps a system of micropayments for still copyrighted but will never be seen again media. I say books because I love books, but movies, etc as well. All of it. I have started making a tiny effort myself by scanning and typesetting book published by members of my family a ways back. I know that Library of Congress has a lot of good stuff, but it only collects fromt he US (I think) In Norway Nasjoanlbiblioteket has a lot of stuff that is Norwegian.

danuker 4y ago
All I can tell you is that distributing via torrent will significantly increase the effective bandwidth.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]