Goodbye, Dawson City, Goodbye
Digital Cinema Technologies from the Archive's Perspective: Part 2
by Nicola Mazzanti

So, it's here. It has arrived, and it is here to stay. Digitization of cinema, "from capture to projection," is really here.

Film archives have been nervously waiting and actively getting ready for it for quite some time now, starting in 2002 when the European project FIRST provided the opportunity for 'brainstorming' about the future and the impact of digital on cinema archives. At the time few people in the field thought that Digital Cinema would come true - at least not any time soon. This was quite understandable as 2002 was the year when DCI-Digital Cinema Initiative was created, and only a few years had passed since the very first feature film had been produced with the process that we now call Digital Intermediate - although at the time it did not have a name.

Of course after that, much work was done by archives and other bodies, to wit: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' classic, groundbreaking report "The Digital Dilemma"; the work at the Library of Congress within NDIIPP ; on a more technical accent, the recent EDCINE project; the work on ISO-standardized JPEG 2000 profiles for long-term preservation ; and the introduction of silent frame rates in the D-Cinema standards. The list of activities showing how hard archives worked to get ready for a complete shift to digital technologies has become quite long and will surely be added to in the future. Whether the early preparation was sufficient is a story which can be left to historians; right now it's time to face the fact that the horse is out of the barn: cinema has become digital.

Actually, I use the phrase "the horse is out of the barn" in the strictest sense, as in "Belgium, 2011." This is one of the first countries to have completely switched to D-Cinema, with hardly any commercial theatres operating 35mm projectors anymore.

In a way I can say that I am a 'privileged' spectator and a highly interested one. And as such I can say that no matter how prepared you were, or how much you discussed, analyzed and dissected the issue, when it happened, it was still a surprise and a shock. In a way it was like a tornado or hurricane had hit the ground. You saw it coming, expected it, but when it finally really hit, you were still somehow caught by surprise as secretly, at some level, you still hoped it would simply go away - and frankly, that's exactly what some archivists had hoped for a while.

Well, this digital tornado hit with full force.

In fact the very first thing that strikes you is how quick the page turns, how fast a whole market flips. In the case of Belgium the limited size of the market helped. Still, when the decision to 'go digital' was announced, all screens and all theaters became digital practically at once and suddenly, hardly any 35mm projectors were left behind.

Lesson One: Don't bank on a nice, easy transitional period where the two technologies (film and digital) happily coexist or at least where 35mm is kept as a safe, familiar backup. This is just wishful thinking! 35mm is not meant to stay. 35mm machines are being dismantled, sold, thrown away - with the exception of some multiplexes where one projector is left in one of the theatres, "just in case" for a year or two.

None of this is really surprising, as keeping two systems in operation is both not economical and not really that useful. For many years now we've been warning that other similar industrial restructuring processes show a pretty consistent pattern: the rate at which an aging technology is replaced is slow at first, then it accelerates until reaching a sort of 'breaking point' when keeping the old technology alive becomes both technically too complex and economically unsustainable. At that point the process suddenly shifts to "warp speed" and it is very soon over.

So went the theory… and reality wasn't far behind.

Although I was one amongst others who had been preaching and warning about the consequences the shift to digital would entail, when it actually happened, I was dumbstruck by the sudden disappearance of all things analog. Literally overnight projection equipment's maintenance and service became costly and either hard or impossible to obtain; film labs reduced their services while trying to 'restructure'; suddenly your viewing prints could no longer be shown at schools and universities and others couldn't find a theatre with 35mm projectors anymore.

Lesson Two: As soon as distribution turns digital, one can really read the writing on the wall: film origination and the scanning of it won't last long either. Digital image capture will inexorably expand.

I admit that what follows is not really a neatly organized strategy to deal with the change, as this will require time and adaptation to a technical and industrial landscape that is in constant, deep and fast evolution. Besides, we have to realize that the consequences impact all aspects of an archive - from acquisition to programming, cataloguing, distribution and access - not just preservation and collection management. This is a landscape that is much broader than what I can discuss here. So, please consider all of this as a collection of loose thoughts aiming at nothing more than starting a discussion.

In the previous issue of the AMIA Tech Review, Arne Nowak did an excellent job of breaking down the whole D-Cinema process from an archival perspective. I am sure that his article greatly contributed in helping people understand a few basic and critical points beyond the intricacies of the process.

The process is indeed complex, with the complexity largely due to the fact that it is new and experience with it is limited. I also think that Arne's article showed that the process is ultimately manageable and that it is absolutely reasonable to assume that this technology will become easily available even in the short term. What I am saying is this: a fully compliant DCP can be produced in-house or even at home with reasonably priced software and hardware and even with free, open source tools.

In other words, if we look at the process of producing digital viewing elements for theatres it's clear that archives should be able to produce DCPs completely in-house. Objectively speaking (and setting aside our obvious lack of experience,) this is far less complicated than producing a 16mm or 35mm release print. Consider the chemistry involved in processing, sensitometry, or the art of properly setting up a printer or the many other technical considerations required for best results - we all know this is not trivial.

Viewed from a pure cost/benefit standpoint, there is even less competition between film and DCP production. The last DCP we produced was done on a 3 year old Mac and while it took 6 times the running time to complete, it worked out well on the very first try. (If you want to spend some money, there are technologies out there that can do the job in real time). Compare that with a full-fledged wet or dry lab. Please understand that I am not arguing that one display medium is "better" than the other, I am simply arguing against the concept that making a DCP is a complex, costly and ultimately impossible endeavor. The reality is that producing a DCP is something that already is much more easily within the reach of an archivist and an archive than printing and processing a film print. And it is so much cheaper - even now when it is still a 'new process' - whether it is done in-house or if it is outsourced to the many companies offering the service. Considering all of this, I see no reason why archives shouldn't get equipped to carry out the process in-house.

However, there are caveats to this type of thinking. While it is somehow a relief to think that producing new digital projection elements is necessary so that our films can be watched in this new environment, is this not a self-defeating concept for an archive? Following this logic pretty much sets us up for a future in which we will not be able to screen those film prints we cherish so much anywhere else but in our own theatres and even this will become more costly and more complex until it will be practically impossible. Even so, we can argue that this is what we should do, that we should turn our archives into real museums, making them perhaps the only places where a film-originated work can be seen as it was intended to be seen: with an audience, on a screen, illuminated by a film projector. But in the digital age the demise of this concept may not be a matter of if, but when.

On the other hand, we all know that this is not the only issue. There are many others.

Lesson Three: Don't fall in love with today's methods of digital storage. Knock film all you want, but one thing it does extremely well is survive. Once a piece of film stock gets out of the lab and into our archives the chances for a long life are pretty much guaranteed provided it is kept in a cool, dry place and the archive exercises reasonable care.

Unfortunately, digital media does not have such a secure and validated reputation. The instability and volatility of a digital file and the complexity of handling a large collection of large digital files is well documented. Please note that the adjective 'large' is the key element here. Holding a 300 GB file in your collections is not that difficult, costly or complex. But multiply it by 1,000 (plus throw in some Digital Cinema Distribution Masters, or DCDMS, each worth a few Terabytes) and you actually have a problem. The problem becomes even bigger when you project that in the future all of this - those 1,000 files or more - will have to migrate from one medium or system to another. Not to mention that format issues might arise with time and might require some form of format migration.

Lesson Four: 'Format stability' is a very serious issue.

In theory, the whole D-Cinema process is almost fully described and defined by SMPTE standards. Standards for professional applications are usually more stable than others and there is a strong chance that D-Cinema standards will last a while. This is because the consequences of a change will be too costly after the initial transition is complete. Nobody wants to buy new projectors and servers too often. Still, if we look at this from an archival perspective, it is both possible and probable that within the next 10-15 years something will change.

With computing power constantly improving and storage constantly decreasing in cost and complexity, it is not hard to imagine that sooner rather than later we will see D-Cinema going beyond its current specs. Examples include: higher resolutions like 8K, higher bit depths, the possibility of more extensive use of higher frame rates (frame rates other than 24 and 48, from silent frame rates up to 60fps are already in the standards, and they might be used some day), development of new display technologies (laser projectors or very large "active" screens rather than projected images are two solutions currently being proposed), and improvements in sound. (Wavefield synthesis is what we need!)

Similar developments and others that I have undoubtedly overlooked or I don't see coming are likely to impact the existing standards in the future. This won't happen tomorrow, but in 'archival time' we can surely expect this to happen and we should start planning for these changes now. This implies having format migration in mind. In turn this means making sure that we have our technical metadata straight.

Lesson Five: Taking accurate metadata is essential and unavoidable!

I might be wrong, but I suspect that many film archives today may not be fully equipped to properly describe, from a technical standpoint, digital masters or projection copies that are already coming into their collections. In this sense and context, it is my humble opinion that becoming 'fully equipped' entails acquiring three necessary capabilities.

1. Adopting some sort of metadata schema allowing the recording of the technical characteristics of the digital object (at ingest and all along its life cycle, including at migrations).

2. Acquiring the proper hardware and software tools necessary to inspect, analyze, and check the digital object, both at ingest and all along its life-cycle.

3. Developing the necessary know-how within the staff to apply the above to the many digital formats that are being, will be, or might be ingested.

At the moment, I think most of my concerns lie somewhere in these three areas, at least when we look at the issue from the point of view of digital element ingestion, long term preservation, and collection management.

Work has been done on the metadata issue, but I am under the impression that there is still work to do in the real-life application of the schemata that are available, particularly in the interaction with issues 2 and 3. The situation is even more critical when it comes to methods or technical solutions to track down and record 'historical technical metadata' that describe the processes and transformations that are applied to a given digital object during format migrations or conversions aimed at creating an access element. Such metadata are critical to be able to identify the correct version of a given title, to make sure that the right version is produced, or to reconstruct retroactively what happened to a given file. Clearly, this is something that cannot be done manually as it is both excessively time consuming for a large collection and impossible for certain types of information that can only be gathered by software.

Hardware and software solutions for ingestion are not an easy issue either. First, a major concern is the cost. Today most public and private commercial archives are faced with what one can politely describe as a not brilliant economic environment. Second, selecting software and hardware today is not easy, nor is it easy to implement the 'right' hardware and software solutions into the everyday operations of an archive.

Lesson Six: Basic ingestion requirements may entail more fact-finding than previously found in traditional film archives. (The following sketches a pattern of basic actions which will have to be performed upon acquisition of materials.)

1) Similar to analog days, an archive needs to perform a proper ingest process that requires inspecting the incoming elements, assessing their conditions, and the recording of the necessary metadata. It does not matter here if they are deposited, acquired from a service provider (digitization/restoration lab) or internally produced (Do you really trust the guys in the other department?). Elements to be ingested must be checked against what they are supposed to be, labeled to be, and listed to be. Obviously the list of possible incoming formats depends very much on the workflows used internally and, concerning deposited elements, the industrial environment the archive operates in.

2) If we look at DSMs (Digital Source Masters i.e. the format that originated a DCDM and then a DCP), we are confronted with a wide range of HD video formats, both tape- and file-based, plus differently flavored DPX, TIFF, JPEG 2000 and sound files. Tape-based formats are 'easy' in the sense that one just needs the right machine, but the costs are very significant as one needs more or less one machine per format. File-based elements can be handled with a wide range of software/hardware combinations and the good thing is that the entry level can be relatively low: there are many medium priced (or even free) software solutions to open JPEG 2000 or DPX images, and pretty reasonably priced hardware can be sufficient at least at some basic level. Not to mention that it is very possible that the tendency, inaugurated by Blackmagic, to lower the price of digital postproduction tools able to handle 2k and 4k can be followed by others, taking it down to almost a prosumer level.

3) In its unencrypted form, a DCP is even easier to handle. Just as an example, we can check DCPs on a rather 'normal' dual Quad-Core MacPro using Fraunhofer's software. 2k DCPs would run at 24fps (or slightly more), for real-time 4k (or 3D) one would need something better than a 3 year old machine. Similar performances can be also obtained on PCs, of course, and other solutions are available with other vendors.

Obviously, the real issue of encrypted DCPs is not so much that one needs the proper software to open them, or that the de-crypting process uses up some computing power - the real problem is the availability of the keys.

Actually, this is also fairly simple: if you do not have a key there is pretty much nothing you can do except copy the file as it is, and pray very intensely that (1) it contains what it says and it is not corrupted, and (2) it does not get corrupted later. Ultimately, real long term preservation of encrypted DCPs without access to the keys is simply impossible.

In my opinion, no archive should ever accept encrypted DCPs without keys as a deposit format whenever long-term or even short term-preservation is in the picture. It is probably good to remember at this point that, as Arne Nowak explained and contrary to what many people think, encryption of DCPs is not mandatory. It is common practice, but it is not mandatory.

The Technical Commission of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) recently issued a recommendation, "On the deposit and acquisition of D-cinema elements for long term preservation and access," which discusses the different issues and concludes:

1. Only a DCDM or an unencrypted DCP are acceptable formats for the long-term preservation of a cinema work. Archives must be aware that a DCDM will be considerably larger than a DCP.
2. A DSM can also be accepted, but not in place of a DCDM or DCP.

As the delivery of an unencrypted DCP might be considered risky, another alternative (that is discussed both in Arne's article and the FIAF recommendation) is to provide the archive with an encrypted DCP that can be decrypted with a so-called "Distribution KDM" (the term "Studio KDM" is also sometimes used).
As Arne explains, "Distribution KDMs" are

KDMs that can be used with special software to decrypt the DCPs in a secure and controlled environment on the archive's premises. This would secure the transmission but also give archives the possibility to take care of the long-term preservation of today's digital films for the future.

In practice this means that the archive receives an encrypted DCP as well as a Distribution KDM, a key that works only on a specific trusted software/hardware environment. The key is then used in that secure environment to decrypt the DCP. At this point the archive can decide to store securely the unencrypted DCP in its own storage system or it can produce a new DCP encrypted with a new and different key; thus, the key required to de-crypt the newly encrypted DCP is owned by the archive, and can be securely stored and conserved.

Although I am personally uneasy with the idea - as any extra layer of complexity increases exponentially the probability of problems - an archive could even decide to store encrypted DCPs, as long as it owns the keys it produced with the procedure above.

Whatever the strategy of the archive is, an "ingestion" station is basically what we all need to have in order to really manage a collection of D-Cinema elements and have a prayer of a chance of being able to preserve it.

Lesson Seven: Ingestion fine points: eyeballs, ears, perspicacity and persistence are essential!

A station that is designed to facilitate ingestion and processing of digital signals implies a group of equipment capable of appropriate procedures to ensure that incoming materials not only are what they say they are (the DCP opens, all the reels and the eventual subtitles are there, etc.) but that they are correct and the quality is what it should be. This includes a long list of checks (is it in the right color space, is the left eye really the left eye or do we have two copies of the right eye?), etc. Some of these need to be checked visually, and some of this would require some analytical automated tools to make sure that the MXF structure is correct, that the JPEG 2000 compression is within parameters and all the other little details where the proverbial devil hides. Similar considerations also apply to other digital formats, obviously.

I am not aware (my fault, possibly) of software that allows systematic checking of the packages we receive, but that's definitely something we all need. One could of course have a battery of servers and check each DCP visually on each of them, and it is true that all software/hardware do perform a check, and usually if something is wrong they either do not open the file or have some error message. But that's not really enough, nor is it practical or necessarily particularly significant in the long-term perspective (there might be minor errors that are not problematic right now, but they could become a problem later). What we really need is a piece of software that thoroughly checks a DCP to make sure that it is correctly done and produces a report that can be used as a record of the state of the DCP at ingest.

Last but not least, inspection inevitably entails some sort of 'visual' checking which is neither easy nor cheap, and right now it is more difficult than it sounds. Obviously, in order to properly check any digital format one needs displays that can show the required resolution, in the correct color space and that are highly reliable - in other words, a studio-level display. Never trust built-in computer or monitor down-res processes as they might either introduce or hide problems and errors.

Ultimately, the best way to check something that is designed to be projected onto a screen by a D-Cinema projector is to use a D-Cinema projector and a screen - the underlying concept being nothing new to a film archivist! But of course this is costly and poses some organizational problems as it risks creating bottlenecks because of limits to the number of screening rooms one can set up. Also 'studio' projectors are not exactly that small or cheap to buy and run. On the other hand, high-quality monitors capable of simulating a D-Cinema DLP projector's color space and gamut are also not cheap, although obviously they are more affordable than a projector and require less space. Whatever the solution, one needs a way to routinely check the displays' consistency and quality.

Another issue that should not be underestimated is the time factor.

Although we have a tendency to think that today a 250 GB file is not such a problem (and it is definitely a lesser problem than it used to be only few years ago), it still takes time to simply move it around, and it gets only worse when we try to move more than one at the time, or if we are dealing with DCDMs or DSMs that can be several Terabytes in size. Obviously, one can move files on hard drives on a 'sneakernet', but only in a very early stage. Very soon it becomes imperative to set up a proper network, and to factor the time required to 'move stuff around', as all post houses know all too well.

It can easily take one hour or more to simply upload a DCP from the hard drive it comes on into a server, depending on the interface and the bandwidth available. (By the way, this is going to be a serious problem with a cinematheque's typical programs of four different films per day, changing every day. In that scenario just having the files on the server becomes a problem.)

Lesson Eight: Make sure that the archive's staff has the required skills, competencies and know-how.

Already choosing, purchasing, and implementing what we discussed until now (metadata & equipment) requires some knowledge of the technology and of the technical solutions available as well as a sound understanding of the archival practices and principles as they are applied to a digital environment. Finding staff with the required skills and competencies is not an easy task and it is made worse by cinema being still a niche sector. Finding somebody with knowledge of video and even better, of Digital Video and/or Final Cut editing at a decent professional level, is possible, but finding anybody with a deep understanding of the cinema production, postproduction and distribution sectors is a serious challenge. (This might be necessary as the archive is bound to receive not only the 'finished product' - a DCDM or a DCP - but a 'bunch of digital stuff' that includes DSMs in the most perverse formats and files used in the postproduction process that need to be understood in order to be correctly checked and ingested.) Again this is not necessarily a new situation for archives, as they have dealt with all sorts of materials coming out of photochemical labs, usually mislabeled, mis- or not-described, etc., that needed to be sorted out. But of course archives have had decades to build up a staff possessing the required know-how in the analog domain. Re-training is of course a viable option and in most cases it can be the typical Hobson's choice, as hiring an experienced, highly skilled digital lab worker might prove to be unaffordable for most institutions. Besides, re-training might be the best option to make sure that your technical staff still knows what a film image look like, rather than coming in with a dreadful 'video look' in their minds.

Lesson Nine: Consider a separate IT team for archive work as opposed to layering it on a pre-existing IT group only familiar with office business requirements.

When thinking in terms of staff who need to adapt to the new world, one should not make the mistake of assuming that the regular back office IT personnel can handle it. Business-related IT is critical of course, and many public institutions have serious problems in this area, as way too many IT departments are only concerned with - and therefore competent in - office applications. Sometimes even installing and running new dedicated software in a large institution is a challenge as IT departments get nervous when things they do not control or master start creeping into their systems. It might make more sense to give up and just set up a parallel environment suited for managing and handling digital cinema content. But obviously, this might entail long negotiations and, inevitably, an increase in costs.

Lesson Ten: Get ready to retrain your film staff.

Although IT is of course the most critical sector, other parts of the archive must get used to new procedures as digital elements come in or go out: administrators must get used to the fact that 'delivery' might not be 'physical' anymore (they must be told what an FTP is, and this might be a challenge), print loan and distribution will have to deal with DCPs, programming will have to pose new questions besides "Is it 16 or 35?", projectionists must get used to the new, menacing and mysterious 'black box' in the booth. And so on.

Training of this kind is not impossible or complicated, but it is time-consuming and it implies a transitional period when mistakes are inevitable. Besides, it might require some flexibility, as it is to be expected that some people in the organization either refuse the whole new thing ("Digital? I just hate it!") or they simply can't deal with it ("Digital, I will never get it!").

In spite of everything I have just written, it must be clearly understood that what archives are faced with is not just a digital future - which would be easier, in a way. They are looking at an 'analog plus digital' future, a future in which analog collections will co-exist with growing digital ones. This is less obvious than it seems. For one thing, it means that archives will have to manage mixed collections, they will need two sets of equipment, two sets of skills and experience, databases and collection management systems that can handle both as multiple analog and digital elements of the same title will co-exist, an analog plus digital projection booth, and so on.

Lesson Eleven: Get real: you're going to need more money right now!

The first, obvious and self-evident truth is that setting up for digital requires an increase in budget, and though eventual 'optimizations' and 'savings' might come in a second phase, the first phase simply will be one in which whole new sets of equipment from ingest to storage and projection will need to be acquired and put in place, as well as new skills and new staff.

As is always the case in the media and cultural environment, the advent of a new technology and the establishment of systems for its preservation (social structures, institutions, technologies, etc.) are not synchronous events. So it should not come as a surprise that while many governments in Europe are directly or indirectly supporting and encouraging the digitization of cinema exhibition, there is no comparable effort in supporting the preservation of the works produced for D-Cinema distribution. The danger is that we implement solutions only post-factum, which would result in a certain amount of losses - again, nothing new for archivists, just something we are not so excited to see happening yet again!

The above does not mean that archives are not working and getting ready for that, and apparently something is moving at a higher political level. The European Commission recently launched a study on the "challenges and opportunities for film heritage institutions in the digital era" that should result in a set of very concrete and practical recommendations on the "legal/organizational/technical changes [that need] to be introduced to make sure that archives will continue to perform their role in the digital era." Translated from the political jargon, this represents a first attempt to deal with these issues with a system-wide approach that might even produce significant and meaningful results (I know, I am a die-hard optimist).

As a matter of fact, the shift to a digital world from capture to exhibition impacts most areas of an archive's activities, and therefore a systemic approach that takes into consideration many aspects of the problem is indeed welcome. And even more welcome is an approach that does not take into consideration only the short-term perspective but factors in very long-term scenarios as well.

Lesson Twelve: Consider the future future.

Much of what I have written so far speaks only of the short term. The picture gets more complex when we consider things in the medium to long term. The following is not listed in a precise order; nor will I comment on all of them. Approach this as "just thinking out loud."

Worry #1: Until now, I have referred to the challenges of managing, ingesting and preserving D-Cinema elements, while in reality the very first big problem is acquisition!

As the most common D-Cinema elements are encrypted DCPs, one thing is sure: there won't be any 21st century Dawson City. There won't be any more Dawson Cities where long forgotten prints are recovered after decades spent in the permafrost; nor distributors depositing positive prints to make space in their vaults; nor prints left in a booth, nor labs depositing prints and inter-negatives left on their shelves. In short, fate won't play a role anymore in an archive's acquisition policy. Prints will not 'turn up'.

While legal, contractual and voluntary deposits are the most important reasons for acquisitions, we must face the reality that it was fate, haphazard, serendipity, whatever you want to call it, that brought into the archives all those prints and negatives that were forgotten and abandoned in the many dusty corners of the analog cinema industry. Like Dawson City, for one….

Serendipity is not going to play a role in a digital world, as what is more likely to be found is an encrypted DCP, of which the key is long forgotten, lost, or belonging to a bankrupted production company.

It might be different in countries where the film industry is stronger and better structured (namely the US, possibly India) but in most European countries, for example, the reality is that production companies come and go, are dissolved or go bust and budgets are too small to ensure regular payments to any commercial film storage company, let alone a digital repository. In an analog world, most of these forgotten film elements would eventually end up in an archive. At that point, the films were safe from loss, and the archives' problem was to locate the rights-owners, as companies dissolve, names change, widows and daughters get married, etc.

As for now, the problem will be to find out who was the last to hold a key. And if we get to that point, we can be sure that the percentages of what we lose would make the loss of silent cinema works look like a picnic.

Worry #2: Truth is that behind any deposit or acquisition of a digital element there will have to be a conscious decision. There are many different reasons why such a decision could be taken. Some countries have legal deposit schemes, while others impose the deposit of works whose production was supported by public funding and so forth. Hopefully voluntary deposits will continue, as I think they are to everyone's advantage.

Right now, in many cases commercial vendors do not charge for keeping a DCP on their tapes or disks, because their business model is that the fees they collect for making copies and KDMs will pay for the storage. But we all know very well that when theatrical distribution is over there is very little use for projection elements. This used to be one reason why prints were deposited in archives: to save storage costs and headaches. This is in fact one of the many ways by which archives have been actively supporting the film industry for decades.

In the digital era, the real question will be: how long will it be until a service provider will realize that after two or three years a DCP (even more so anything bigger than that) will only be a liability and a responsibility and will cease to produce income? If this is already true in the analog world where storage is basically passive, how soon will the storage of digital materials entail regular migrations and become a really significant cost factor for laboratories and owners of the elements. As archivists, how often have we received in deposit printing elements long forgotten in a lab and whose storage the owner stopped paying years ago? But don't worry: no need for that anymore, a simple "format disk" command would do.

In this scenario, preservation of digital elements must be based on a new level of collaboration between archives and the industry, a collaboration that needs to be even closer than what we already experience now. For the industry, this means realizing that fundamentally different from any other player on the scene, archives' only interest is long term preservation and they have been doing that for many, many decades, in good times and - more importantly - in bad times.

Worry #3: For archives, this also means that they must not only implement long-term preservation strategies, but they also must implement serious steps to make sure that the materials are securely stored with no chances of unauthorized access, without which of course nobody would ever deposit anything with them - at least nothing that could be preserved (i.e. nothing unencrypted).

Yet again, the principle of storing items safely and securely is not new, nor has it changed. It is the concrete methods, procedures and technologies that change. Let's not forget that archives have been storing unencrypted formats for decades: they were called 'release prints' and 'negatives'.

Worry #4: Analog collections will continue to exist and will need constant care to be properly preserved. That's true, but they will inevitably change their status and function.

Once theatres will all be digital, the viewing prints we hold in our vaults will be projected by us. We will be the only ones left able to project analog prints.

Next, photochemical labs will become too expensive and unreliable, their quality will decrease as their staff ages and retires and maintenance gets too costly. Ultimately, they will be gone too. This is not something bound to happen in the distant future, this is something we are all experiencing already; large areas of the world do not have easy access to film lab services today.

When photochemical labs are gone all the prints in our collections will become irreplaceable and unique. They will be irreplaceable because we won't be able to make new ones, and unique because at that point all prints will be the only witness of the way the work originally looked and sounded. Suddenly, every item in our collections will be a unique master.

Inevitably, this will have an important impact on strategies and procedures (for collection and storage management, preservation priorities, access limitations, even vault design) that we used for decades and were based on a hierarchy in the collections that now will have to be redefined.

This process will take some time, how much exactly depends of course on a number of factors, including how fast the industry in your country will switch to digital distribution, how resilient Kodak and Fuji are, whether your archive has its own internal lab or not, how good your staff is at keeping it in operation, etc.

But the process of reconsidering your collections will start very soon. The day when you realize that there is almost no theatre in the country that can show all those beautiful prints you conserved so carefully and no lab to make a new one, that's the day when you start looking at them in a completely different way. That's tough, believe me.

Worry #5: As much as I am concerned with the problems of finding new staff members who are competent in this whole digital world, as much as I find it difficult to find skilled and not-too-greedy IT staff, as much as I struggle to decide which equipment to buy, where and how to install them, and how to train my staff to use them, still I have a discomforting feeling that this is not the hardest challenge yet, at least in the medium term. No, the challenge of the future, the real problem for future archivists will be analog.

And it will be the real challenge because all the knowledge, the know-how, and even the technology on which the analog film industry was based is already fading away, and soon it will be gone completely. Again, it is not a matter of whether or not, it is a matter of when.

As a matter of fact we have been witnessing this trend for quite some time. Since films are post-produced digitally, negative cutting, optical printing, and even grading are all activities of the past; if and when they survive, it is mostly for archival works, not for production. The technology of film-based production itself entered its sunset quite a few years ago, with no new research or new products being introduced in quite some time. The years since the last printer or analyzer were designed are counted in dozens. And the lab's staff is definitely ageing, as no new staff is hired or trained. Departments are being shut down, not opened.

Film labs barely survive on the production of positive prints off 'digital negatives' and some negative processing. Most if not all of them have opened new Digital Intermediate departments and some might even convert completely to digital. There is no doubt in my mind that analog film services will shrink to a handful of specialized labs serving only the commercial or non-profit archival market or the production of film-based protection materials. In the best of scenarios, wet labs will become a highly priced niche market which will progressively dwindle to nothingness when analog film technology slowly fades out or is replaced with a non-film-based archival media which truly does have 100 years or more useable life between migrations. In the worst-case scenario, labs will go very fast if the bulk of their business depends on positive printing and processing.

In the short run this might even turn into an advantage for archives, as many good film lab technicians and truckloads of equipment will become available, almost for free. It may be valuable for archives to seriously consider the option of buying the closing labs and keep them running if they want to have film services for few years more, although operating them in this 'Omega Man' scenario will be neither easy nor cheap.

So, while it may be true that job offers for film technicians might continue for a few years, after this wave there will be nothing. Those of us who teach at universities know all too well that nowadays talking about anything analog to the students is like speaking Martian: there is no connection, no shared experience at all, blank stares or at best, fetishistic fascination.

Obviously there are still students interested in archaeology, and they can be taught about 16mm and 35mm, negative and positive, about archiving and managing analog collections. It will be hard and costly, but this can be done.

Worry #6: What really worries me are "the eyes."

There will be no eyes left which have the experience of seeing a film projected onto a properly-sized motion picture screen, or if they see a motion picture image projected by a film projector, it will be in a laboratory environment, not in a good-sized theater with a substantial audience.

They will watch guinea pigs run and think they know what a lion is.

This phenomenon is already underway and it is creeping up to our screens: if you look at recent digital restorations you will notice how many of them have that clearly distinguishable, unpleasant, artificial 'video look', not even close to the look and feel of a film work.

I am afraid that these are just symptoms of the hard times ahead, when managing our analog collections will be much harder than managing our digital collections. It's hard to believe when we look at short term challenges, but it's nonetheless true.

Worry #7: If analog labs are bound to disappear or to become a niche sector serving only the archives, I think digital labs are also going to face a restructuring whose early signs we can already spot around the world.

Technical evolution in the IT sector has largely reduced the gap between high-end equipment used for Digital Intermediate and the prosumer mass market. Today it is absolutely possible to install a full DI workflow in dad's playroom in the basement. The only obstacles to complete the workflow are of course scanning and film out. Oh, sorry, I forgot: film out won't be needed anymore. Scanning…. Well, scanning demand is already going down in the high end market, as movies and even more so when medium to low budget TV series are moving to HD. And medium to low budgets productions are important because they constitute a significant portion of the market. They are the first to experiment with cheaper solutions (dad's basement playroom) and in the past they were often served by the same labs who provide the archives their restoration services (as the big labs usually have other fish to fry, like big budget movies and series). It is not difficult to see that a possible scenario for the future is one in which very few large labs are surrounded by smaller and sensibly leaner ones with few workstations and few operators and absolutely no scanning capabilities. A scanner is too expensive and a risky investment as its commercial life is expected to be short. After a few years, maybe less, its only market will be archives, and they are famous for not paying much per hour or per minute.

Worry #8: I am seriously concerned that the decreasing demand for scanning services on one hand and the overall restructuring of the laboratory sector on the other will sooner or later result in a slow but unstoppable decline for the whole scanning technology, much like what we experienced in the analog film technology domain. Actually, I am not really worried that this might happen; I am sure it will happen. Again, it is just a matter of time.

Obviously this won't happen overnight as there are enough BTS Spirits or Cintel C-Realities around today that can be kept alive. But I wouldn't bet on a new scanner being introduced in the market any time soon or many more to be purchased outside of archives.

Ultimately, I think it is inevitable that scanning will become a niche market with machines built only for archival work, which will result in either a decline in quality or an increase on costs, most likely in both.

And this is my closing remark on why I think the real challenge we are facing is analog and not digital, as we are led to think by its sheer, overwhelming momentum in today's moving image world. The shift to digital will be really complete when all productions use digital capture. It will be a whole new world, a world in which any film-related technology including scanning will be gone for good, and the competencies and skills in the field will be decimated.

Now, before the Editor hits me on the head to make me stop wasting virtual trees, I'll leave with a closing remark:

Not discussed in the context of this article are the many technical issues, techniques and choices that we all will face when it comes to digitizing (and/or digitally restoring) our analog collections. Add to that the largely unexplored issue of how to correctly simulate an analog projection in a D-Cinema environment. It is not an underestimation of the problems but a conscious choice for me to hope that each of the various challenges we are facing are big enough to be treated separately, as I hope they will be, in future issues of this Review.

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