Digital Heritage From Obsolescence to Preservation
We talk a lot about the future and not enough about the past. Switching from analog to digital we passed from caring about the restoration and preservation of film materials to the fake belief that everything digital will last forever. And we are failing to preserve right now the multitude of content that has been increasingly produced in digital format starting from the late 90s / early 2000s. But storage media as much as analog support can become unreadable, they are at continuous risk. Realistically, hard drives have quite a short lifespan, which is very far from eternity. We explored this topic in depth during a conversation with Mnemonica, a company that supports every stage of the production process and has made the preservation of the film industry’s digital memory its flagship mission. The key takeaway was that preservation in the digital space is not so much material problem as it is a management one. They offer an interesting parallel: like a man who fears death and avoids health screenings. Sadly, sometimes it is too late.
It’s clear at this point that the digital file is not the problem itself, but there are three orders of problems. When the support (the hardware) is no more readable, due to that short lifespan mentioned before. When the file, even if it survived perfectly its own medium, does not have any more software able to read it or an issue with the decryption keys (i.e. like a KDM for a DCP), which expire or are lost. Or when the organization (a company or an institution) managing those files disappears, and nobody knows where the files are or how to access them. The latter is a true real world failure which sadly happens constantly under the tacit ‘not my problem anymore’ assumption of the unassuming employee.
Now, what can we do to avoid the constant human-size failure? We can start preserving in the digital space, guaranteeing a future to that digital heritage. Preservation requires a full protocol which includes ongoing management, constant monitoring, a disaster-recovery policy and geographically separated redundant copies, as well as its own set of rules at a higher level.
The French, who are champions at heritage preservation and at creating new industry standards, have those rules already in place. They tie preservation directly to funding: to receive production subsidies, a producer must sign a contract with a specialized technical provider guaranteeing the security of the work. Of course a subsidy becomes worthless if the film it funded can’t be found, opened, or licensed years later. So the fix is neither abstract nor exotic, it’s a simple, almost obvious idea, already in place. Somewhere, not everywhere.
Read more: Cinema & Video International Issue #208
