41 GENIUS INTERVIEW Stephen McConnachie, BFI
THE LOGICAL CHOICE Two Spectra Logic tape libraries have been installed in the BFI’s Hertfordshire conservation centre to handle the organiation’s massive data storage needs
selecting titles and preserving them digitally? SM: We work with all our partners, with the National and Regional Film Archives and digitising suppliers, to develop a set of technical standards and deliverables. We base those on tried and tested film archive standards, including using the DPX format. DPX is pretty much the standard for digitising film material for long-term preservation. It’s a very high-resolution photograph of every frame of the film. In real time, the scanner takes a high-quality image of each frame of the film and that frame becomes a single DPX file. You build up what is effectively a folder of these images, and that is your preservation copy. It could result in 100, or 150 or 200 thousand DPX images for each film. Once you have that image, you can restore it, regrade it, remove scratches, but you will always have the original document that you scanned without any tampering or intervention. For film archives, that you document the film to the best quality and highest resolution you can achieve at the time is a really important principle.
from the BFI National Archive and 5000 films from our National and Regional Film Archive partners around the UK. We made those 10,000 films available on our VOD platform, BFI Player, for UK viewers. We also made some of these titles available for UK and international viewers on the BFI Facebook and YouTube channels, and we had over 50 million views of those films through the project period. It was a major public access outcome for us. Some of these films had not been seen for many decades. They included films from the Edwardian era – we have a collection called the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection, which is actuality footage of Britain from the 1900s and 1910s. We’ve done a lot of digitising ourselves and still do, but we also developed a framework of digitisation partners in the UK who did a lot of the digitisation for that project. It really helped develop skills and technologies, and helped keep the digitisation of film economically viable and important in the UK. FEED: What guidelines and best practices do you employ when you’re
We also have standards for web delivery. We have that preservation file, which is huge – they can be two terabytes each – then we have a mezzanine file which we create from that to use in day-to-day work. The sector tends to use ProRes Quicktime files for that. We also create low bitrate viewing access proxy files for display online. Those tend to be H264 MP4s. FEED: What are the plans for the BFI National Archive down the line? SM: The next big challenge is videotape digitisation – that’s the five-year block the BFI has just entered. We’re committing to digitising 100,000 works on videotape! We’re currently auditing the tape collections in our own archive and with our National and Regional Archive partners around the UK. What we hope to preserve is a complete corpus of British broadcasting history. There will be a lot of TV, but there is also non-broadcast stuff. For decades, the world produced a lot of videotape content – industrial film, promotional film, music videos – so it’s a mixture of broadcast and
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