To play Devil's advocate, keeping the originals isn't just keeping, it means a commitment to maintaining them in an environmentally controlled space, following all fire prevention standards, in an organized fashion. It's easy to see why they would be wanting to cut down those costs to zero, especially due to forthcoming digitization and storage costs.
On the other hand, it's also clearly an issue of controlling who has access to the material - I highly doubt it will be simply dumped online for free. So once you take it out of the live, high maintenance archive, you will not throw it in the rubbish or donate them to a friendly NGO, since that might limit your ability to control it in the future.
An organisation is offerring to do the retention, as mentioned not only in the article itself, but directly in its subhead: "A charitable foundation asked CBC for time to find a storage space for the archive, but was turned down."
And why do they want to keep it? Even old film has a low resolution, let alone magnetic media. Do they expect to be able to better digitalise the same media that will be in worse state (more decay) in a distant future?
For some media, this is absolutely the case. Particularly films that are slightly damaged, or seriously damaged, it's well worth holding onto the material in order to wait for better techniques to become available.
They laser cut the film apart, then used X-ray microtomography to scan the film and some very clever software to unwarp layers from the 3D data produced by the X-ray microtomography process. Not exactly something we could've done 5 years ago.
This is a great read about the restoration of a lost archive, but it is worth noting that in this case the source material was similar to what is being converted and destroyed now: analogue video tape recordings from a low-resolution source material. The source was recorded in PAL/NTSC/SECAM and the conversion process can be completely lossless and still end up with a copy that has every bit of information that was on the original.
In the case of the Morecambe and Wise recordings, this was video to film (with an additional step to try to lose information in the first conversion so that the scan lines were less visible) so the interesting technique here was simply in restoring a degraded source. Unlike scans of film negatives, there is no way a new process or technique is going to dig out information that the original low-fidelity recording system was simply unable to capture.
It's not uncommon to see vital documentary footage that was crudely digitized twenty or more years ago, to a resolution that was less than standard TV resolution at the time. It looked okay on TV then, but looks horrible now, and the originals are lost forever (since that was the point of digitization, to save rent money in the long run.)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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Digital storage needs sophisticated hard- and software to read, which thus needs to be archived as well (and how would you do that; no hardware has that shelf life), or, you re-archive everything every ~10-15 years (as is done today).
In contrast, I can read anything from the Barbarastollen with a magnifying glass and sunlight, today and in 500 years.
I bet in the very long term it's not. I suspect that error correction on digital tape is only meant to address the problem of magnetic spots flipping or fading over time, but the tapes are throwaways as soon as there's detectable physical degradation or disintegration. Contrast with analog tape (or to speak to your point, film) which can be handled in all kinds of crazy ways (cleaning, baking, coating, etc.) in order to get at least a partial or imperfect copy of the original made.
B&W film will live in a shoebox in the attic for 100 years and be retrievable just by shining a light through it. Digital media becomes inaccessible very quickly; I have floppy disks I can no longer easily or reliably read...
The cellulise acetate used for 16mm films up through the 80s has to be kept in humidity and temperature controlled environments or it breaks down quickly into acetic acid which accelerates the process further.
Cellulose acetate film was introduced to replace highly unstable nitrate stock in the 30s. With in a decade of its introduction, archives were reporting significant degradation and it was realized that it needed to be stored in climate controlled conditions. It wasn't until the 80s however that serious efforts were put into preservation or development of better archival mediums.
Of course this was touched on in the article. Wikipedia had more information.
"maintaining them in an environmentally controlled space, following all fire prevention standards, in an organized fashion" just means putting them into a storage unit. I'm pretty sure my cable bill is higher than those storage costs.
[Edit: See comment for correction that explains that Radio-Canada includes TV. I'll leave this here because some of the info is valid]
From the article: It also questioned why Radio-Canada was preserving its master recordings after making digital copies but CBC had opted to rely only on digital copies
This statement shows a lack of understanding of the problem. Old audio recordings can still be played. Old video recordings from the early VTRs[1] are going to be unplayable soon: the people who have the skill to refurbish an old VTR are well into retirement age now. There are only a handful of the original VTRs still operating.
Very old audio equipment is in a similar boat - I know archivists who are prioritizing stuff for digitization based on the number of tape head hours they think they've got left in older machines.
Is contact absolutely required in such old machines - I wonder if you could float the tape using, say, air [1], ultrasound, or silicon spray, or even just carefully fitted wheels in order to maximize life of the head itself.
I'm surprised generic non-contact magnetic readers haven't been developed for retro tech given the prevalence of magnetic storage tech for HDDs.
I'd wonder more if a newer more modern head could also be used on the same tape at the same time (a few inches over on a slightly extended tape path), with the output of the "original" used to train software to interpret the higher resolution data coming from the new head.
Seems to me that might in some ways be similar to some things required for software defined radio signal processing.
What was that book where they were digitizing books by shredding them and then vacuuming them up and digitizing all the scraps as they passed through the vacuum hose to reassemble digitally and then OCR?
Destroying program originals or the most recent copy of those program originals is in violation of international archive standards, and is a breach of the Public Trust which had funded CBC to the extent of $50 billion from public purse since exception. These archives are the property of the people of Canada.
International Archival Standards call for preservation of analog originals, or the most recent copy of those original programs.CBC's destruction of program archives (following digitization) is a breach of the Public Trust.
Letting random people take ownership of various chunks is—in all practical respects—identical to destroying them. This stuff is expensive and complicated to archive long term.
I think there may be license issues, if the archives are not in the public domains. Other than that, yes, they might as well sell them and "recover" some money.
Just as with any other recording, I can make a backup copy for archiving purposes, but if I start selling those backup copies then that's a violation of copyright laws.
There's nothing wrong with compression, data can be lossless and still compressed. That's why a FLAC file can be three times smaller than an otherwise identical WAV file.
No, digital preservation is much harder than most people think. Digital media degrade too. Hard disks, optical media and magnetic tape all degrade over time.
Paper and film are fairly durable. They can be preserved without any maintenance for quite a long time.
Format obsolescence means that it can be hard to read old files. Sometimes, you need to track down a precise version of a program. The more tricky issue is that sometimes a file can render, but incorrectly on more modern versions.
Also, digital files require specialized software to read, whereas paper documents are immediately readable. Film is also readable to a certain extent without equipment.
Digital files might be deemed useless at some point in the future and dumped in the trash. Or there might not be enough money to transfer the files to a new medium.
In this case we are not talking about paper or film, but old analog video and audio tape. This is reel-to-reel audio and quad or u-matic analog video tape. It suffers from even more degradation issues than digital files as you need to maintain the original medium, have no error correction layers, and are faced with an increasing rarity of the specialized equipment needed to read the data. There is also no additional data that advanced techniques will be able to pull from the original low-fidelity source.
I've got digital files from last millennium that have survived better than analogue ones - both written text and images. For the most important I've kept logical and physical redundancy (but not yet needed it); much harder to do with bulky physical media.
Libraries in my UK city, and across the UK, have been closed rapidly in the last few years - the materials are generally dumped/sold, but the data from all of them could be held in a small box (computer) with multiple redundant backups for the cost of a couple of magazine subscriptions. For one librarians wage this could all be easily shared with the entire web.
We, or at least I, am keen to hang on to some artefacts. But a lot of what we keep seems to be primarily useful for navel gazing.
I don't think that's really the same thing. The Mona Lisa was painted directly by the creator's hand and there is value in maintaining the physical structure of the painting because there is something there beyond a physical image.
In a video the media - the original film - is already just a copy of the original performance. Unless you are interested in the history of the physical media for it's own sake because it's unusual in some way I don't think it's the same thing. Is the media even the original negative that was in the studio? I don't think so.
The value of the Mona Lisa is in the physical object. The value of the broadcast archives is the information they store. So storing the archived in a different format makes them more valuable, but storing the Mona Lisa in a new format removes the only thing giving it value.
Well, ask the same question about a mediocre portrait picturing someone of no [recorded/remembered] societal note by an artist no-one knows anything else about and I'd say "absolutely". Take pictures, make them available to the public, give the original away - use the remaining 99% of the upkeep costs for something else.
When a robot/printer is able to make a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa down to the brush strokes, and we can experience it in VR without even needing the replica, the answer to your question might change for most works too.
High-res scans of sculptures are already a thing [0]. Just send the polygon mesh to a 3d printing and presto, you get your own David by Michelangelo.
However, painting would be waay more difficult, especially in cases (such as Van Gogh) where the artist deliberately applies thick layers of paint.
(I find the idea of intentionally destroying the originals to be ludicrous, but hey, more future-proofing is always good)
> What is it about original artwork that makes it so important as to need eternal preservation?
In David's case, maybe the fact that Michelangelo was able to carve it out of a fragile and partially sculpted block that at least two other great artists refused to use. It's an engineering feat at least as much as an artistic one.
Hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to minimize and erase Canadian culture, such as it is. Nice A / B with the french counterpart, where there is political will to bolster theirs.
On the other hand, it's also clearly an issue of controlling who has access to the material - I highly doubt it will be simply dumped online for free. So once you take it out of the live, high maintenance archive, you will not throw it in the rubbish or donate them to a friendly NGO, since that might limit your ability to control it in the future.
CBC are destroying the records regardless.
Case in point, this recent restoration of Morecambe and Wise by BBC R&D: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-fi...
They laser cut the film apart, then used X-ray microtomography to scan the film and some very clever software to unwarp layers from the 3D data produced by the X-ray microtomography process. Not exactly something we could've done 5 years ago.
Please post to HN front page and re-post as updates occur!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjK-b4x9ZmQ
In the case of the Morecambe and Wise recordings, this was video to film (with an additional step to try to lose information in the first conversion so that the scan lines were less visible) so the interesting technique here was simply in restoring a degraded source. Unlike scans of film negatives, there is no way a new process or technique is going to dig out information that the original low-fidelity recording system was simply unable to capture.
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.
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Magnetic tape is hard to keep. Film is even harder, it is flammable and decays as well. Needs controlled atmosphere to keep well.
Digital data tapes have a nice layer of error correction on top.
Better than film, but still requires some care.
In contrast, I can read anything from the Barbarastollen with a magnifying glass and sunlight, today and in 500 years.
I bet in the very long term it's not. I suspect that error correction on digital tape is only meant to address the problem of magnetic spots flipping or fading over time, but the tapes are throwaways as soon as there's detectable physical degradation or disintegration. Contrast with analog tape (or to speak to your point, film) which can be handled in all kinds of crazy ways (cleaning, baking, coating, etc.) in order to get at least a partial or imperfect copy of the original made.
The cellulise acetate used for 16mm films up through the 80s has to be kept in humidity and temperature controlled environments or it breaks down quickly into acetic acid which accelerates the process further.
Cellulose acetate film was introduced to replace highly unstable nitrate stock in the 30s. With in a decade of its introduction, archives were reporting significant degradation and it was realized that it needed to be stored in climate controlled conditions. It wasn't until the 80s however that serious efforts were put into preservation or development of better archival mediums.
Of course this was touched on in the article. Wikipedia had more information.
From the article: It also questioned why Radio-Canada was preserving its master recordings after making digital copies but CBC had opted to rely only on digital copies
This statement shows a lack of understanding of the problem. Old audio recordings can still be played. Old video recordings from the early VTRs[1] are going to be unplayable soon: the people who have the skill to refurbish an old VTR are well into retirement age now. There are only a handful of the original VTRs still operating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadruplex_videotape
I'm surprised generic non-contact magnetic readers haven't been developed for retro tech given the prevalence of magnetic storage tech for HDDs.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_bearing
Seems to me that might in some ways be similar to some things required for software defined radio signal processing.
They dont face any threat of not beeing readable anymore and therefore storage becoming a waste of money, gradually
Paper and film are fairly durable. They can be preserved without any maintenance for quite a long time.
Format obsolescence means that it can be hard to read old files. Sometimes, you need to track down a precise version of a program. The more tricky issue is that sometimes a file can render, but incorrectly on more modern versions.
Also, digital files require specialized software to read, whereas paper documents are immediately readable. Film is also readable to a certain extent without equipment.
Digital files might be deemed useless at some point in the future and dumped in the trash. Or there might not be enough money to transfer the files to a new medium.
Analogue files render incorrectly too; surfaces deteriorate - media rots, oxidises, decays.
I've got digital files from last millennium that have survived better than analogue ones - both written text and images. For the most important I've kept logical and physical redundancy (but not yet needed it); much harder to do with bulky physical media.
Libraries in my UK city, and across the UK, have been closed rapidly in the last few years - the materials are generally dumped/sold, but the data from all of them could be held in a small box (computer) with multiple redundant backups for the cost of a couple of magazine subscriptions. For one librarians wage this could all be easily shared with the entire web.
We, or at least I, am keen to hang on to some artefacts. But a lot of what we keep seems to be primarily useful for navel gazing.
In a video the media - the original film - is already just a copy of the original performance. Unless you are interested in the history of the physical media for it's own sake because it's unusual in some way I don't think it's the same thing. Is the media even the original negative that was in the studio? I don't think so.
When a robot/printer is able to make a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa down to the brush strokes, and we can experience it in VR without even needing the replica, the answer to your question might change for most works too.
(I find the idea of intentionally destroying the originals to be ludicrous, but hey, more future-proofing is always good)
[0]: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dmich-sig00/
What is it about original artwork that makes it so important as to need eternal preservation?
In David's case, maybe the fact that Michelangelo was able to carve it out of a fragile and partially sculpted block that at least two other great artists refused to use. It's an engineering feat at least as much as an artistic one.
If we did that, what would we have lost? Just curious...
Hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to minimize and erase Canadian culture, such as it is. Nice A / B with the french counterpart, where there is political will to bolster theirs.