 Hello everybody and welcome to today's webcast. This is Mike from Learning Times. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. And before we get started, just want to quickly remind everyone that if you have any questions at any point in time, or if you're experiencing any technical issues such as loss of audio or slides, feel free to communicate with me using the chat at the lower left corner of your screen. So without further delay, I'm going to go ahead and turn things over to our host, Robin Kilko. Go ahead, Robin. Hi everyone. Thanks again for joining us for today's webinar or Connecting to Collections Care webinar, Identifying and Preserving Motion Picture Film. What is it and how can I save it? I'm going to run through a couple of quick introduction slides and then I'm going to be more than happy to hand the mic over to our speaker. So, Mike, real quick, could I have the ability to advance the slides or if you can go to the next slide, please? Well, I'll go ahead and introduce myself or we're waiting for that. My name is Robin Bower Kilgo and I am the Community Coordinator for CDC Care. And you just heard from our producer, Mike. As he said, we will be able to help you out in the chat box if anything happens, so feel free to put the information down in there. Along with that, I want to go ahead and introduce you to our community and welcome to any of the new listeners that might be here today. We do have a home on the website which is connectingtocollections.org. You are more than welcome to go to that website to see signs from fabulous resources that might be of use to you or also to just go ahead and poke around to our archives of our webinars. Thank you, sir. Another important part of our website is the community platform. You can reach it by going to our main website, hitting the discussions tab or by navigating to that little hyperlink that's located on the screen below, community.culturalheritage.org. That community is a great place to pose questions to conservators who are monitoring the chat. If you have a specific question about Collections Care, please do feel free to post in that community. You can also find us on social media, on Facebook, at the C2C community, or you can follow us online on Twitter at C2Ccare. Both of those platforms are pretty popular. We post announcements about new webinars coming up and a lot of other fun information going on in our community. Real quick review of our platform as we said earlier, there's that fabulous chat box down in the bottom left-hand corner. Please do feel free to post questions throughout the webinar. Our speaker will be posing some questions during her talk, but we'll also, I'll keep an eye on it so if someone has a question right then, we can always copy it and we will try to address it at the end of our talk today. We do have an upcoming webinar coming up called Looking at Glazing, Finding the Best Solutions to Protect Your Works of Art and Historic Artifacts. That one's happening March 25th from 2 to 3, excuse me, 3.30 p.m. Eastern. Our speaker will be Yad and Laroshek, so please do feel free to join us for that webinar and as with all of these C2C webinars, they are free. So if you wanna go ahead and register for it, that would be wonderful. Without further ado, I'm gonna go ahead and introduce our speaker today. Our speaker's name is Chris Austin. She is the supervisor of the Motion Picture Preservation Lab at NARA. Over the course of the last decade, she's overseen multiple preservation and digital restoration projects and recently completed digital preservation of William Wiler's outtakes from the Memphis Bell Story. She's an active participant in multiple moving image professional organizations and in creating technical guides for archives, libraries, and museums. Without further ado, I'm gonna hand the mic over to Chris. Hi there. I'm very happy to be presenting to you this afternoon and I'm only slightly less nervous than I would be if I were doing this in person. I'd also like to say thank you to Heather Galloway of Galloway Art Conservation for bringing this opportunity to me. Yep, here we go. So just a little bit more background for you. I've been at the National Archives for 17 years and I moved our film preservation lab from an analog workflow to an analog and digital workflow over the past 10 years. NARA holds roughly about 800,000 reels of film with accessions coming in all the time. The records we hold are created by the executive branch of the federal government, including all branches of the military and most federal agencies ranging from NASA and the State Department to the Park Service, Social Security, and everything in between. We also provide services to 13 presidential libraries. There are four of us in the film preservation lab where we assess approximately 4,000 reels per year and digitize 1,100 reels on average. During the webinar, feel free to post questions into the chat box. I'll try to stop after each section to see if there are any questions that I can answer sort of quickly. There are a lot of types of film, but the most common are 16 millimeters and 35 millimeter prints and the negatives used to create those prints. But first, let me stop here. What I just said leaves you stumped, let me explain the basics of film versus video. The terms video and film are often used interchangeably when talking about the content, i.e., I filmed something or I have a video of something. So with that in mind, if you shot something on your smartphone, that's a video. If you inserted it into your VCR in 1994, that's a video. If you used a projector, which in its most basic form is a machine that moves a strip of plastic past a light source at 24 frames per second, then you have a film. The most elementary difference between the physical object of film and the physical object of a video is whether the content is visible to the naked eye or if you need a machine to see what's on it. If you unwind a reel of film and hold it to a light source, you'll see individual images, all the frames. Let's see. Mike, I think you mentioned that I have like a, oh, there it is, the little pointer. Hopefully everyone can see me pointing at things. On the sides are perforations here that are there so that a projector can pull the film through and create moving images out of the succession of still pictures, which may also be accompanied by, if you have a video, it will probably be in a cassette, but not always. You won't be able to see anything except a brown strip of plastic. The videotape requires a machine in order to view it because the visual information is an electronic signal that's recorded magnetically to a piece of tape. If you're attending the webinar because you're interested in video preservation, I won't be offended if you sign off. The focus of this presentation is on motion picture film. Not only cover video file formats while reviewing digital preservation options a little later on in the presentation. So kind of with that in mind, I do have another quick poll for you. I'll pop up here soon. The primary characteristic by which we refer to film is the gauge. Gauge refers to the width of the film and can range from seven and a half millimeters wide to 105 millimeters wide. Eight millimeters, 16 millimeter and 35 millimeter are the most common. These are images here. This is 9.5 millimeters where the perforations are located in the center. This is 16 millimeter color negative and these two images are of 35 millimeter positive, black and white and down here color. Film base refers to the plastic layer that provides the support needed to carry the images found in any other information. Since the 1890s, motion picture film bases have changed from nitrate to acetate to polyester. Layered on top of the base is the emulsion which is the photosensitive coating on film that contains the images and other information. Created in the 1890s and manufactured in the US until 1951, nitrate film is highly flammable when stored in improper conditions. It is almost always 35 millimeter with a few exceptions of 16 being made in the USFR and China. Usually it will say nitrate along the outer edge of the perforations in all caps. Acetate film is also called safety film because it was created as a non-flammable alternative to nitrate film stock. First used in 1910 but it's been standard since the 1950s. Most of the film and collections will be acetate and spans the range of gauges. Acetate film is still used today for original camera negatives. Usually it will say safety in all caps along the outer edge of the perforations. If you have a film that says both safety and nitrate along the edge, it is most likely safety that has been printed from an earlier nitrate copy. Polyester film is also referred to by Kodak's brand name F-STAR. Polyester film stocks were introduced in the 1950s but were not widely used until the 1980s. Today, polyester is used for theatrical print releases and for creating preservation copies. Polyester film stocks is extremely durable and has an estimated lifespan of about 500 years. So let's see, looking at a couple of questions here. 7.5 millimeter is not eight millimeter. It's actually something a little bit different. It was an early cinema format or sort of home movie or even like something that they would use in community halls and those sorts of things. So film elements. A film element may be any type of film that goes into making a finished title or the finished title itself. Black and white prints are negative, color prints are negative, and soundtracks are all film elements. Usually these elements will have leader on the beginning, what we refer to as the head, and or at the end which is what we refer to as the tail of the film. Leader is clear or opaque film-like material used to protect the film during handling and threading equipment such as projectors. There is often useful information written on the leader. You may also have outtakes, work prints or answer prints which are additional film elements related to the titles. Outtakes may be of value as it's usually additional footage that wasn't included in the final product, but it may visually document the project. Work prints were used to inform editing of a finished film. Answer prints were used to ensure that the sound and color were to the producer or the director's liking. You may have trims which were generally bits of scenes that were cut out during editing. So on the slide here, this is a black and white negative 35 mm, a black and white positive 35 mm, 16 mm color negative, 16 mm print with a soundtrack. Then these two images are varying types of soundtracks on 35 mm. Over here, this is 16 mm mag track. This is 35 mm mag track. This is full coat 35 mm magnetic track. To answer Jeanette's question about a certain date and any film after that being not nitrates, generally it's safe to say that any film after 1951 is probably not going to be nitrates. Acetate was created as a safety alternative in the teens. With that in mind, I do have another poll for you because I'm trying to make this as interactive as we can. Over time, motion picture film ages, the condition of the film is affected by how well the stock was manufactured, how the film was developed, and whether or not it's been stored properly. Film in good condition will be flexible, have little to no odor, and will not have faded or exhibit other optical defects. Film in poor condition may be brittle, shrunken, give off an unpleasant odor, or exhibit muted or faded color. One of the first indicators of film decay is smell. Before we move on, I'd like to stress that if there are any signs of decay, or if you're unsure of what you'll find in the can, you should always, always, always open the lid to the can away from your face or body. There are five stages of nitrate film decay. The first is actually a smell. Depending on the kind of smeller you are, the film will either smell like bloody socks, or host its cupcakes. It's generally a sweet odor that some find grossly unpleasant or tolerably chocolatey. Thankfully, I fall into the latter category, but generally the content is recoverable during this stage and the second stage. The second stage is a formation of dewey, honey-like blisters on the film. The third is a hardened goo that may look like it's bubbled over, and content from this point through the fifth stage is unrecoverable. The fourth stage is when the film is turned into a solid mass, and the fifth is when the film begins turning into a brown powder. Please note that this stage of decomposition in nitrate can have very adverse health consequences. Breathing in the powder can cause bleeding or scarring of the lungs. As a side note, while this sounds alarming, and nitrate film should be cared for cautiously, it's not going to spontaneously combust on you unless you have it near an open flame or are in an environment in excess of 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Vinegar syndrome is the most common form of deterioration in archives, and it smells exactly as it sounds like it would. As the acetate base breaks down, acetic acid is off gas. Films with vinegar syndrome will deteriorate physically, shrinking, and losing flexibility. In final stages, films with vinegar syndrome can become fused and resemble a hockey puck. There are few less common acetate bases listed here, and they have their own unique odors as well. Films with vinegar syndrome should be stored separately from other films whenever possible, as the acetic gas can react with healthy acetate reels, causing a chain vinegar syndrome reaction. Pictured here are AD strips manufactured by the Image Permanence Institute, which are used to measure the level of acidity in acetate films. Films that measure at a level of 1.5 or higher on the scale will impact the films around them, and it's at this point that the reaction becomes auto-catalytic and exponentially worsens over time. Nitrate and acetate decay are also impacted by and impact mechanical decay. This is a list of the most common ways your film can go wrong. After vinegar syndrome, the second most significant preservation issue is shrinkage. Shrinkage can occur horizontally and vertically across the film and can impede playback. Shrinkage will always be present with brittleness, cracks, tears, warping, and crazing. The images here are examples of crazing, where the base and the emulsion layer shrink at different rates, resulting in ridges or channels in the film. Barotyping is a result of the emulsion being pressed against another surface when the emulsion isn't dry, resulting in an imprint of what it was pressed against. Emulsion fogging is when the base and emulsion layers begin to separate, allowing air in between the two layers. These conditions may be a result of poor development and drying when the film was first created, but is generally a direct result of poor storage environments. Image fading is a result of being in direct light for long periods of time. Luckily, this is something that occurs rarely, as most film reels are contained within cans or boxes. Dye fading is a much bigger issue for motion picture films, particularly for print films created in the 60s through the early 1980s. If you've motion picture film or personal photos from this time period, you'll recognize that distinctive magenta hue. Martin Scorsese purportedly shot Raging Bull in black and white as a rejection of Kodak's inferior color print stock for this reason. Color fading is a result of the cyan and yellow dye layers having faded, leaving magenta as the dominant color. When the silver begins migrating through the emulsion, leaving a metallic sheen on top, the film is silvering out. Air pollutants and moisture oxidize, and the silver ions migrate to the surface of the gelatin. Biological decay is a result of all things Creepy Crawly. Mold is the biggest culprit as a result of water damage. In addition to growing over the reel, the mold eats into the emulsion, leaving etched patterns behind. Insects also enjoy eating emulsion and can become embedded within the reel. Animals are less of an issue, but mice are also known to enjoy sampling emulsions. I've heard that emulsion is one molecule away from being the equivalent of Jell-O. I've not confirmed this, but I guess that makes it exceptionally tasty. Bacteria, like cholera, is very rare, but can occur in tropical environments where natural disasters have occurred and contaminated water has come into contact with the film. In this section, we'll go over some ways to evaluate your collection as a whole to help determine what items within your collection you might want to address first. At NARA, we've created an at-risk matrix to help us evaluate the needs of our collection. We rank the risk levels from low to immediate with multiple factors. Acidity and shrinkage are at the top of the list with lesser forms of deterioration listed below that since they tend to occur less frequently. You'll see shrinkage measurements here, and we measure the percentage with a film shrinkage gauge. If you're interested in sampling the shrinkage in your collection, members can borrow a shrinkage gauge from the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and there's a link to this in the handout. We didn't include all types of mechanical decay in the table, but these can be factored in to make selections for preservation as well. One area that we're fortunate enough not to have to factor in is storage, as we've several vaults specifically dedicated to film. However, for your purposes, if you don't have optimal storage environments, you can use the Image Permanence Institute's storage calculators at filmcare.org to determine how long your film may last in its current environment, and the link to that site is also included in the handout. One thing we did want to factor in is how often a film is requested. We have a category for polls per year, but this can be slightly misleading as we know that there may be a high level of interest in certain films because a lot of what we do is anniversary driven. So for example, a reel might get requested 18 times this year for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 14, but not again until 2045 for the 75th anniversary. So the topic of intrinsic value makes me a little squeamish, but it's something that needs to be discussed. No one really wants to say that something is more deserving than another for the sake of posterity in part because we may not know what will be valuable in the future. In any case, think of it as your grant justification language. Here I pulled several considerations from the NARA website. So for number one, think about what makes this really unique. Think about point number two, is it really old and deserving of some extra care because that in and of itself makes it unique, and do people want to see this? If you go to the effort of preserving it, will people be interested? And the image down there is of Apollo 11 from the 70 millimeter film that we worked with a vendor to scan for the Apollo 11 movie. So that would be an example of something that meets this particular criteria. The language in point number four is pretty dense, but essentially is there something funky about the provenance that makes this film important? Case in point, if alien researchers come to NARA in 346 and want to see the first photographic evidence that we hold of their earthly appearance and the project blue book film, we'd better have it. For number five, are there famous people or significant events? Number six, does it document something important or lost to time? And then lastly, are there other copies out there? I'm just going to give you a couple seconds here to take a look at this if you'd like. So now on to preservation. Now that you've a template to help determine what reels need preservation, what are your options? The first option is photochemical preservation, which is just a fancy way of saying film to film. So we're going to create a new reel on stable polyester film stock with a copy of the original. If you decide to go this route, the lab you'll send the reel to will use a film printer to print a new copy. So I don't think I can really drag the pointer around, but pointing down here at the bottom, this would be your original image portion, and it kind of gets wound up and goes through this printer head right here. And then down here on the right-hand side, this is your audio portion of the film, and it's going to run through this printer head. Then up here, this is where your original, or I'm sorry, your new film stock would be threaded, and it's actually going to ride on top of your original. It's going to be exposed from underneath through this printer gate, and it's positioned over, the gate is then positioned over this lamp house. On the full picture of the printer, the lamp house is located behind this little door. And the way this works is that the appropriate amount of light and color will be used to expose the new film stock to create the new copy. There are some labs that will create a digital scan and then print the data out onto the new film stock, and this is called a Film Out. And as with all things in life, there are pros and cons to everything. On the cons side, it's expensive. You can estimate about $3,000 per reel on average for a new film print or new negative. This will include all of the prep work, the cost of labor, and the film stock. Second, you're still going to have a physical object. I realize that people want to Marie Kondo away parts of their collection. I get it. You want to downsize and cut out on cost. And then you're still going to need adequate storage for the film reel that you've created. And then in order to view it or scan it, you'll still need playback equipment. On the pro side, if the object type itself is important to you because you believe that there are inherent characteristics to a reel of film that are essential, then you'll be carrying that forward. Second, you'll have an object you can find later. It's not going to be in the cloud. It's not going to be on a drive. It's going to be on a shelf. And if you store your new polyester reel at 65 degrees and 45% relative humidity, that reel will last you about 483 years, which makes the upfront expense of that reel come out to about $6.20 a year for long-term preservation, which really isn't too shabby. Over the next 483 years, you will always be able to recover the content. And I'd like to keep you to keep those last two points in mind as I go forward. Your second option is digital preservation. The technology of film scanners is, in its simplest principles, similar to film printers. The original film will run through a film gate, just like on a printer, and the color and light levels will be set prior to scanning using software. There will be a lamp or an LED light source illuminating the film for red, green, and blue sensors to pick up the color information. Instead of capturing the images onto raw film stock, the images or content will be stored on drives within a rate array. Any file derivatives will be made from this source data. So what are the pros and cons here? It's still expensive. You can estimate about $150 per reel on average. Perhaps double that if you're asking the vendor to do the prep work, cleaning, etc. And that's a lot less than a new reel of film, but there are additional costs beyond the initial transfer. You're going to need somewhere to store the data, which means purchasing LTO tapes, servers, cloud storage, and or drives, which will incur ongoing costs. You may need to purchase hardware and software to access, transcode, add metadata, and make the content available. When all of those systems age out, you will have to buy it again. You'll need the ability to do check sums and migrate your files to new servers, tapes, and drives. Not to mention that when the industry changes or file formats become incompatible, you will have to go back to your film. So if you think about the past a little bit, since 1998 we've gone from SD to HD to UHD to 2K to 4K, and we did the bulk of that in the past 10 years. And not to mention that 4K isn't even considered full resolution for film. 6K to 8K is depending on the source material. If your content is still viable in 483 years like that reel of film and your proverbial hard drive hasn't crashed, you will likely have spent thousands of dollars on equipment, data migrations, transcoding, etc. In the end, per file, you might have spent the equivalent of that same $3,000 you had in creating a new film reel. On the pro side, this practice is ubiquitous. People are doing this all over the planet. In order to get your content out into the world, this is something you have to do. Having files that you can easily share and repurpose by sending a hard drive, popping it into Dropbox, or sharing it via emails, an amazing thing. And you can continue to do this as many times as needed. It's easier to highlight your collections and convince people of the importance of what you have. In spite of the drawbacks, the benefits are real. So there's real digital preservation versus digitization. And it's useful to consider why a file format was developed for this purpose. Kodak created the Cineon Print Density File Format, known as CIN, to specifically mimic and capture the qualities of motion picture film. The Digital Picture Exchange File Format, known as DPX, was built upon those characteristics by Cinti and it has a great deal of range and flexibility in capturing the color and dynamic range of motion picture film. It is a raster image file format, meaning that for each frame of film, there is one DPX file. It's the equivalent of a TIF file for photograph, and TIF can be used as an alternative high-level file format for film as well, but do keep in mind that it was developed for photographic versus motion picture film. Each DPX file must be played back in sequence, and this allows for the frame rate of the original film to be maintained. For example, in our World War I film collection, the film was shot with a hand-cranked camera somewhere between 16 and 18 frames per second, maybe a lot faster or slower if the cameraman was fearing for his life. If we were to play this back at an appropriate speed, we have the flexibility with software to play the files back at the correct speed. This isn't true of all file formats, and I'll get to that in the next slide. A couple of the drawbacks are the file sizes and the ability to keep all of the files for one reel wrangled. There are open-source tools that you can use to zip all of the files together that will also generate check sums to keep it all neatly packaged. The size of the files are large. If you have a small number of films needing preservation, this may not be an issue, but if you have a large volume of films, you may want to consider some different options. Not even NARA has the ability to create digital preservation copies in large quantities. One of the other benefits is that you can over-scan the image so that you're capturing information around the frame. In this image here, this is above the image, below the image. You've got the perforations here, and then you can also see the information along the edge that tells you what the stock type is and has some edge numbers there. It's useful also to do this to give a sense of the condition of the original film, and many major archives prefer to do this and keep it as their preservation master. The header of the file is also very flexible, which allows for information about the original and the scan to be embedded, also using an open-source tool. If these conditions are met, the DPX file format could stand in for the original film. So, responding to Eric here, I would not recommend preserving audio on gold CDs or images, in part because even though they are gold, they still have a layer that the information needs to be written to, and those layers can peel. I believe that the Library of Congress recently put out a report about the use of CDs, you know, whether it be your regular commercial off-the-shelf type DVDs or the gold standard CDs, so you might want to take a look into that. Most of the other file formats available for transfer were created as video formats for entertainment industry access and not for preservation. So, this would be a case of what I would not call preservation, but rather digitization. This doesn't mean that the formats are inherently bad, and some of them are adequate for reproduction master status, but you've got to know what to ask for. Regardless of the format type you choose, ProRes 4444, AVC, JPEG 2000, you should ensure that your film is being scanned at a proper resolution level for the gauge, just as if you are using DPX. You'll also need to ensure that you're asking for progressive frame rates, a format that supports 24 frames per second because most are 2997 frames per second, which is what the video frame rate is. You'll want to ask for loss with compression, etc. These file formats are for ease of distribution. The frame rates are for video, and they are almost all proprietary with the exception of JPEG 2000. Even in the case of JPEG 2000, there are cross-platform compatibility issues, meaning that one workstation or software suite will play a certain file format while another one won't. Either way, within the suite of file formats, you should not assume that this file can stand in for your original film. One of the other things that I didn't point out on the previous slide is that DPX can be used on any operating system, so it'll work well with Mac, Windows, and Linux. There's a lot to navigate out there, but you can step through the Library of Congress's sustainability of digital formats list to help, which is linked to in the next slide. The Digital Preservation Coalition Handbook also has helpful guidance, and I've included the link for both in the handouts as well. And I realize I might sound as though I'm anti-digital preservation. I promise I'm not. I'm in favor of a good digital preservation in favor of good digital preservation with proper planning and infrastructure. However, what I often see are institutions that embark on digitization projects that think this process will be easier, less costly, and with the impression that they have preserved their content for eternity. If you do it wrong, it'll be more expensive, and you'll have to go back and do it the right way. The TruvaPoint, out of the 800,000 reels NARA has, we've only completed true digital preservation of four reels where we've had to dispose of the original, and 41 reels that have significant condition issues, but we did not throw away the original. The other 8,000 reels we digitized were all to an HDA AVI and MP4 file for ease of access, and we know we might be called upon to provide that content at a higher resolution in the future. So to answer Annie's question, hi, Annie. Thanks for getting up and being here early. A Motion JPEG 2000 could be considered a preservation master as long as it's lossless, because there are lossy flavors of JPEG 2000, and also as long as all of those other conditions are met. You maintain the correct frame rate, those sorts of things. I know that the Library of Congress, that is one of their preservation masters, but I believe that tends to be more for video than for film. Okay, so I'm going to put my soapbox away now just to be able to tell you what to do in my official capacity as a federal employee and an employee of NARA, but what I can do is provide you with information so you can make informed choices. Whenever possible, choose a robust preservation file format. If you can't handle the volume of data, then choose a format that's less complex but has lossless compression. After choosing either or both of these file formats, then acquire smaller files that you can put up on your website, bear in your catalog, put on YouTube, etc. You want to be able to show off your hard work. Best practice is to store your files in geographically separate locations on various types of storage media. You'll need to keep track of where these are and be prepared to ensure that the data doesn't experience bit rot, degradation, or corruption over time by performing fixity checks. Fixity in digital preservation terms is defined as the assurance that a digital file has remained unchanged, i.e. that it is fixed. You also need to be prepared to migrate your data over time. As an example, the most current version of LTO tape is 8. It's two generations backward compatible, so if you've got LTO 6 tapes, you better prepare to start moving it off to LTO 8. And most importantly, unless your film is a complete loss, do not throw it away. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that you or anyone that's following in your footsteps will need to go back to it at some point. So responding here to Jacqueline, any tips for long-term care of animation cells? Animation cells should be stored similarly to like original negative. So if possible, and I'm not exceptionally familiar with animation cells because I think are they actually painted on the cells? It may be that the best method to take care of them is by freezing. But maybe, you know, you can feel free to email me and I'll see if I can point you in the right direction. Okay, if they are painted, I'm not sure about freezing them. But let me, if you can, my contact information will be at the end of the presentation. If you want to send me a quick email, I can get in touch also with our photo conservator. She may have some ideas. So what I can recommend are the following examples. I said two and a half examples because I feel like the last example is not exactly preservation but, you know, it's a good method for getting your content out there. If you have the means, do make a new film copy and ask for a preservation level file along with a robust set of derivative files. This will likely only be possible with a small subset of your collection. If it isn't possible, then ask for a preservation level file and derivatives. You may be able to do this with under 100 reels but you must get asking for a preservation level file then make sure you're asking for the most robust reproduction files that you can manage. So I'm going to stop here and see if there are any particular questions. I know that's a lot of information. Okay, so now that we've gotten a crash course lesson in digitization and file format, let's go over a few key points about what to ask from vendors and a few key points about quality control at the end of a project. As I said, there's a lot of information in this section coming up as well, but a template can be found at the FADGI site, which I've linked to in the slides and in additional documents. It's important to have a statement of work to provide to a vendor before getting started. And if you can't sort out every point here, it's okay to have a discussion with vendors to help clarify what you might need. One of the things that I really appreciate about the film preservation community is that most of the vendors are great people who are really willing to help. If you need help identifying a vendor that can assist you, the Association of Moving Image Archivist Global Supplier Director is a good place to start. I've linked to this in the handout as well. So in your statement of work, you should include a brief paragraph about your mission and why you're preserving or digitizing these particular reels. Next would be a brief description of the project goals, such as, the objective of this project is to obtain HD files, which we shall provide to requesters as a source master for their needs. We will provide the original film to vendor XYZ who will undertake all duties described in the statement of work. The volume of work is approximately 33,000 reels of or 33,000 feet of 16-millimeter material. If you need to provide definitions for the project, number three would be the appropriate spot. As an example, the quote original for you might be 40 reels of 16-millimeter black-and-white print film from the 1962 World Fair in Seattle. A longer description of the type of film would go in section four, whether or not the film has copyright claims, if the film is fragile, if the film will be prepped prior to being sent, and any additional characteristics that might be important. This section is the part where it will be useful to have some discussions with your vendor or vendors about what they can provide. This will also be the mediest part of the statement of work. For number five, you'll outline where the work will happen and if subcontractors are allowed. You'll outline how the films will be packed and shipped and what the inventory documents will look like, whether it's paper or via e-mail. You'll also want to know how the vendors to handle the films. You'll be doing the prep work, adding leader, using the cans, etc. You should also outline what you expect the work area to be like, how the film should be handled, that the film shouldn't be left threaded on equipment or left out overnight or on weekends, that any equipment that's going to be used should be in good working conditions, and you should also outline what the vendor should do if the film breaks or is damaged during the transfer. Next, you'll want to outline your deliverables. This will be your new film copy or file type, the file naming convention you want used, how you want the files organized in a directory structure, whether or not you want plates or closed captioning or any metadata. This is also where you'll ask for the quality control and checksum reports and what responsibility the vendor has in quality control of the files. In the administrative portion, you'll want to outline how the vendor will confirm the shipment and how the films will be tracked at their facility. You'll outline your requirements for security and storage of the film while at the facility, and you'll cover how the film and files will be returned to you. Most importantly, you'll note how long you, as a customer, will have to return any unsatisfactory deliverables. So payment, everyone likes to get paid. This section will let the vendor know when they will be paid. If you've gotten your funding through a grant, this may be stipulated there. This may also be the case for timeliness. Either way, you'll want to let the vendor know how long they have to do the work. And here's a link to a sample statement of work. Responding to Pamela, there's not really, there's not necessarily like a link for a vendor or grant proposal. I would direct you to, and it's in the handouts as well, to look at some of the grant proposals on the Clear website, the Council for Library and Information Resources. Their Recordings at Risk program has samples from some of the projects that have been funded, and then that's a good place to look, and then also going to the Digitization Guidelines to see if there are any badgie scans, or badgie scanning documents with the sample statement of work is also a decent guide. So responding to Rasha, the most stable type of film at this point in time is polyester film stock. Oh, I see. Pamela is there a way to measure the length of film itself. If you don't have a film synchronizer, there is a great little tool on the Scene Savers website. I'm not sure that I did link to this, but I can pop that in here really quick. At the Scene Savers website, they actually have a tool that you can... Sorry, I'm trying to Google this at the same time. They've got a film footage calculator there, which I'm going to have to dig around a little bit more, but they actually have a calculator where using a ruler, you can measure the width of your film, and that will give you an approximate length. Thanks, Mike. So moving on. This is the least exciting part of the project, but it's probably the most important, quality control. If you have a small number of files, you'll want to do 100% visual QC. If you have a larger number, pick a percentage to check, and you'll want the vendor to provide you with a QC report upon delivery, and then you'll want to create check sums when the files are on the delivered hard drive, and then, again, when you move them off to a new location. You'll then compare them to make sure that the check sums match and no data has been left behind. You'll also want to do this whenever you copy a file to another location to ensure that they match. Ideally, you should have them in three locations, but at least two. If you don't have the ability to do this yourself, consider reaching out to a local university or sister institution, and take a look into a couple of different cloud storage providers. Doing a quick search for best cloud storage services for video is a good place to get started. And then consider keeping a set of files on LTO tapes, and make sure that if your files are being stored in the cloud or on servers, that regular backups are occurring. At regular intervals, you'll want to check all of your files in the places, in all of the places that you've stored them for fixity to ensure that no changes have occurred over time, which equals loss. So in an ideal world, let's pretend that you've done everything that you need to take care of your collection. You've got film elements and files. What should you do to go forward? For your film, temperature is the key. Blue and dry is the way to go. If you have a small amount of film, a frost-free-free-ther may be your best bet. Filmcare.org has tips on their low-temperature storage implementation basics page for using free-thers. If possible, make a plan to check in on the collection on a regular basis. Say that a bit tongue-in-cheek, because at our current staffing levels, with the number of reels we have at NARA, it will take us 200 years to touch every reel once. If you can, do an A-B strip survey once a year to see how your film's doing. Take a sample of the same reels each year, along with a smattering of reels in other areas. And if you've got Nitrate, find somewhere to donate it. There are a handful of institutions in the U.S. that may be willing to accept it. Nitrate does have special shipping requirements that must be followed, which can be a barrier to getting it donated, but help, guidance, and training can be found. I'm going to pause here and try to answer Rebecca's question. So, yes, I would recommend removing the film and letting it acclimatize to room temperature. There... And I would do this probably with the lid slightly cocked, just so if any condensation does begin to happen, just to let it evaporate. And then I believe that on that same website for IPI, they link to particular types of bags that they could then be placed in and then put back in the freezer. It is odd that they put them in a canvas bag. And again, if you would like a little more information, feel free to email me. For your digital copies, going back a few slides, regular backups, check sums, and fixity checks are required. The sooner you find an issue, the more likely it may be that the data can be recovered, particularly if you've got copies stored in multiple locations. You'll also need to make sure that your budgeting costs for continued storage, migration, and access to your files. So, I realized that that was a lot of information and honestly I think that each of those slides could probably have been a presentation all on its own. I do really appreciate that you are attending the webinar and I'm happy to answer any questions now or later. When I say that I like helping, I really, really mean it. I always like answering questions and being helpful, so please feel free to reach out and I'll be glad to do whatever I can. Hi, this is Robin again. Chris, thank you so much for that presentation. I had been emailing you about this earlier. Some of your slides were answered some of the big questions I always had whenever I was working on grants and things. Just like, what kind of file type should I ask for and that kind of a thing. It's really useful that you included that in there. So, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Please feel free. If anyone has any other great questions or anything else, feel free to throw those in the chat and I'll be sure to pass those along to Chris. You know, the other funny thing I was thinking while you were doing your presentation is just how much the file type question has changed. Like even in the, let me think, 15 years I have been in the field, how different things are, because even when I started out in undergrad, people would talk about zip files, like those big chunky cassette files all the time and like you don't even see those anymore for backups and digitization and that kind of stuff. So, it's really interesting to kind of see what people are recommending, what they like to do now. That was really cool. Well, and one of the things that I like to recommend is to actually choose a file format that is not changing all the time, because the more it changes, the more difficult it becomes to deal with later. So, something like DPX is good because there are only two versions and it has hardly changed in, you know, gosh, three years. AVI is another example of something where everyone wonders like, why, Nara, are you using this dinosaur of a file format? That's because it doesn't change. We know we're going to be able to play it on just about anything. So, let's see. I do see a question here from Annie. Is there value in freezing really deteriorated films? At this point you have some that are almost unplayable and some that are definitely unplayable. That's a difficult one because I want to say if they're unplayable now, freezing them is not going to make them playable later. It's probably going to be a matter of needing some other chemical intervention, like replasticization. So, if you think that you are going to have the funding later on to deal with that process, go ahead and freeze them. You know, I don't want to tell you to throw them away, but if they're really that bad, I don't know that freezing them is necessarily going to make them any better. But who's to say there may be some sort of technology later on that would make them playable? I know that at the Association of Moving Image Archives conference this past fall there was a whole session on replasticization, so maybe reach out to me and I can at least give you the names of the presenters and they might be able to give you some better guidance. Yeah, I mean I would hate to say what you're saying, like say dump them because we just don't know what the technology is going to do in the next 10 or 20 years. I mean like there might be some really cool Star Trek-ian type thing, you know what I mean, that they can do. So, I mean me sitting back is just a run-of-the-mill registrar or collections person. I would sit there and say, well if you have room in the storage and it's not hurting them, continue storing them. You know what I mean, but if it ever gets into a position of we need this room for something else, then you might start really questioning, you know, is it something you can deaccession or remove from the collection? You know, that would be my thought at least. I will say that like at the National Archives we have had some things that have been given to us that were stored in the tropics and there was nothing that we could do to save these and so we did end up deaccessioning them. You know, I think unfortunately it was of the creation of the Panama Canal so it was probably of interest to someone but we deemed them completely unrecoverable and so we did deaccession them. But hopefully everyone has good deaccession policies that they can cover up if you get to that point. Looks like we have another question coming in from Rasha too if you want to take a look at that one. Is that a graph distributor? Right, so, you know, as long as the storage conditions for the photographs and the film are adequate there is not any problem with storing them in the same location. In fact, at NARA in our vaults we have some mixed collections that include film as well as paper. That's in our 65 degree vaults. So, again, as long as the sort of overall conditions are being met there's no problem with storing those together. You know, the other interesting thing I really liked was your discussion about the gold CDs earlier because when I first started back in the day those were like, yeah, put everything on gold CDs like people would talk about that a lot but it was really interesting for me to hear some of your comments on those for sure. Honestly, we had, like we, you know, probably in the 90s or early 2000s we had several collections digitized and put on gold CD and now we're in the process in the audio and video preservation lab of pulling all of those files off and, you know, storing them to LTO and servers just because we don't press the gold CDs to stick around. Yeah, and that timeline works out from when I was in school. So, I think from starting on my career so that would make sense why I remember learning so much about gold CDs. It looks like we have a question from Jadine Young. What are the benefits of LTO versus cloud server storage for digital files? So, I would say that they're like everything. They're pros and cons to each. LTO, I would say the benefit there is you have something in your custody that you could get the information off of versus a cloud or versus a cloud which is different than a server. So, I mean, things in the cloud are stored on a server but if you're accessing them only through the cloud, you know, there are additional considerations like what are the terms of, you know, keeping that in the cloud. Are you paying for that? Are you not paying for it? Are you always going to be able to access that file? And servers, you know, again pros and cons, you have something on-site that's pretty easy for you to get your files off of like versus LTO tape or you would have to have an LTO drive. If it's in a server you could just using your regular desktop computer to pull those back but then you also have to make sure that you're maintaining that server. So, being able to keep a copy on all of those different media types is kind of the best way to go but I guess if I had to shoot, like if I had to pick two, I might go with the server and the LTO. What is this what LTO stands for? Well, linear, I don't know. It's one of those terms that I use all the time but I don't know that I actually know what the acronym is for. Gotcha. That is silly of me. I'm sure we can Google it at some point and post it somewhere. Laurie Osternpost asks, would you explain the difference between blind and be blind? In what situations do you find them? Oh, and we have the answer too. It's one of your tape open. That's what LTO stands for. Thank you. So, blind and be blind. That refers to how the information on the film is viewed either through the base side or the emulsion side. So, blind means that you will always be able to view the information correctly through the emulsion side of the film. Be blind refers to being able to read the information correctly through the base side of the film. For 35 millimeter, positives should always be a-lined and negatives should always be be-lined. If not then you have a problem and it was printed incorrectly in the first place. For 16 millimeter, positives and negatives can be either a-lined or b-lined. And it really depends on what the originating camera original was because you can have reversal, original reversal film in the camera which will be positive and be be-lined. And then depending on how the next generation copy was printed, it can be a-lined or it can be be-lined. So, but the easiest way to figure it out is the correct information a-lined is through the emulsion and the correct information through the base is b-lined. Excellent. We have a question from Elizabeth Cesar. Says, I understand the point of checksums and fixity. We are generating them as we digitize materials. But as a lone ranger, I'm stuck on the going back and checking them part. Can you set that up as an automated process with either the same program that generated the checksums or with a different one? And just generally how are people accomplishing that? I do believe that there are some automated ways to do this. If you go to the FF MPEG website, I believe that they have sort of like mand-aligned programs there that you can actually, they're all open source. They generate RIPs that will do that for you automatically. We... Go ahead. Oh, we... We have like a... We have a program, a background program running that does that automatically for us, so it is automated. And I have to admit I'm like not an IT person, so I'm not exactly sure how that is set up in the background, but it can be done. Yeah, I was just going to say automation can be your friend and that kind of thing. That's for sure. Okay, I think we've got our final question now from Janielle Fish. It says, for preserving purely audio from magnetic tape, could polyester film be applied here or this... or is there an equivalent you would recommend for that process? So if you're talking about MAG tracks, which are specifically used for film applications, we do actually print out new optical tracks on polyester film for things that sort of rise to that level of preservation need. Otherwise, we create purely broadcast wave files to save those as our preservation master. If you're talking about like quarter inch audio, there are... I think there might be only one sort of boutique quarter inch magnetic tape creator that you could theoretically make a new quarter inch audio reel for, but because it's boutique, the quality between the batches could be questionable. So I know that for our audio and video preservation lab, they are also just creating broadcast wave files and maintaining them on LTO and servers. Excellent. Thank you. Well, I think I'm going to go ahead and say thank you so much, Chris, for taking some time today to go through that. Pretty complicated, but easily digestible topic. For us, you really broke down some portions of it, which I really appreciated. Sure. Sorry, go ahead. Again, really, I do encourage people to get in touch. I really like answering people's questions and making it possible for people to understand the stuff. It's a lot, and there are so many very complex pieces that I realize it can be overwhelming. Yeah, but you made it, like I said, you had some key slides in there, and you appreciated someone who dips their toe into that world every once in a while. So thank you very much. I'll remind all of our attendees that there are links located on the left-hand side of the screen. They're the fabulous handouts that Chris helped put together. We also have a link to our survey. So please do take that. That does affect how we do future programming for C2C Care. So if you can fill out the survey, it's always appreciated. I'm going to be aiming to get this up on our website, connecting to collections care by the end of the week, for end of the week. And I just again want to say thank you to Chris and to Mike for our technical help, and we will see you all in March for our next webinar. Thanks again and have a great afternoon.