 from heritage preservation, please go ahead and begin whenever you're ready. Great. Thank you so much, Mike. Well, welcome back, everyone, to our fourth webinar in the course, Caring for Audiovisual Material. It's so nice to see so many familiar names logged in today. At the moment, it looks like 143 people logged into the meeting room and that is slowly climbing. Please, as Mike said, continue to say hello and throughout this webinar, feel free to type in your questions. We'll hold on to them and ask them during breaks and hopefully, we'll get to them all by the end of this webinar. As you guys know, this is just one of many courses in our series Caring for Yesterday's Treasures today. We have now concluded six courses this year. If you missed any of those courses or you're just simply interested in going back through the material, everything is archived on the online community from webinar recordings to resource links, so make sure to check that out. This entire series has been made possible by Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. We're fortunate to have learning times on board to help us with webinar and website support and for this particular course, we owe a great debt to the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts for organizing all of our speakers and materials. And again, today, we have Laura Hort Stanton from CCAHA on board to help field your questions. Laura, do you want to say a quick hello? Sure. Thank you, Jenny. Again, my name is Laura Hort Stanton. I work at CCAHA where I'm the Director of Preservation Services, focusing on education and outreach. At CCAHA, we're a non-profit paper conservation lab. And so it's been a great opportunity to be able to work with Heritage Preservation on this program. So thank you, Jenny. Thank you. So before we move on to our topic, let me run through quickly some logistics of our course. So today, of course, is the fourth webinar. We'll meet one final last time if you can believe it on Wednesday, October 30th at 2 o'clock, same place. Like our other courses, you may earn that certificate of completion. We just ask a few things that you're registered so that we have your email, that you've watched all five webinars, whether it's live or through our recordings. And that you also complete all five homework assignments which are due no later than Wednesday, November 6th if you are interested in earning that certificate. Again, everything that you need for this course including links to the homework assignments, PDFs, handout, three sources, everything can be found on the course webpage. And once the course has concluded, we will also post recordings of these webinars there. And as always, if you have questions, feel free to email us or call us. We're here to help you. So without further delay, let's move on to our topic. And I am so pleased to introduce today's instructor, Jeff Martin. Jeff is an archivist and conservator with experience and caring for both archival collections and time-based art. He is a 2005 graduate of the New York University's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation MA program. In a 2007 postgraduate research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's Horschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Jeff currently serves as Executive Director of the Independent Media Arts Preservation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing resources for the care of independently produced electronic media. His other recent projects have included ongoing work as time-based art conservator for the Horschhorn, as well as collections assessment for the Seattle Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art and Pittsburgh, the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Cooperation for Public Broadcasting. He has served for two years as the program chair for the Electronic Media Group of the American Institute for Conservation and has also organized the EMG-sponsored workshop, Tech Focus 2, Caring for Film and Flight Art in April of 2012. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm going to go ahead and move my PowerPoint out of the way and pull yours up. Great. I really need to cut that introduction down. Well, great. It's great to be here and I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to everybody. We are looking specifically at film today. And what we're going to be going over today is, first of all, the historical background of motion picture film. We'll talk briefly about that. We'll look at the physical properties of motion picture film and the deterioration factors. I know if you were on the first webinar with Karen Gracie, she reviewed some of this, but we'll go into more depth today and we'll also talk about production processes, how films are actually made because, first of all, that helps understand how films are preserved. It also helps understand the materials that you might find in a collection because a lot of times you'll find materials not only related to the completed film but to the production of the film, outtakes and things like that. So we'll talk about production processes. We'll talk about film handling, some basic things to understand when you're actually handling film. We'll talk about preservation actions and some of the sort of standard procedures for handling those. The thing that I think is important to think about before we really get started is the real benefit of working with film is it's human readable. I'm sure Sarah and Linda talked about some of the things you really can't learn about audio tape or videotape just by looking at them happily with film and this goes for slides, too, the physical properties are the same. With film, you can look at the film on very simply, on very simple equipment and learn a great deal about it, about how it was made, when it was made, its condition, what your next steps for it might be. So if you have film, you're actually lucky in that sense. So to get things started, this is the Edison kinetoscope. On my screen, the Edison is a bit cut off but you get the point. What we're really talking about here, of course, is the photographing of multiple frames projected in rapid succession on a flexible piece of film that creates illusion of movement, which is what you can really see here. The process was dependent on the development of flexible cellular film by Kodak in 1889. The Edison kinetoscope was the first such device to actually prove practical, although as you can see here, you kind of keep in the top of it. The next development is sort of the Lumiere cinematograph. What you're looking at here is the projector part of it. The film is winding through down into that box, causing archivists' headaches by getting dirty and scratched up. But basically, this was the device that allowed for the projection-emotion picture film. And the technology has remained essentially the same in its underlying principles since 1895. Here you see the contemporary equivalent, a 35-millimeter platter projector of the kind that were in multiplexes until the last few years. These are the kinds of machines that are being taken out of multiplexes all across the country these days. But it's important to think about, and it's great to think about the fact, and again, I know Karen touched on this, that the essential technology has been the same since about 1893. So what is motion picture film physically? It's a photographic emulsion on a flexible base. This is a cross-section of motion picture film. As you can see, the base constitutes the vast majority of the thickness. We're sort of looking across it here. The emulsion is a gelatin that is photosensitive. The base is simply there as a carrier. But again, it makes up the majority of the thickness. 90 to 97% of the thickness of motion picture film is the base. We'll talk in a little bit about things that depend on the understanding of which side is the emulsion side and which side is the base side. The way to tell emulsion versus base. If you have black and white film, the base side is very shiny. The emulsion side is very dull, sort of matte. Color film, it's mostly the same. It can be difficult with a color negative to tell one side from the other as they both look a little bit shiny. Looking at it in raking light can be helpful. If you look at a color film in raking light, you can see almost sort of like a bar relief of the image. But it can be difficult. People who work in film labs and are working in total darkness will tell you their technique is to lick their lips and then sort of put the film in their mouth. And the sticky side is the emulsion side. The side that doesn't get sticky is the base. I cannot recommend that as an archivist, but that's what film lab folks do. So the film bases, again, reiterating some things that Karen talked about, nitrate, acetate, and polyester. So as nitrate is the one that was introduced in the 1880s by Kodak originally for still photo negatives. And then it was used for motion picture negatives and motion picture prints until 1951. It had an excellent visual quality. It was scratch resistant and very durable. It also had some serious problems. First of all, it was extremely flammable. A nitrate fire, when nitrate film is set on fire, it generates its own oxygen. So if you go on YouTube, which I recommend you do, you can find footage of nitrate film that is burning when it is submerged in water. It is also subject to decomposition, which, as we'll learn, its successor is subject to decomposition as well. The image you see on the right is the one of extremely decomposed nitrate material. At that stage, it does become quite hazardous. Excuse me, that's the image on the left. The image on the right is what nitrate film looks like when it is actually in the process of decomposing. That's what the image looks like. The thing to understand about nitrate is, although it is extremely flammable and exposed to open flame, unless it gets to the stage that you see on the left, the extremely powdery brown stage, it's not inherently unstable in the sense that it's not going to spontaneously combust an open flame. We'll definitely ignite it, but I hope there are no open flames in your archives. It does require special handling, which we'll touch on when we get to things like storage. But again, this is 35 millimeter from up to about 1951. Cellulose acetate, which is also known as safety film, was introduced in 1910, roughly. And it became more common with the introduction of 16 millimeter film, which we'll talk about in a second, as home format in 1923. It was originally a cellulose diacetate and later a cellulose triacetate, which is not incredibly important to learn, except that the earlier format was a bit less stable dimensionally. It's not flammable or inflammable, depending on how you like to use the words. If you try to set it on fire, it will simply melt. And it became the standard for non-theatrical exhibition up until earlier this year. It wasn't until June that Kodak finally ended production of acetate motion picture film. And there in a picture, you see exactly what it was designed for. Home use, exclusive of, without the need for the types of fire protection that nitrate film might have had. Acetate, of course, is subject to decomposition as well. It is subject specifically to what is known as vinegar syndrome. Because it is based, has an acetate base, it gives off, as it decomposes, acetic acid, which gives it that specifically pungent vinegary smell. And I think if you saw Karen's graph that demonstrated that as the film decomposes and gives off acetic acid, it becomes autocatalytic. The release of the gas accelerates the process. And it is fundamentally irreversible. What are the problems that happen, though, when the film begins to decompose? You can see here buckling and cracking. This is looking down at a reel of 16 millimeter film, acetate film, that severely buckled and cracked. But even before the film gets to this point, the decomposition causes warping and cupping and that sort of dimensional changes. The dimensional changes lead to problems in projection and duplication, instability and focus issues. On the left, you can see some 35 millimeter safety film sort of laid out in ways that you can see the sort of warping and buckling. On the right, you see the type of film handling that I'll recommend against, but it's a little more subtle. You can't quite see the warping, et cetera. This is an example of a relatively heavily warped reel of acetate film. It's, I think the warping is very obvious. It's, nevertheless, it is still recoverable and it is still viewable on a light box, as you see over the left. You can still look at this and understand what is on it. Find out what it is, understand its condition, et cetera. This is a reel of a relatively short-lived format known as 28 millimeter film that lasted for a few years at the late 20s and early 30s, late teens and early 20s. And this reel dates to about 1923. So as you can see, it's decomposed, but it could be saved through digitization or duplication despite some of these problems. If it goes further, duplication, migration will be extremely difficult. The next base is polyester. It's marketed under the brand name S-Star, the co-brand name S-Star. It was introduced in 1955, and originally for things like microfilm and for X-rays and non-motion picture, non-consumer applications. Now polyester is extremely stable over time. It doesn't have the issues of shrinkage and decomposition that nitrate and acetate do. It's also not flammable. It won't catch on fire, and it is extremely strong. In fact, the reason that it wasn't adopted by the motion picture industry until the late 80s and early 90s was the fact that it is so strong that in projection, if the projector jams, the nitrate, excuse me, the polyester film will damage the equipment before it tears. So rather than tear, it will yank things out of alignment. For exhibition, there was a lot of resistance, but it is at this point sort of the de facto motion picture stock for creating new motion pictures. If you want to tell the difference between a real of polyester film and a real of acetate film, you can hold them up to the light. Now the real on the left is polyester. It transmits light, it's translucent. Acetate film on the right does not. If you were on Sarah Stauderman's webinar about audio tape, you know that learning the difference between polyester audio tape and acetate audio tape, it's the opposite. Why that is, I couldn't tell you. But again, determining whether a real of film is acetate or polyester is as simple as holding it up to the light. Now I want to talk about gauges and formats. It's important to understand that gauge refers to the width of the film and the format refers to things like the position of the image and how it's projected. Although they're really used interchangeably, it's a useful distinction to think about. For example, if you look here, you see an overhead diagram of a cinema theater which used three projectors, 35 millimeter, and yet, so it's 35 millimeter gauge that projected them all onto a single screen. So the gauge was 35 millimeter, but the format is cinema. The most common formats, again as Karen brought up, are 35 millimeter, 16 millimeter, eight millimeter, and super eight. Those are the most common formats of the dozens and dozens that have happened since 1893. Here's a closer look at the four formats. I'm gonna try using the arrow here and see if it works properly for me. What you're gonna see, first of all, is here is the soundtrack. I wanna point out a few things that we'll be talking about in a little bit. This is 35 millimeter, this is the soundtrack. This is 16 millimeter. You'll see here some numbers and information. Here, you can note that this film, regular eight, is the same width as super eight. It's a bit of an optical illusion, but they are the same width, but the project, these brackets here are smaller as opposed to these ones. The other thing to note about this is that the image on all four is the same basic shape. It's the same aspect ratio. Which we'll talk about again in a minute. So, 35 millimeter. It was the initial film format. It was the one used in the Kinetoscope and the Lumiere Cinematograph. And it was the one used for theatrical exhibition basically to the present day. If you go to a movie theater that is showing film, you're gonna be seeing 35 millimeter. And that's what this is here. And things to note about it are number one. You see here a soundtrack. We'll get into that more in a moment. And you also see here the useful information, nitrate. If we talk about nitrate film being flammable and dangerous, the people at Eastman Kodak were kind enough to put the word nitrate into the edge of the film. So if you have a real third about 35 millimeter film and are concerned that it is nitrate and it might have been made before 1951, the easiest way to do it is simply to roll off a few feet and see if it says nitrate on the edge. If it does, you should assume that it is nitrate. It's possible that it would have been duplicated onto safety film and the nitrate information was simply transmitted. But it's likely that it is nitrate. It's worth handling it as if it were. Here, 16 millimeter. Now, 16 millimeter, as opposed to 35, was a non-theatrical gauge. It was used from the 20s up into the mid-80s, really, for just about any application that film could be used for. It was used for home movies, for educational applications in schools. If you were my age or older, you grew up with the 16 millimeter films being shown in class. Educational training, corporate government films, television commercials, kinescopes, news film, TV news, was shot on 16 millimeter up until the early 80s. Even the syndication of television shows, shows that were syndicated, were syndicated by shipping 16 millimeter prints out to states. There's 16 millimeter everywhere. Let's look at a few things about this. First of all, you see three different roles. Three different 16 millimeter films. Here, if you look here, you see, first of all, perforations on both sides of this film, on the right. That is a silent film. There's no place for the soundtrack. Over here, in the middle, you see on the left side, you see the soundtrack. So that's, you know, that this is a sound film. And the same thing is true over here on the left-hand film. You see the soundtrack running down one side, the perforations down the other side. You should also note that there is printed in information on the edges of all three films. Now, this is valuable. It's also a bit of a pain in the neck, because 16 millimeter film, if you've ever seen it, is about 5 eighths of an inch wide. And so, if you think about that, you can imagine how tiny these pieces of information are. But again, it's there and it's really helpful. The other thing to notice is on the left side of the film on the right, this dot, which will become important a little bit later on. So just keep that dot in mind. So that's what 16 millimeter looks like. And again, if you have a collection that has film in it, you are likely to have at least some, and probably a lot. 8 millimeter is an amateur format, introduced in 1932. It has the same perforations as 16 millimeter, but the size is really small. You can see here and here, at top and bottom, you can see the perforations are more or less the same size. 8 millimeter film, if you have it, is almost certainly a home or amateur film. It never had very much wide adoption outside of home or amateur use. And it was always safety, it was always acetate or polyester. Super 8 was introduced in 1965 by Kodak as an amateur format, and this diagram shows why it was developed. You see here on the left side of the left-hand film, space for soundtrack, but you also see that the image is quite a bit larger, which means that the resolution is better and the quality is going to be better. If you are not compatible, a Super 8 projector will not play regular 8 and vice versa. Super 8 did have a wider adoption outside of amateur cinema used in certain types of film cartridges for educational use, experimental filmmakers used it a lot, pornographers used it a lot, other types of non-theatrical, very low budget filmmaking used it. And it's still available, you can still get Super 8 film. But again, never nitrate, always safety, acetate or polyester. Now this is one specific bit of arcane information about film that can be very useful when you're doing inspection of a film and trying to figure out what a film is. It's A-wine or B-wine. So if you think about the emulsion image that I showed you before, it's possible for the image when it's going through the camera, for the emulsion to be on the side closest to the lens or the side further from the lens. What that means is when you're looking at the film, sometimes if you hold it up to the light or you're looking at a viewer, when you look at the emulsion side, it's properly oriented. Sometimes when you look at the base side, it's properly oriented. And that tells you some specific things about it. For example, 16mm camera original, the film that's in the camera is B-wine always. If you have something that is A-wine, it is not a camera original. And the shorthand for this is what it says right there. If you want to know something, if a real film is A-wine or B-wine, you look through the base side of the film, you look through the shiny side. If the image is properly oriented, and hopefully there's an image in there that is either a sign or a title or a car driving down the road that you can tell the left hand from the right hand. If it's properly oriented, and you're looking through the base, it is B-wine, base B. Again, this is a useful piece of information in certain types of film inspection that we'll touch on a bit. Now, at this point, I've been going on for quite a while and it seemed like a really good idea to stop for questions. All right. But we do have a few questions, Jeff. Yes. And you did touch on this a bit in your discussion, specifically of the 8mm film. But can you maybe just clarify a bit? Some folks are curious to know if all gauges of film can be found on any of the bases. Right. So is nitrate more common on 35mm, or are there nitrate-based films that are on other gauges as well? Okay. That's very simple. Nitrate is only 35mm. 35mm was... Nitrate film was only ever used for 35mm for the reasons that I touched on. 35mm exhibition is going to be in a theater with an experienced projectionist in a fireproof booth. People at Kodak didn't want to be selling potentially flammable nitrate stock to the home market, which is the other reason that 16mm is not actually 35mm split down the middle. In other words, they didn't take the wide format and make it smaller. They specifically made it completely different so that nobody would actually be able to use nitrate. So nitrate is only 35mm. 16mm, 8mm, and super-8, they can each be on either of the safety, quote-unquote basis, acetate or polyester. Okay. Great. So in a similar vein, I know people always have this terror that there might be nitrate film in their collection. Sure. So if they do happen to have it, can you give a few more tips on how they might want to store it? Well, the first thing is to take a look at it and if it is at that extremely decomposed stage, the first thing to know is that the film is completely lost. And so your concern is not storage or care but disposal. So working backwards from Morse case scenario, if it looks like that, it's gone. There's nothing you can do about it. So you need to be concerned with disposal. And it has that issue to hazardous material. And frankly, then you need to go through whatever your institution's protocol is for dealing with hazardous materials. If it's in better shape, the key thing in the short to medium term is to have it in the coolest and most stable storage environment possible in a closed metal can. If you have cold storage, it should be in there. If you have nitrate sheet film in your institution, you may have a storage protocol already set up for it that way. If you have frozen storage, even better. If you don't have good storage, one of the best solutions is to either partner with a larger institution that may have nitrate storage and be willing to put it up for you or find a donor organization that might be willing to take it, like the Library of Congress, for example. But the other sort of general guideline is if you have some film that is nitrated and is valuable to your institution, first of all, you know that it was shot on 35mm and so it's probably very well shot. And second, that you should prioritize its transfer or its digitization. Okay. You think so? Yeah, absolutely. Well, if that doesn't, we'll hear back. Yes, we'll get more questions. Okay. So another related question that you briefly had mentioned, vinegar syndrome. And is there a way to detect that before you have that wonderful salad dressing smell in your collection? Yes. I don't have a slide on this, but there's something by the Image Permanence Institute called ADSTRIPS, A-D, which are simply the equivalent of sort of litmus paper, small slips of paper that you can slip into a film can leave for a couple of days and then take out and it will have changed color to indicate the level of decomposition. If you Google it, they'll turn up. It's economical and very easy to do and it will give you a sense of the decomposition before you actually have to smell it. Okay, great. Yep. One more question and then we'll let you get back to your talk. But with this last slide that you have up now about the A wine and the B wine, from California has a question of not sure why it's quite so important to know if it's a camera original. Why would we need to know that from an archival standpoint? Okay. That's a very good question and the answer is, and I think this might become a little clearer when we talk about production processes, that in a nutshell, film is an analog process. So whenever you duplicate film from one copy to another, there's a loss of resolution and sharpness and image quality. The camera original is the film that actually went through the camera when the film was made. And so it's going to be the highest quality film material you have. So if you're doing preservation and you want to copy it on to safety stock, you want to digitize the material. If you can get to the camera original, the very original film, that's the one you want to work with. So it's useful to try to find that original for preservation purposes. I lied. I think we have one more question if you feel it's okay with time. Yeah. So Amy from Jefferson City, Missouri asked, if nitrate was only used for commercial film production, do you know if there's a simple way to find out if other copies exist in institutions? Is there some sort of central database that's useful for these things? Unfortunately, there isn't. It's legwork and research. There isn't a simple way to find that out. It's important as Amy points out, but unfortunately there's not a simple way to do that. Shucks. I know. It really is a matter of posting to listservs, contacting other archivists, thinking about who the likely holders of this might be, if it's a corporate, where's the corporation, if it's a local. It's the type of research that archivists know all too well. Okay. Great. So I will go ahead and mute myself and turn things back to you then. Thanks. I'm going to talk very quickly about aspect ratio because it's useful to know, but it's not the most essential. But in a nutshell, I think this is something we all know due to the recent change of television aspect ratios. But basically the aspect ratio, the ratio of the film's width to its height. Here you see the standard aspect ratio, and I mention this in part because, as you saw, all those film gauges have the same aspect ratio. Roughly 1.37 wide to 1 high. This is the aspect ratio that was used for pretty much everything with a few exceptions up until about 1953. Aspect ratio's got wide in the 50s due in some part to the competition television, and became the de facto standard. Films are almost collusively in theatrical presentation, widescreen. There are two types of widescreen, non-anamorphic or cropped or masked, or anamorphic. So non-anamorphic means that you shoot the film at the full aspect ratio. This is the image that goes through the camera. This sort of square 1.371 image. This is from Dr. Strangelove. That's how it was shot. And then either in printing or projection, they just crop off the top and the bottom. Dr. Strangelove is actually supposed to be seen as a minor aspect ratio 1.66 wide to 1 high. Aspect ratios that are anamorphic mean that there's a wide angle of view that's squeezed by specific types of lenses onto a standard 35-millimeter film, although actually it could be 16 or 8. But what happens is it squishes the image to a narrow aspect ratio, and then the lens is on the projector, unsqueezed. The most common of those is cinemascope, which has an aspect ratio of 2.35 to 1. It's quite wide. To get a sense of it, it's almost the exact proportions of a dollar bill. And here you see a frame enlargement from the film that is anamorphic, wide-screen. You can see it's kind of smashed down in the middle and will be unsmashed in projection or in digitization. Note also on the left, the soundtrack. There's the soundtrack. Color is the next thing to talk about. Although briefly this is, if we're talking about other formats, this is the 70-millimeter format used almost exclusively for epics and major motion pictures in the 50s until it's still in use now. You can also see that this color has faded almost completely. Certain types of color film stock, still and moving image are very susceptible to color fade. Colors that are resistant to fade are Kodach chrome, Kodach stock, after 1938. The dye transferred technicolor process, which was a process from the early 30s through the mid-50s, that involved transferring dyes physically onto the film stock. And then the most recent polyester S-DAR stocks known as LPP, a low-fade positive print. Color stocks that are not resistant to fade are color negatives and pretty much everything else. Over time, color film will fade as the blue and yellow components of the film eventually, for all its sense of purpose, disappear and you end up with these sort of magenta prints. This again is important to think about because if you have a Kodach chrome copy of the film and a non-Kodach chrome color copy, you'll know that the Kodach chrome is probably the more valuable one to the collection. One more thing to think about in terms of the physical film is the difference between negative film and reversal film. This is something you'll hear about when you're talking about film preservation and about processing film. A negative film means that you put film in the camera. It's processed and it comes out as a negative. It's used to make prints. Reversal film means you put the film on the camera and it comes out as a positive. Home movies are always reversal. This is something that those of us who grew up taking film to the drug store understand, you get back a print and you get back little envelopes of negatives. Reversal film is a positive. A quick way to tell reversal film is that the edges around the image are completely black. This is reversal film. Again, this is about understanding what you have in a collection that might be. Sound. Sound is most commonly a track along one side of the film frame and if you think of the film images being intermittent, the sound is continuous. The image is basically a series of discreet images. The sound just rolls along continuously. The two types of sound track are optical or magnetic. What does that mean? Here you see optical sound track on the left side of the left frame which is, as you can see, sort of a photograph series of jagged lines. On the right side of the right hand image, you can see the brown stripe of the magnetic sound track. Optical sound is used much, much, much more widely, especially in 16 millimeter projection. Magnetic sound is essentially a strip of magnetic media similar to an audio tape that's basically painted down one side of the film and has the sound recorded on it. It's like an extremely skinny strip of audio tape. Optical sound was used in all sorts of applications, much more common than anything else. Magnetic sound, especially in 16 millimeter, is likely to have been things like TV news film and some other sorts of applications. It was largely a thing for TV news film but you do see a lot of it in that type of production and other productions from, say, the mid-60s through the early 80s. So now we have a video clip that will show you what I mean by optical sound track. Look at the left hand side of the frame. The sounds that we wish to record were picked up by means of horns and concentrated on a diaphragm. The diaphragm had attached to it a stylus which would cut a variable groove in a record, either what is called a lateral groove or a hill and dale groove. Okay. So what you're seeing is that the sound levels are reflected by the varying level of light and dark on the side of the frame. Photographed in, which is, again, what is known as an optical sound track. Again, if you look here, you'll see the jagged black and white pair of lines are an optical stereo sound track. On the far right, you have a series of dots that control a separate sound track. I should take a step back and explain what we're actually looking at here. I apologize. We're looking up the contemporary 21st century 35 millimeter print which are recorded a bunch of different types of sound tracks. It's quite amazing how much information they manage to cram into these things. Again, on the far right is a little control track. The controls separate sound track recorded on CDs. Next, in black and white, you see a standard optical sound track with two channels of sound, a stereo sound track. Each of those contain sound. Gray in the middle is the Dolby sound track which is recorded in a series of images that looks sort of like a QC code in between the sprockets. Over here is a different type of digital sound track. This is theatrical high-end exhibition, but it's useful to think about in terms of the complexity of information that can be on the film and the non-intuitive ways in which it can be recorded. Speed. Very quickly, speed varied in the silent era between 16 and 24 frames a second. The sound area, excuse me, the sound era, it was fixed at 24 frames per second. So the speed is fixed, which means that if you know the footage of the film, because the film frames are all the same size, if you know how long the film is and if it's sound or silent, you'll know the duration. There are calculators, and I believe there's a chart in the NFPF guide that we'll explain to you how to convert either the duration of the film into a length, or the footage of the film into its duration. For example, a 16-millimeter film, those two acetate and polyester reels that I showed you, those are both 400-foot 16-millimeter films, and those are always going to be, because they're sound, about 10 minutes in length. So you can work backwards and forwards on this. So let's take another pause for a few questions, although time is running, so just a few perhaps. Okay, we'll keep them to just a couple questions for you. Great. So there have been a few questions about, to say we're not lucky enough to have that safety film stamp on our film, is there another good way to ID our base in doing this? Well, again, there are two ways to think about it. If it's not 35-millimeter, it's either polyester or acetate. And again, holding it up to the light is the best way to do it. It's really very rare for it not to be printed on the edge of the film, though, either safety or nitrate. Honestly, the other ways you can do it are to start to become destructive testing. For example, if you have acetate film, you can tear it. You can't tear a polyester. And just as obviously if you have nitrate film and you snip off an inch at the end and take it outside and put it in an ashtray and set it on fire, you'll know whether or not it's nitrate. But again, it's almost always printed in. Okay. From an archive standpoint, there's a question about is it important to note and identify variable area sound versus variable density sound? It's useful to identify, yes, but they are projectable and recordable by the same equipment. So it is useful. We'll look at an inspection sheet in a little bit, and it's useful to note. Okay. And just to clarify, those are two different types of optical soundtracks that, although they look very different, actually are compatible. The NFPF guide, I believe, has a good illustration of those. Okay. One last question related to sound. Jan from Ontario has a question. Will the presence of magnetic sound increase the rate of decomposition of film strips? It can. There's a type of sound track that I'll mention in a second that consists, is used in the editing process and 16 millimeter in particular. That is a 16 millimeter film completely coated with magnetic media. It's known as full code sound. That type of sound track, which, if you see it again, is the most susceptible to vinegar syndrome for reasons that haven't been all that well studied or well understood. Presidents of the magnetic track does have a tendency based on experiential and anecdotal evidence to accelerate decomposition. So things with the magnetic sound track are worthy perhaps of additional attention. The other challenge with magnetic sound tracks is that they are basically pasted or painted on. They're basically painted on. And it's possible as you're unwinding them for the track to start sticking and coming off. If that happens, as you're winding through a film, then you definitely want to stop and try to get it to a vendor because who will be able to care for it more carefully because that is completely destructive of the track. And it is a serious problem with audio, magnetic audio. Great. Thanks, Jeff. I'm just collecting questions till we're at the end. Okay, good. I'll take you quickly through the workflows and elements for film. And it's important to think about this because it's used for film duplication and for film preservation, for copying from film to film. And the thing is, again, if you come from an analog world, you recognize that copying something always introduces change and copying photos, et cetera, introduces lower resolution and introduces problems with loss of image quality. So the goal in making a film and in preserving a film onto film is understanding how the processes can cause change in the image and managing and really caring for that type of change. So a traditional film workflow, this is how films were made traditionally, is you would shoot a negative or you would shoot a positive. You'd shoot all of your film that you needed to use. Then you'd create a work print, which was a cheap, sort of down and dirty, rough copy of the film. So you have a camera in the original negative, which you protect, and you make a work print. The work print is used, and this again may be a word you see on cans in a collection. Work print or really commonly W slash P. And the film is edited together on an editing machine like this. This is a steamback or a flatbed. You see here, over on the left side, the different pieces of film that you want to put together. You can view them here. The cutting takes place here in the middle, and then over on the right, you're compiling the film into its complete edited form. This here is something that you don't see anymore outside of people who are editing with film. This is the trim bin. We'd actually literally be sitting at the side of the film, editing machine, while you're editing to take in, how it takes material that's not included in the film, because it was literally taken out. And then trims, which are the small bits of pieces of film were taken out of the included material. So if you imagine how that film process goes, you put together some shots, and then you decide one shot is about three seconds too long. So you take out the three seconds, and then you stick it over here in the trim bin. And then, if you decide maybe you want to put the three seconds back in, you take this piece back, and you stick it back in. So when you see this in cam, how it takes our stuff you were included, and trims are the teeny little pieces that were snipped out of the included material. Now the soundtrack, when edited was edited separately, and it may be that sort of full coat soundtrack completely covered with magnetic media. For some reason it's always spelled as you see there with full coat. Another thing you might likely see on a film cam. So once you shot the negative, made a work print, edited the work print, and then you would go back and edit the original negative. How would you do that? You would match these numbers alongside of the work print back to the original negative. So you cut the work print, and this shot is supposed to start at, you know, a Z60-2497. Then someone goes back, cuts the negative, and that's how you make the film. This is a duplication, sort of standard duplication process. We were talking about getting back to the original camera negative because it's because creating film prints to use or creating materials to digitize or transfer to a video format involves copying from one generation to another. So you would have started with that cut camera negative. From that you made an inter-positive there on the left, then you would have made from that an inter-negative and a separate soundtrack negative. So what you're seeing is this process goes from negative to positive to negative to eventually to a positive print over on the left. So it's a duplication process that typically is negative to positive, etc., etc. And so as you can imagine, making these duplications introduces loss of resolution, potential shifting in color, that sort of thing. So it has to be carefully managed. So as this process goes like this, it's really important to be working with the most original elements possible over on the left side, so to speak, of this equation. At the bottom you'll see sort of the names of these types of elements that you will commonly see again as you're going through a film collection that has more than prints. The IP is the inter-positive which is an intermediate step in the process that is a positive, as you can see. It's a negative, which is another intermediate step. So the IN, you see the soundtrack negative there next in black and white, which is also very commonly called a track negative or a track nag. And then here you see the final product, a positive print. You may also at some point, rather than print, be digitizing. Now why is all this copying going on? Because you have this original camera negative over sort of on the left hand side of the frame out there, and you want to protect it and you don't want to use it any more than is absolutely necessary. So you make these subsidiary copies in case something happens to them. So if you make an inter-negative, make all your prints from it. If anything happens, it gets damaged or scratched or torn. You still have all the way over on the left your original negative process again. This is about protection of the original elements. So that's sort of the filmmaking process. And it's important, again, to keep in mind that if you're doing film preservation in the traditional sense, you're copying film to film. This is the exact same process that you're doing. There are different steps along the way for restoration of things like scratches and other damage, but you're doing the same basic process. If you're doing something digitally, I think actually we're going to come back to that towards the end. But this is traditional film workflow. These are the kinds of film things that you find in big pilot film cans. And this is the same basic process that you do when you're doing a film preservation project. So let's talk a little bit of film handling and inspection. Because this is what cans of film look like in so many archives. It's very common. You see some cans with labels that are falling off. But you see here, you see, for example, this can down here that says B-Wind. Now you know what that is. It's the negative track. Now you know what that is. That's the sound track. And I don't think you can maybe not be able to see on the bottom can. It's over there. It's the negative original outs. So it's the camera original and the outtakes. So your job is to kind of make sense of this stuff and decide what to use for preservation and what to use for duplication and how to prioritize within it. Because this is a whole bunch of stuff to win into the making of a single film. And again, your job is to try to figure out what is most important to preserve. Now best practice for film handling inspection. General workflow is you want to take film out of the types of metal and other cans that you have that it comes in. Shipping cans, boxes, big metal lab cans and off reels and rehouse it in archival polypropylene cans on film cores. There's a film core there. Not on a reel, but wound onto a core. The goals are, first of all, rehousing in the types of cans that will cause the least damage. But it's also about using this opportunity to inspect the film if you want to and find out what the film is, the actual film, what's on it and find the best possible elements to use for preservation. So the types of equipment that you need are really quite simple. You need a pair of film rewinds which we'll look at these things in a second to wind through the film. You can use a film viewer or a simple light box in a loop. A regular one foot square light box in an eight magnifying loop. You want some gloves, cotton or latex. That's your basic equipment to actually look at a film and try to figure out what it is. If you're going a little bit further, you'll need a splicer, some clean leader which is the blank film that goes to the head and the tail. The aforementioned cores which is what you use to wind them on the cores. And then the cans. Again, the NFPF film guide is the essential guide to making sense of this sort of stuff. They take you through it in great detail. There's also some video links that I provided that I think will be very useful for a lot of this stuff. I do highly recommend those. This is a basic film inspection setup looking down at it. You see on the left side, that reels are here. You can see the film is 16mm, double two perforations on each side. That means it's silent. This is a little film viewer in the middle called a movie scope, although it's spelled Maviscop. And it's got a little light in the lens and it very gently handles film if you want to see it moving. But it's not essential. A light table will do just as well. Your loop there obviously, and then over on the left is a splicer. There's some rewinds and a board. My quibble with this is that the board, first of all, the rewinds should be further apart. And second, the board should be painted white which makes it easier for you to keep clean and the reflected light makes it a little easier to see the film. But you can see that this is a very basic setup and you really don't need much more than this. This is another view of the film rewinds. Again, I don't think these should be so close together. And here you see the split film reels. And this is basic film inspection. Now this over on the left is much better sort of setup. You can see here you don't even need the fancy split reels. You can just wind through one to the other carefully and really get a sense of what's on the film. Over here on the right, you do see a pair of nice rewinds on a nice white board and a split reel. So again, what you're imagining is you have these reels and have a core in the middle of it so you can rewind the film on the core, open up the reel, and you have this nice flat sort of hockey puck of carefully wound film on an inert core that goes directly into a can. And that's the best practice way to store the film. Film handling and inspection. A couple of basic rules of thumb are pretty straightforward and probably relatively obvious. You want to handle it with gloves and you want to only handle the film by the edges. Some people prefer to use cotton gloves but some people prefer to use latex or nitrile gloves. It's a personal preference. I find nitrile or latex to be a little bit easier because they're just a little bit thinner and you can feel things a little bit more quickly. So what are you doing when you're actually inspecting a film and what are you looking at? First of all, you're looking for scratches and things. Now, this is a blow up of a frame from Star Wars which I chose because I think most people are familiar with it. When you see this this is what you would see over a light box with a loop. You know, you see here vertical scratches, a few very heavy ones. You see some thinner, lighter scratches, but a lot of them especially obvious over the bottom. You see this big horizontal scratch up towards the top right above the engine. And then you see kind of all over the place a lot of dirt on a schmutz. This is the kind of thing you're looking at when you're looking at a film print and trying to determine its condition. You'll also see, again since most of us are familiar with the film you know on the base of whatever it is is how pink it is and how faded it is. So that tells you something as well. So you can look at a film print and you can make a lot of determinations about what it actually what its condition actually is without even having to project it. Basic equipment. And what do you do with that? You can utilize something like this. This is the print condition report that is in the NFPF guide on film preservation. I strongly recommend using this as a starting point. I think it's good, but as you see it's print condition report only. And you may well be looking at stuff that's not a print that's a negative or something like that. So in addition to this basic information which again you can find by winding through the film silent sound, well what type of sound? Magnetic or optical. Material. Triacetate, diacetate, polyester. It might be nitrate. Generation. Positive reversal. It might be a negative. Is it soundtrack only? Is it image only? Etc. And you're also going through the film interpretations on all this sorts of potential damage, deterioration, etc. On a scale that you can determine. It can be 1-5, 1-4, A-F, etc. But you would say for example on that previous film that we were looking at, depending on what side of the film those scratches are they might be emulsion scratches. They might be base scratches. There might be damage to the perforations. There might have been some repair to the perforations, etc. This is all pretty straightforward. But again you can do a very detailed film print or film element inspection relatively easily. Now, you might remember way back at the beginning I suggested that you note the dots on the edge of that film frame. In case you didn't hear so quick reminder, you can see the dot over the upper left. Just to the left of the M. That is the Eastman Kodak Date Code. Now they're very tiny and they're very annoying but they're very useful. They can tell you when the print was actually made. Kodak started using them in 1922 and started recycling them on a 20-year basis. So if you look at the edge of the film with a loop you can see that there's a circle in a square. It tells you the film was made in one of those three dates. 22, 42, or 62. You have to use what other information you have about what's in the image or what you know about its history to determine which one of those three it is. And it's quite useful. And if I hadn't cropped this chart off at the wrong place you could see that the circle means 1937, 57, or 77. Based on the content we know that this film was made roughly in the late 30s so we know it was made in 1937. So it's an extremely useful thing to try to find. Again, they're tiny but they are there and you can find them with a loop. So talking about film preservation costs. How much does it cost to preserve a film? When I say preservation I mean copying it onto new stock restoring color, scratches, etc. This is a preservation cost from a recent project I worked on. For a 16mm film with sound it was about 490 feet which meant it was about 12 minutes long and there was an internegative that was the negative that we were working with. The lab charged $90 an hour for evaluation which was just to make any repairs and there was nearly nothing they needed to be done so it was only an hour. Cleaning it, it was charged by the foot. So again when you're talking about the necessity of knowing duration versus length when you're making film duplication it's charged by the foot. So if you know that again a 12 minute film is about 490 to 500 feet then you can estimate charges. To make a new interpositive again positive, negative at $1.73 a foot dubbing there should be a hard return after $1.73 a foot, sorry. Another hour the audio stock was 510 feet 90 cents a foot the answer print which is the first completed print at the end of the restoration the answer print was $1.30 a foot so to do full preservation on 16 millimeter film found about 12 minutes long there was in very good condition was $2,417.70 not including shipping so it's not cheap but again it can be done and sort of the most important thing to think about when you're talking about film preservation is that film of all of the media is the most stable over the long term even though nitrate and acetate have decomposition excuse me they decompose there's still far more stable than audio tape or videotape and there's still much more known quantities than digital media so the types of issues that those media face aren't necessarily faced by film this is the recommended storage conditions which is pretty straight forward you basically want to for the longest term possible freeze it for the medium term it should be cold again these are these weekend handouts and they'll also be in some of the NFPF guides it's relatively straight forward and I think we all know that a lot of people don't have the capability because of institutional pressures and budgetary issues to have really good frozen storage and protocols for things like that but the rule of thumb is cooler and drier the better and if you do have things that are nitrate or things that are extremely important that are that are not in good storage it might make a lot of sense to try to partner with other institutions that do have better storage if you can that's the end of my talk right now so I guess we should see what kinds of questions we have and whether I've missed anything that people want to hear about great thanks Jeff we do have a few questions for you a lot about just the best way to store the films that you might have Mary is asking should your containers your cans be vented or unvented what do you suggest? Yes the standard archival cans that you will get there's a couple of makers two names that gave me they are slightly vented yes and Cody from Rock Hill, South Carolina has a particular thing that might also be affecting others says at my institution we have several films that are under 400 data film and the smallest cans you found are made for 400 films how do you store the smaller films he's worried that perhaps they're going to slide around in the can when they're trying to retrieve them that's possible but there are two sort of practical considerations number one is it's not likely that they'll be retrieved incredibly often but number two that's the reason that it's important for the film to be wound tightly onto the core and taped down tightly so that it stays in that sort of hockey puck configuration and also that it has a lot of clean leader on the outside so that it's protected so that if it does move around in the can it's not you'll be handling it carefully but yes when it's retrieved it may bounce around a little bit but if you take those steps there's not a lot that can happen to it if it's in a clean can wound very properly and leader it on the outside so that possibility of films bouncing around in the can is better than putting something in the can whose longevity you may not necessarily be able to track would you as archivists and librarians I think so many of us are always trying to save space would you ever put two films in one can together? Yeah that's a good question standard practice is not to and but I respect the question and I understand the problem and so I'm trying to envision ways in which that would be possible for example there are quite large archival cans 12 and 1600 feet which are quite large and if you had a number of small reels that were wound properly in theory it would be possible to store them in practice it may or may not be worth the trouble because for example the labeling of the can is going to be more challenging the tracking of its contents adds another layer of complexity to that I think the one thing that I could say absolutely could understand how that would happen if there were storage issues and a number of small reels were in a small can but again that would be less than ideal and the one thing that I could say absolutely is that you should never stack film for example if you saw those metal cans in that earlier shot those are big heavy lab cans and inside them this is totally common were two rolls of 16 millimeter film stacked one on top of each other and so that's something you should never do it's not good to stack film so that's one thing you should definitely not do okay well that leads perfectly to the next question say we get our collections all nicely housed in these cans once we get them do we store them upright or flat on shelves flat always flat yeah okay so that is an easy one that is an easy one there we go do you know any of any cooperative storage programs that might be out there Connie from Arkansas has so if we have motion picture film and no cold storage capabilities is it maybe that we transfer it to another institution that does and is there kind of a good cooperative way to find places that are accepting these sorts of things well in terms of seeking one out really the association of moving image archivists AMIA which is at AMINET.org is in the states is the most important moving image archivist group they have a very active listserv that sort of rather than a board or anything that's the way that they share information and seeking potential homes or potential someone else was asking also about trying to find out if there were other copies of films that's one good way to start the AMIA listserv because the majority of moving image archives in the states seem to have a connection there and that is a really good place to start in terms of cooperatives there are places the one that I know off the top of my head is Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport, Maine provides storage for outside clients and as a not-for-profit I believe that their rates are relatively reasonable and that's certainly someone that I would contact the Library of Congress I think the National Film Preservation Foundation might be a good resource to contact as they have a lot of good relationships with other institutions and the Library of Congress as part of its mandate really is largely accepting of donations and material created in the states so those are some places to look at so that might be helpful great do you have any tips for folks that might want to do some cold storage at their own institutions do they get a refrigerator or freezer how might they go about that if they have a significant number of films that they want to deal with it's a lot more complicated than that there are some protocols and again I know I keep referring to the NFPF guide but it is very helpful and I believe that there is a good chapter on it but in a nutshell for a climatizing film that's being taken in and out of a freezer the first of all is a conventional freezer cycle on and off and they don't have a continuously stable environment and there are also some pretty rigorous protocols for how to house and pack up film that's being put into freezing storage that's probably a little too complicated for me to explain right now but there are protocols for housing properly so I'm going into cold storage and then for freezing storage and then for it coming out because it has to climatize if we thaw in ways that won't for example cause condensation to form there are some protocols on that if it's not in the NFPF guide I can send you a link or someone there I could or Laura I could send to distribute that might be more helpful great thank you one last question that we have here is Sarah has a question that says she has a lot of films in her collections that are secured at the end just using regular old pressure sensitive tape should she try and remove this or nope in a nutshell especially if it's got a leader on it the blank film it's quite the opposite film should be taped down so that it's nice and tightly wound talking about film handling this is something I didn't really talk about you want it to be tightly wound one thing you never want to do is pull on it to tighten it up cause that causes horizontal scratches known as cinch marks so you want the film to be tightly wound but you never want to sort of yank it to tighten it up and is it in storage that's fine usually people just use paper artist's tape for that sort of thing so it actually should be taped down because if it's not and it gets loose dirt and dust can get into the reel and cause damage or scratching great so that's all the questions we have I know that Jenny normally likes to step in here too go ahead and I'm going to pull over the homework assignment for today's webinar so here's the link to that and then as we always do if you have logged in as a group so one person's logged in but multiple people are watching we love to get an accurate attendance of who's watching this webinar so if you're group leader go ahead and enter in everyone's name for their group and I will pull over our link to the course webpage for the homework assignment there in addition to some of those resources that Jeff included in his PowerPoint and we'll include any new links there as well Jeff thank you so much and Laura thank you so much and I almost forgot so we'll see you one last time on Wednesday at 2 o'clock it'll be our last webinar so this Wednesday at 2 and so with that we can go ahead and close out today Jeff and Laura thank you so much