How to store old films

[CSM126]

I recently acquired a small handful of 35mm trailers. They didn't come with canisters or anything, and I'm looking for a proper storage solution. Right now I'm storing then in a Rubbermaid box in a closet, but I have to wonder if there's a better way.

They're all relatively new and in excellent shape aside from a little dust.

[movielocke]

It's ridiculous how often these concerns have to be repeated when they're the same issues that everyone in film and music have been facing for the last 30 odd years. Every time there's a media upgrade, these concerns aren't really effectively addressed.

L.A. Weekly did a nice article on this not too long ago.

The longevity of Digibeta seems pretty remarkable, not as a storage medium so much as a "quality" format institutions can still play. It entered the market in 1993, and a lot of popular formats have come and gone since then.

Well Digibeta decks are spectacular to work with. they're reasonably easy to service. There's a gajillion of them, and they're cheap relative to other decks. It's a huge step from BSP decks, they can play BSP tapes, and perhaps one of the biggest advantage of a Digi deck is that it has SDI ins and outs. That means it's a beautiful bridge between the analog and digital worlds. It's also good to use for SD formats for digital ingest because those old tapes might dirty or damage the heads on your shiny HDCAMSR deck (that's worth probably 1000 times or more a digibeta deck. So even though you could use an HDCAMSR deck to do a lot of a what an A500 deck does, you're probably safer using the Digi deck. Digi decks have Composite Ins and outs, Component ins and outs, can handle AES or SDI audio and has TC inputs and outputs. Basically you can hook a Digi deck up to anything and it will work beautifully. And if you have a higher end Digi deck you can play most of the various other formats like SX and IMX.

The decks can do just about anything and is probably one of the best looking SD formats, far superior to DVD.

[MichaelB]

Projected Digibeta looks surprisingly good - obviously, we're talking SD resolution, but the 2004 semi-restoration of Ken Russell's The Devils has only ever been available on Digibeta, and did a very impressive job of filling the biggest BFI Southbank screen.

The comparative lack of compression is a major factor here - because Blu-ray looks surprisingly shit when blown up to a cinema-sized screen, despite the theoretical resolution advantage over Digibeta.

[movielocke]

A lot of stuff done to Digi, at least when we were mastering to Digi in the standard def days, was done in 1:1 with no compression. HD material mastered to SR or HDCAM is all done compressed at Avid DNXHD 220 or 220x (10bit) because 1:1 HD was too large a data hurdle to bridge in the early days when TV was switching to HD. 220 has been a superb codec to work with, but I've started to feel I'm really seeing some of the limitations of it, and once you start looking for them, you see them everywhere. Not that it matters for the viewer, which is why 220 has stuck around for so long, what I see in online is massively better than the laughable image direct tv serves up at home, so much hideous compression that really wipes out the image, so because of the way the image gets sent to the home, no one I know has made the switch to uncompressed mastering for TV. And while my experience is in TV, rather than film, it's worth pointing out that 220 is a lot less compression than what BD goes through. Our 220 same as source QTs generally run about 85 GB for a 42 minute show. So I'm never really surprised at how poor a BD looks projected, because the larger the screen the more evident compression becomes.

[David M.]

The comparative lack of compression is a major factor here - because Blu-ray looks surprisingly shit when blown up to a cinema-sized screen, despite the theoretical resolution advantage over Digibeta.

Hmm, it shouldn't look shit - but not all compression on BD is done well. The bitrates the format allows for allow for at least 'transparent' quality. High bit rates and good compression result in something that shouldn't appear different to the master.

[Brianruns10]

Don't listen to these people; films are best stored in damp basements next to boxes of oily rags, ideally near the water heater.