Studios see dollar signs in film preservation

There are many reasons to preserve old films, such as for art's sake. Funds are raised, grants given out to ensure that even cinematic historical films from the past 60 years are given as much care and attention as the most valuable paintings or sculptures.

But the real reason more and more movies are being preserved these days is about economics. After decades of letting films decay, the industry has seen the potential profit.

The newer technology of the Blu-Ray Disc, the DVD and high-definition television has educated the consumer. The demand for high-quality images and audio has given studios an ideal economic motive for keeping their libraries in top condition. And once most consumers become accustomed to crisp visuals and booming audio, nothing less will do.

Michael Pogorzelski, director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Academy Film Archive, points to the jump from VHS to DVD as film preservation's turning point.

"The picture quality and audio quality went up so astronomically compared to VHS, everyone at the studios said, 'We've got to make sure that all the films look and sound as good as they can, and the only way to do that is to go back to the original elements.' And that's when you saw them seeing a real economic incentive to get their libraries in shipshape."

Over a decade ago after the DVD was launched, film preservation (and often restoration) is routine at Hollywood studios. Today, studios typically store multiple copies of films in climate-controlled vaults in different locations. Primary materials are stored in one film storage facility, while three duplicates are stored in others miles apart. In the event that an individual copy is corrupted or an entire facility is destroyed, the library remains intact.

The process has advanced tremendously since years ago, when prints and original negatives were neglected or lost, improperly stored, transferred to inferior stocks, sometimes destroyed. In the 1970s, filmmakers spoke out and the Library of Congress and institutions like the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the George Eastman House stepped up efforts to save and restore films. Studios were, by and large, slow to act, if they did anything at all.

Whole divisions in studios are devoted to the preservation and restoration process. They give state-of-the-art preservation treatments to every new project, while simultaneously working through older titles in the media library. Films that have a historically significance and are highly profitable on home video and across other markets get looked at first. Priority is also given to titles that are in bad condition or stored on historically unstable material.

Grover Crisp, vp asset management and film restoration for Sony, says recent advances in digital-restoration technology are inspiring his studio to go back and revisit major titles a second or third time, such as 1969's "Easy Rider," which was previously restored in the mid-1990s using both photochemical and digital techniques.

"There were serious limitations back then in terms of what we could do digitally, and because of the cost involved, it really wasn't done very often," Crisp says. "Now, we can do the entire film for a whole lot less than we did just short pieces 10 or 12 years ago."

The issue of long-term digital storage is also a big concern to the major studios, which put most of their films through a digital intermediate process that renders the final image in a data file that is then transferred to celluloid for theatrical distribution. Various groups are looking into the problem, such as the Academy's Sci-Tech Council and the industry-standards body SMPTE, but the processes for dealing with digital data are unique to each facility, and no consensus as to a solution has been reached.

For now, film archiving is the medium of choice. Film Storage done properly should last 100 years or more, compared to digital data tape, which lasts around seven to 10 years. But with the increasing number of major Hollywood films being shot digitally, the push to retrofit multiplexes with digital projection systems, and the growing popularity of viewing media on personal computers and handheld devices, one has to wonder if the idea of preserving moving images on film may soon be gone.

Achieving the standards of the highest quality, Pacific Title Archives' preservation facilities are environmentally controlled in high security buildings providing ideal storage conditions for film, video, audio and optical media assets. We provide a number of tools that assist in the re-purposing of the assets and their enhanced restoration and media conversions.