Film Restoration: Jaws bites first

Thankfully George Lucas wasn't involved here... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLWvXaeDzwU&feature=player_embedded

100th anniversary of Universal Pictures - super restoration and 7.1 audio up-mix of 1975's Jaws.

That's a fascinating video. Although two things really surprised me.

Firstly, I can't believe how bad the original negatives were, sure they've aged. But it seems like they're admitting they weren't that hot to begin with.

The second thing is that despite the wonderful new world of digital media, they're still printing back to 35mm stock. Digital obsolescence continues to astound me, in 30 years time there probably won't be single working HDCAM-SR deck to play the digital masters they've created, but they'll still be able to view the film stock. I would've said 40 years, since there are U-Matic machines from 30-odd years ago that are still working, but to be honest, they don't make 'em like that anymore. A lot of the new kit becomes junk as soon as the highly custom silicon in them fails.

I've got decks that are less than 10 years old that can't be fixed as Sony have stopped manufacturing some of the IC's in them, and it's not economically viable to buy a junker to strip for parts.

Not that you're at the Beeb anymore but, how do they archive their stuff nowadays? And what parts of it? I measn do they archive web pages as well as radio/TV output? And is it everything nowadays or still selective.

It would make more sense to have digital files stored on some generic random-access storage media rather than HDCAM-SR or whatever other proprietary physical format becomes popular. Keep it online, maintain it, upgrade it and back it up. As storage technologies change, so will your storage array. That way you don't have to worry about physical format obsolescence.

That said, it still makes sense to hang onto the film as a backup. But it has to be pointed out how much the original film deteriorated over 37 years. And I'm pretty sure they'd moved from celluloid to polyester by that point. Actually, they apparently didn't commonly move to polyester until the 1990s, so maybe that actually makes sense.

Well they could have done a reprint of the film before it faded. My guess is someone dropped the ball in the preservation process. Despite all the psuh to move everything to digital film is hard to beat as a movie projection medium. It's fairly cheap and the mechanics of projecting it our straightforward. Digital projectors of decent quality on the other hand are really expensive. It's also worth noting that IMAX films are shot and projected on what basically is medium format film.

I got the impression that its not unusual for the original negatives to have problems. Even when new, it's not a matter of just splicing it all together and making a print. A lot of what was done in the restoration seems to be stuff they normally do, there is just more of it.

Funnily enough I actually start back there next month. ISTR back in the days before MAM's and sizeable disc arrays, everything for archiving went onto (or stayed on) the tape format du jour. Over the years this has been 2" Quad, 1" C-Format, Beta, DigiBeta, D3 etc. This caused massive headaches when suitable playback machines like the quads became scarce. I think at the end of the 90's there was a concerted effort to get all the older stuff onto DigiBeta.

Nowadays I believe the BBC's DMI (Digital Media Initiative) is looking to store everything in a file based format, so I assume the archive is now a metric fsckload of LTO tapes. Having been bitten in the arse by erasing important stuff in the past, I believe they keep everything. I presume after a decade or so, they probably review it and bin off the unimportant stuff. I think they're also ingesting all the important stuff off videotape too.

Must be one of the biggest/most complex data storage systems in the world.

Certainly one of, but I'd have thought some of US networks and the news agencies like APTN would probably give them a run for their money in terms of size.