The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences

Building an Interim Digital Preservation System

Nancy Silver

Digital Archival Program Manager

Science and Technology Council

©AMPAS

Today’s Discussion

• The Academy and The Council

• Current Council Projects

• The Digital Archival Framework Project

• StEM Case Study

• Issues

• Next Steps

About the Academy

•>6,000 members in 33 countries

•15 branches, plus at large/associate members

•Staff of 250

•3 buildings

•Academy Film Archive

•Margaret Herrick Library

•Grants, public programs and more….

Academy Mission

•To advance the art and sciences of motion pictures

•To recognize outstanding achievements

•To provide a common forum and meeting ground for branches and crafts

•To represent the viewpoint of the actual creators of the motion picture

Academy Facilities

Inside the Academy

Coming ….

About the Council

• The Council: 25 Academy members

• Four standing subcommittees:

• Technology History

• Public Programs & Education

• Advanced Technology Programs

• Research

• Council Advisory Group: Studio CTOs

• Staff of 9 plus interns

• Project committees: over 200 volunteers

Research

• Not about solving any particular problem

• Work that leads (or may lead ) to improvements in the theatrical audience experience

• First project: CineGrid

• Calit2 iRODS Researcher

Advanced Technology Program

• Collaborative technical problem solving

• Establish usable specifications and best practices, then bring them to SMPTE for standardization

• Image Interchange Framework

• Digital Motion Picture Camera Assessment

• Digital Archival Framework Project

Council Technical Resources

• Esmeralda™ Easel

• Stella Stage

• Dalsa Evolution 4K Cameras

• Custom spectral densitometer

• CouncilNet

Image Interchange Framework

• The Problem: interchanging motion picture images between post production facilities is very hard: the pictures don’t look right

• IIF: A framework specification and open source implementation that addresses color management and file formats for today’s hybrid digital motion picture workflows

• A portable software programming language designed specifically for color transforms.

• Reference transforms to convert between IIF-defined encoding schemes

• A set of reference images and calibration targets for film scanners and recorders

• Documentation on the architecture and software tools • Merges with NDIIPP effort because digital preservation

requires digital format standards

The Digital Dilemma

The Motion Picture Industry is Changing

Digital technologies bring many benefits:

•Better sound quality

•Visual effect and animation not possible with film

•More creative choices with “digital mastering”

•More efficient and higher quality theatrical presentation

•Digital Cinematography provides immediately viewable images and longer “takes”

•Film is 100 year-old technology and works very wellCapture, release prints, long term archiving

The Motion Picture Industry is Changing

Digital technologies bring many challenges:

• Very difficult to manage large volumes of digital objects

• Security issues

• Current metadata standards need to be customized for digital motion picture materials

• Lack of simple archiving software tools for digital motion picture materials

• Data migration problems

• Software incompatibility

• Storage costs

Digital Archival Framework Project

•Case-study system for preserving digital motion picture materials

•Requirements document that focuses on the digital preservation needs of the independent filmmaker and smaller film archives

•Image data format specification, development and standardization for motion pictures

•Education and outreach

•Research

Current Academy Metadata Initiatives

• Established a key project committee consisting of key metadata specialists throughout the world

• Provide recommendations for technical and preservation metadata standards for digital motion picture materials

• 2009 Digital Motion Picture Metadata Symposium

Case-study system for preserving digital motion picture materials

StEM Case Study

•“Process” the collection

•Develop interim preservation strategy and infrastructure

Bit-level preservation

Essence-level preservation

Evaluate and choose metadata schema

Probably not the reference design

•Publish findings

The Collection for the Case Study

The Collection

The Collection

The Collection

The Content Audit Process

Case Study System Workflow

Data audit

Data verification

Data cleansing anddata restoration

Preservation requirements and typical content management strategy

ContentCreation

Create accurate anddetailed records fordigital materialsproviding descriptive,administrative andstructural metadata

ContentIntegrity

Verificationmechanisms

Attention to security

Routine audits

Digital Library and Preservation Methodology based on ALA Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS)

StEM DigitalMaterials

Digital materials and metadata records are actively preserved

via nearline storage (server based) or

long term storage(LTO Tape libraries)

ContentCreation

Production of reliablemaster files

Clear and completetechnicalspecifications

ContentIntegrity

Documentation of allpolicies, strategies,and procedures

Use of persistentidentifiers

ContentMaintenance

Continuousmonitoring of files

Written disasterprevention andrecovery plansStorage of files atmultiple sites

ContentMaintenance

Robust computing &networkinginfrastructure

Programs forrefreshing, migration& emulation

Hardware Architecture

Software

Collection Manager(UI, Catalog Database)

Storage Subsystem(Cloud, Local Management)

LocalStorageCineGrid

Object Repository(Media, Access Services)

Software

The Role of Metadata

Issues

• Identifying the collection

• Data migration

• Media management and repository software

• Metadata schemas

• Q&A and technology

• Staffing

Next Steps

• Continued content audit

• Restoration of a few corrupted files

• Continued software development

• Cataloging of the StEM collection

• Ingest of the StEM collection

• Management of the StEM collection

• Case study documentation

Questions and Answers

Thank you!

Science & Technology Council

©AMPAS