Film and/vs. photo preservation

In response to JJN's comment about my post regarding the Film Preservation Guide:

Good questions and comments.

It is easier in some ways to say how film preservation is like photo preservation. First of all, you are obviously talking about film, and that cameras are used in the creation of both types of material. One definition of film describes it as "roll film"--and I'm not sure if it's another type of film that could be described as something other than that. Film, is spooled around a core or a hub.

In both kinds of preservation, you are preserving the individual photographic images. But in film preservation, you have a lot more to worry about in scale--because there can be thousands of frames. Film has to be preserved in its totality, but conserved frame by frame.

Any interpretive decisions made have to be consistent. Once a decision is made for the type of color was thought to be originally in a frame, has to be followed subsequently.

As to your rhetorical question, according to some materials I've read (sorry I don't have a source), the best video image still doesn't have the feel of a "print" for many filmmakers. Janet Wasko, I believe, mentioned that although some of this is subjective, it really goes beyond questions of lines, maybe to how our eyes perceive the chemicals on the film that are projected. Something of a different sheen, perhaps. There are of course various ways video has become essential in filmmaking--filming, production, post-production, editing, distribution, and exhibition. As soon as I find that Wired article (ugh- too many papers, books, and journals), I'll mention it--there's another great chart about what percentages of the industry are involved with which aspects of digital video.

As Howard Besser points out in his article from a 2001 issue of The Moving Image (which I was skimming earlier, but didn't copy the citation), motion picture archivists have to move beyond collecting only the finished work, and to expand their purview to include all contextual information, versions, releases, and accompanying materials.