Posted by sgordon on 10/14/06 19:44

Bob Ford <imagesinmotion@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
: Sorry Scott but Bill is right.This subject has already been beaten to
: death on this NG. The last discussion mentioned the fact that you can
: buy archival quality DVDs. They are more expensive but are supposed to
: have much longer life.

Maybe we're just arguing semantics, but I don't know of any serious
film restoration house that would consider any DVD-based format to
be archival. The image is compressed, the discs are dye-based
and their lifespan is debatable, and the image quality is only as
good as the transfer that is done (and local transfer houses often
do a rather poor job, in my experience... that's why I started doing
it myself).

The real archive here is the film itself, since it seems in this case to
fortunately be a stock that is holding up very well. By all means clean
it, by all means transfer to DVD - or better yet to some less compressed
format on a hard drive with which you can make periodic backups (that's
what I do). But the most important thing is to take good care of the film.
Who knows, 10 years from now there will probably be a way of getting
an even better transfer off of it.

Maybe this topic has been "beaten to death". But I've been reading
this group for about a year and I don't recall there being some
revelation that DVD is an archival format for film. Furthermore,
I think that Bill even clarified that that was not what he said.
And, isn't that's what these groups are for? Beating dead horses? :)

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