Bibliogaphic reference
PRONAY, Nicholas. The 'Moving Picture' and Historical Research. Journal of Contemporary History (JSTOR), Vol. 18, No. 3, Historians and Movies: The State of the Art: Part 1 (Jul., 1983), pp. 365-395.
D.C Title : The 'Moving Picture' and Historical Research
D.C Creator : Pronay Nicholas
D.C Subject : film/material/moving pictures
D.C Description : this text describes moving images and their history through time.
D.C Publisher : JSTOR (Journal of Contemporary History)
D.C Date : 1983
D.C Type : journal article.
D.C Format : html.
D.C Identifier :http://www.jstor.org/view/00220094/ap010068/01a00020/0
D.C Language : English
D.C Relation : -
D.C Coverage :
D.C Rights : © Journal of Contemporary History.
The text is protected and I cannot put it on my blog. But you can consult it with the following address :http://www.jstor.org/view/00220094/ap010068/01a00020/0
Moreover, to reach the article in entirety it is necessary to be identified.
2/27/2007
Relator terms for archival moving image cataloging
Bibliographic reference
National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute. Relator terms for archival moving image cataloging. UCLA, from Cataloging Service Bulletin 31 (Winter 1986): 71-75 and Cataloging Service Bulletin 50 (Fall 1990). Last modified: August 12, 2004.
Text accessible : http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/CPM%20Voyager/RelatorTerms.html
D.C Title : Relator terms for archival moving image cataloging
D.C Creator : by a group of film and television cataloging experts meeting as the Ad-Hoc Technical Committee of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute.
D.C Subject : archives/cataloging/moving image/preservation/terms
D.C Description : "A list of terms relating name headings to moving image works being cataloged was created by a group of film and television cataloging experts. The list is designed for use in standard bibliographic records for archival moving image materials that are created according to AACR2, the interpretive manual."
D.C Publisher : UCLA Film and Television Archive Cataloging Procedure Manual
D.C Date : Winter 1986, Last modified: 2004-08-12
D.C Type : Text
D.C Format : html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/CPM%20Voyager/RelatorTerms.html
D.C Source : http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/
D.C Language : english
D.C Relation : -
D.C Coverage : USA
D.C Rights : -
This text is an extract of the original text.
National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute. Relator terms for archival moving image cataloging. UCLA, from Cataloging Service Bulletin 31 (Winter 1986): 71-75 and Cataloging Service Bulletin 50 (Fall 1990). Last modified: August 12, 2004.
Text accessible : http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/CPM%20Voyager/RelatorTerms.html
D.C Title : Relator terms for archival moving image cataloging
D.C Creator : by a group of film and television cataloging experts meeting as the Ad-Hoc Technical Committee of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute.
D.C Subject : archives/cataloging/moving image/preservation/terms
D.C Description : "A list of terms relating name headings to moving image works being cataloged was created by a group of film and television cataloging experts. The list is designed for use in standard bibliographic records for archival moving image materials that are created according to AACR2, the interpretive manual."
D.C Publisher : UCLA Film and Television Archive Cataloging Procedure Manual
D.C Date : Winter 1986, Last modified: 2004-08-12
D.C Type : Text
D.C Format : html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/CPM%20Voyager/RelatorTerms.html
D.C Source : http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/
D.C Language : english
D.C Relation : -
D.C Coverage : USA
D.C Rights : -
This text is an extract of the original text.
UCLA Film and Television Archive Cataloging Procedure Manual
RELATOR TERMS FOR ARCHIVAL MOVING IMAGE CATALOGING
"A list of terms relating name headings to moving image works being cataloged was created by a group of film and television cataloging experts meeting as the Ad-Hoc Technical Committee of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute. The list is designed for use in standard bibliographic records for archival moving image materials that are created according to AACR2, the interpretive manual, Archival Moving Image Materials: a Cataloging Manual, and the MARC Visual Materials Format. The terms will appear in MARC records following personal names (field 700) in subfield "e."
The list includes broad terms which, for the most part, designate "function" rather than "agent" for the person carrying out a function. The choice of categories for these broad terms of function is based upon the hierarchical structure found in the Glossary of Filmographic Terms compiled by the Federation internationale des archives du film (FIAF) (Brussels: FIAF, 1985). The Ad-Hoc Technical Committee of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation chose this approach in order to create a short, practical list that could collect the numerous, non-standard credit terms (often found on moving image works) into useful categories for the creation of indexes. The few terms included in the list that are suggestive of an agent performing a function, rather than the function itself, refer to on-camera functions and are, like the function terms, broad in nature.
In employing these terms for use with added entries, archival catalogers need not fear the loss of specific information found on the item or in appropriate secondary reference sources. Specific terms can and should be recorded in the statement of responsibility and in the note area (MARC fields 245, 508, and 511) for each bibliographic record. Archives may include as many names--together with transcribed credits--as they wish in the note area. (Added entries are not required for each name included in notes.) Archives not wishing to use subfield "e" do not need to apply these standard terms.
Credits: John Doe, director, scenarist; Amy Smith,
assistant director; Bill Brown, producer, author; Jill Johnson, associate producer, casting director.
Added entries:
1. Doe, John, direction.
2. Doe, John, writing.
3. Smith, Amy, direction.
4. Brown, William B., production.
5. Brown, William B., writing.
6. Johnson, Jill, production.
Follow 6.1.1.1, Format of relator terms in formatting relator terms.
Follow 6.1.1.1, Format of relator terms in formatting relator terms.
Note that, since subfield "e" is not repeatable, names with differing functions must appear more than once. [This is no longer true.]Note also that broad function terms, used in this way, eliminate some duplication, and help clarify, for example, that Jill Johnson is not actually the producer (more specific meaning), but performs production functions.
The list of relator terms will be maintained and updated by the Technical Governance Committee of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation for its National Database/Network of Archival Moving Images. Suggestions for additions and/or changes to the list should be directed to:
For guidance in choosing appropriate terms, refer to the explanatory notes in the list and to the FIAF glossary, which provides specific help with foreign language credits, specifically Spanish, German, French, and Russian.
RELATOR TERM LIST
Anchor : Use for the newscaster who is in overall control of the presentation of a news or current affairs program. See also "Reporter."
Animation : Use for person(s) responsible for the arts, techniques, and processes involved in photographically or electronically giving apparent movement to inanimate objects or drawings, often by means of photographing the objects or drawings one frame at a time, each time so slightly different that, when projected in sequence, they appear to move. Use this term for directors and producers of animation.
Camera : Use for person(s) involved with the technical aspects of lighting and photographing either staged scenes and/or actual events. Use for person(s) responsible for, or involved in, the choice of angles and setups of the camera, the mood of the lighting, the placement and adjustment of light sources, the choice of lenses, and any further technical processing of the film or tape material up to the completion of the work.
Cast : Use for actors portraying characters as required by a script. Use for groups of people, such as The Kingston Trio, when they act as scripted characters other than themselves. Do not use for animals, such as Lassie."
Choreography : Use for those involved with the planning, staging, and rehearsing of solo and/or ensemble dances and dance routines which contain music or song.
Direction : Use for person(s) having overall responsibility for interpreting meaning and expression during the production of a moving image material work. Use this term also for any person who helps the director realize the intentions of the script and producer. The extent of the director's involvement may depend upon the individual, the production company, the type of presentation, i.e., feature film, TV series, documentary, etc., or the practices within the country concerned. For directors of animation, use "Animation."
Editing : use for person(s) responsible, following the script and in creative cooperation with the director, for selecting, arranging, and assembling the scenes and/or footage into a coherent whole to achieve the desired effect. Also may control the synchronization of picture and sound and may supervise further technical processes."[...]
From Cataloging Service Bulletin 31 (Winter 1986): 71-75 and Cataloging Service Bulletin 50 (Fall 1990). Local UCLA additions in italics. Last modified: August 12, 2004
2/15/2007
Organizing moving image collections for the digital era : the goldspeil report
Bibliographic reference
M. TURNER James, HUDON Michele, DEVIN Yves. Organizing moving image collections for the digital era : the goldspeil report". Information Outlook. August 2002. FindArticles.com. 15 Feb. 2007.
DC Title : Organizing moving image collections for the digital era: the goldspeil report
D.C Creator : M. TURNER James, HUDON Michele, DEVIN Yvest
D.C Subject : digital image/images collections/moving image/organization/research/retrieval/storage/support
D.C Description : this text explains the goal which is to understand the techniques and tools used for representing the content of moving image collections that are indexed shot by shot.
D.C Publisher : nformation outlook
D.C Date : August 2002
D.C Type : Text
D.C Format :html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FWE/is_8_6/ai_90932749
D.C Source : http://www.findarticles.com/
D.C Coverage : -
This text is an extract of the original text.
Organizing moving image collections for the digital era : the goldspeil report
M. TURNER James, HUDON Michele, DEVIN Yves. Organizing moving image collections for the digital era : the goldspeil report". Information Outlook. August 2002. FindArticles.com. 15 Feb. 2007.
Text accessible : http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FWE/is_8_6/ai_90932749
DC Title : Organizing moving image collections for the digital era: the goldspeil report
D.C Creator : M. TURNER James, HUDON Michele, DEVIN Yvest
D.C Subject : digital image/images collections/moving image/organization/research/retrieval/storage/support
D.C Description : this text explains the goal which is to understand the techniques and tools used for representing the content of moving image collections that are indexed shot by shot.
D.C Publisher : nformation outlook
D.C Date : August 2002
D.C Type : Text
D.C Format :html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FWE/is_8_6/ai_90932749
D.C Source : http://www.findarticles.com/
D.C Coverage : -
This text is an extract of the original text.
Organizing moving image collections for the digital era : the goldspeil report
"THE STEVEN I. GOLDSPIEL MEMORIAL RESEARCH FUND WAS ESTABLISHED IN 1991, and named in honor of the former president of Disclosure, Inc. (now known as Primark). The research fund is an endowment and projects are funded solely from investment income generated by the fund. The purpose of the fund is to support projects that promote research and advancement of library sciences, in particular focusing on projects that address the goals identified in the SLA Research Statement.
The 1999 winners of the award were James M. Turner, Michele Hudon and Yves Devin from the Universite de Montreal. The results of their project titled, "Organizing Moving Image Collections for the Digital Era" are presented here.
Introduction
Pictures have always been used to represent concepts and ideas and to communicate messages. Now that we collect them so extensively, we need to represent the pictures themselves in order to store and retrieve them. Photography, movies, television and digital images stored on computers have all contributed to the rapid buildup of ever larger collections. Whatever the format or the presentation medium, pictures have become a most important mode of communication in our time. They play a crucial role in such areas as medicine, journalism, advertising, education and entertainment. The notion of picture collections now has to do with a vast world, and an attempt to describe this world is represented by the study poster entitled The World of Visual Collections (GRIV 1998), which takes into account the areas of art, engraving, photography, computer graphics, the types of institutions which collect and the many professions that use pictures as part of their work.
Moving images are, of course, a goldmine for many organizations and individuals, and it is important to describe them adequately in databases in order to show their richness and complexity if we are to exploit these collections fully. However, the world of moving image collection organization is one of locally established techniques, with little or no standardization and without communicability between systems. This has not been a problem until now because systems were managed independently of each other, but in the networked world in which we now live, the question of discovery and exchange of information has come to the forefront and needs to be addressed.
Our recently-completed research project was concerned with indexing moving image collections for storage and retrieval. The general goal of the project was to understand the techniques and tools used for representing the content of moving image collections that are indexed shot by shot. We especially wanted to study the question of indexing languages and their structure, as well as techniques for keeping them current. Several more specific objectives were identified:
* to determine how many terms, excluding proper names, are used to describe North American moving image collections indexed at the shot level;
* to estimate the rate of growth of term creation in these tools;
* to discover to what degree the lexical concepts are similar among the various tools; and
* to evaluate the possibility of creating a universal indexing vocabulary for general collections of moving images, those that represent everyday objects and events.
In this article we look at the background information to the study, after which we describe the method used to collect the data. The results are then given along with discussion of them, followed by conclusions we might draw from this research.
Background
Both still and moving images can be divided into three broad categories: art images, documentary images and "ordinary" images, each requiring its own type of organization. The proliferation of supports and the changing context (brought about first by the arrival of computer technology and then the networking of resources) are the driving forces behind a great deal of work in retooling and rethinking work methods, but they do not change this fundamental (if arbitrary) classification. Nor does the shift from analogue to digital images. Thus, there is a great deal of work to do, but the guiding principles remain the same.
The many new systems and ever more efficient technologies for capturing and processing moving images require the establishment of effective management systems. It is necessary to be able to find any specific shot in a particular collection rapidly and efficiently. Without the establishment of new methods for storage and retrieval of moving images, these valuable resources will get lost in a hopeless jumble of useless data.
Research in the area of storage and retrieval of moving images takes place using two distinct approaches with little in common (Cawkell 1992, 180). The low-level or content-based approach is the focus of work by computer science researchers. This approach involves the statistical manipulation of pixels to get information about color preponderance and arrangement, recognition of textures, patterns, boundaries, objects, scene detection and so on. The high-level or concept-based approach is the focus of work by information science researchers. This approach involves human generation of metadata substantially assisted by computer technology (semi-automatic), as well as automatic generation of high-level metadata. The general focus of this approach is finding ways to generate shot-level indexing automatically from text created during the pre-production, production, and post-production stages, such as closed captioning, audio description, and production scripts. The two research streams are complementary, and the b est information systems for storage and retrieval of moving images will need to incorporate both approaches."[...]
2/08/2007
Multimedia Indexing : the multimedia challenge
Bibliographic reference
GROS Patrick, DELAKIS Manolis and GRAVIER Guillaume. Multimedia Indexing : the multimedia challenge. IRISA – CNRS, France, July 2005.
Text accessible : http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/publications/gestion_publis/ref_biblio/gravier02
D.C Title : Multimedia Indexing : the multimedia challenge
D.C Creator : GROS Patrick, DELAKIS Manolis and GRAVIER Guillaume
GROS Patrick, DELAKIS Manolis and GRAVIER Guillaume. Multimedia Indexing : the multimedia challenge. IRISA – CNRS, France, July 2005.
Text accessible : http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/publications/gestion_publis/ref_biblio/gravier02
D.C Title : Multimedia Indexing : the multimedia challenge
D.C Creator : GROS Patrick, DELAKIS Manolis and GRAVIER Guillaume
D.C Subject : collection/image/indexing/multimedia/multimedia document/
D.C Description : this text explains the goal of multimedia indexing which is to describe documents automatically, "especially those containing images, sounds or videos, allowing users to retrieve them from large collections, or to navigate these collections easily."
D.C Description : this text explains the goal of multimedia indexing which is to describe documents automatically, "especially those containing images, sounds or videos, allowing users to retrieve them from large collections, or to navigate these collections easily."
D.C Publisher : IRISA – CNRS, France
D.C Date : 2005-07-01
D.C Type : Text
D.C Format : html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/publications/gestion_publis/ref_biblio/gravier02
D.C Source : http://www.irisa.fr/home_html
D.C Date : 2005-07-01
D.C Type : Text
D.C Format : html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/publications/gestion_publis/ref_biblio/gravier02
D.C Source : http://www.irisa.fr/home_html
D.C Language : english
D.C Relation : -
D.C Coverage : -
D.C Rights : ( (c) IRISA)
This text is an extract of the original text.
Multimedia Indexing: The Multimedia Challenge
by Patrick Gros, Manolis Delakis and Guillaume Gravier
D.C Relation : -
D.C Coverage : -
D.C Rights : ( (c) IRISA)
This text is an extract of the original text.
Multimedia Indexing: The Multimedia Challenge
by Patrick Gros, Manolis Delakis and Guillaume Gravier
"Multimedia indexing is a very active field of research, despite most works using only a single medium. This is mainly due to the fact that while they may be correlated, media are not strongly synchronized. Segment models appear to be a good candidate to manage such a desynchronization.
Multimedia indexing has become a general label to designate a large domain of activities ranging from image description to description languages, from speech recognition to ontology definition. Of course, these fields existed before the expression ‘multimedia indexing’ became popular, and most continue to have an independent existence. However, the rise of multimedia has forced people to try to mix them together in order to manage properly big collections of multimedia documents. The global goal of multimedia indexing is to describe documents automatically, especially those containing images, sounds or videos, allowing users to retrieve them from large collections, or to navigate these collections easily. Such documents, which used to be rare due to the price of acquisition devices and because of the memory required, are now flooding our digital environment thanks to the camera-phones, webcams, digital cameras, as well as to the networks that allow the data to be widely shared. The question is no longer “How can I acquire a digital image?”, but rather “How can I retrieve the image I want?”
What Does Multimedia Change?
While it is possible to study images or audio tracks alone for some documents, such approaches appear to be very limited when applied to multimedia documents like TV streams. This limitation is twofold. First, users (who are not specialists or documentalists) would like to access such documents semantically; second, users face huge sets of documents. As a consequence, many techniques that reduce semantics to syntactic cues in the context of small sets of documents are no longer useful, and no single medium can provide acceptable access to document semantics.
If one considers a TV stream, it is apparent that images are not able to provide a lot of semantic information. The information that can be extracted from this medium includes segmentation information (shot detection, clustering of neighbouring shots), face detection and recognition capabilities, and text and logo detection. It is possible to do a lot more but only in very limited contexts, like news reports or sports broadcasts. In such contexts, syntactic cues like outdoor/indoor classifications have a pertinent semantic translation (anchor person/outdoor reports), but these tricks cannot be used in open contexts. The situation is similar in audio analysis. Cries and applause are good indications of interesting events in sport reports, but not in drama and films. On the other hand, audio can provide useful segmentation information (music or speech detection), speaker detection and recognition, key sound detection, or speech transcription capabilities. There may be several sources of interesting text, eg internal sources like closed captions, text included in the images, speech transcription or external sources such as program guides.
The Big Challenge: Mixing Media
If one considers a TV stream, it is apparent that images are not able to provide a lot of semantic information. The information that can be extracted from this medium includes segmentation information (shot detection, clustering of neighbouring shots), face detection and recognition capabilities, and text and logo detection. It is possible to do a lot more but only in very limited contexts, like news reports or sports broadcasts. In such contexts, syntactic cues like outdoor/indoor classifications have a pertinent semantic translation (anchor person/outdoor reports), but these tricks cannot be used in open contexts. The situation is similar in audio analysis. Cries and applause are good indications of interesting events in sport reports, but not in drama and films. On the other hand, audio can provide useful segmentation information (music or speech detection), speaker detection and recognition, key sound detection, or speech transcription capabilities. There may be several sources of interesting text, eg internal sources like closed captions, text included in the images, speech transcription or external sources such as program guides.
The Big Challenge: Mixing Media
The best way to describe a document is to make use of all the information it carries, and thus all the media it includes. If this statement seems obvious, it nevertheless implies many practical difficulties. The various media within a document are not synchronized temporally and spatially: the speaker is not always visible on the TV screen, the text related to an image may not be the closest thing to this image, audio and video temporal segmentations have different borders. To make things worse, audio and video do not work at the same rate (100Hz for audio, and 24, 25 or 30Hz for video). From a more general point of view, audio, video and text are studied using different backgrounds, which are not always easy to mix. Text requires natural language-processing tools that use data analysis or symbolic techniques, while image and audio are branches of signal processing and use a lot of statistical tools but in the continuous domain. Other domains like geometry are also used. Mixing all these tools in one integrated model is one facet of the problem.
Two common solutions to this problem exist in the literature. The first is to use the media in a sequential manner. One medium is used to detect some event, and another medium is then used to classify it. For example, audio can be used to find the most important events in a soccer game, while video is necessary to understand what kind of event it is. Such an approach does not require a theoretical framework, remains ad-hoc and is not so difficult to implement, and is a good starting point for many problems. The second uses Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to describe and recognize sequences of events. Markov models are of common use in sound and image processing and are very suited to identifying sequences of events. This is thanks to the Viterbi algorithm, which is based on a dynamic programming approach and provides a global optimal solution at a reasonable cost."[...]
Two common solutions to this problem exist in the literature. The first is to use the media in a sequential manner. One medium is used to detect some event, and another medium is then used to classify it. For example, audio can be used to find the most important events in a soccer game, while video is necessary to understand what kind of event it is. Such an approach does not require a theoretical framework, remains ad-hoc and is not so difficult to implement, and is a good starting point for many problems. The second uses Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to describe and recognize sequences of events. Markov models are of common use in sound and image processing and are very suited to identifying sequences of events. This is thanks to the Viterbi algorithm, which is based on a dynamic programming approach and provides a global optimal solution at a reasonable cost."[...]
2/07/2007
Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material?
Bibliographic reference
BESSER Howard, Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material? ( en ligne), UCLA School of Education & Information Studies, Accepted for publication in: The Moving Image, Fall 2001 written March 2001. Text accessible : http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Papers/amia-longevity.html
D.C Title : Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material?
D.C Creator : BESSER Howard
D.C Subject : digital imaging/digital preservation/film archives/moving image/preservation
D.C Description : this text explains the various "approaches to preserving digital materials and the author points to two paradigm shifts that will be likely for moving image preservation."
D.C Publisher : UCLA School of Education & Information Studies
D.C Date : 2001-03-01
D.C Type : Text
D.C format : html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Papers/amia-longevity.html
D.C Source : http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/
D.C Language : english
D.C Relation : http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Longevity/
D.C Coverage : -
D.C Rights : -
This text is an extract of the original text.
"Digital imaging and broadband networks are changing the moving image production and distribution process. In response to these changes, preservationists need to not only re-think some of their daily practices, but also need to engage in some fundamental paradigm shifts in how they view the preservation process. This article first describes some of the technological-induced changes in moving image production and distribution. It then discusses how those changes are altering viewer habits and expectations, and how those in turn affect how we will need to deliver and store moving image materials. Then the article explains the various approaches to preserving digital materials. Finally, the author points to two paradigm shifts that will be likely for moving image preservation: from preserving completed works as a whole to asset management, and from preserving an artifact to preserving disembodied content.
The advent of digital technology is leading to widespread changes in moving image production. These changes are reverberating through all aspects of moving images -- from distribution channels to user expectations. Though the timelines and extent of many of these changes are overly inflated, these changes are still likely to force a dramatic shift in the film preservation paradigm. Key shifts will cluster around 2 areas: the first -- a movement from saving finished works as a whole to an asset-management approach that deals both with component parts of works and with ancillary materials that relate to the work. The second -- learning how to shift from a mode focused on preserving an original negative or print as a physical artifact to one instead focused on saving a digital work that has no tangible embodiment.
Electronic works are encoded and usually stored on a physical storage devices such as a digital or analog tape. The most obvious impediment to electronic longevity is what this author has termed "the viewing problem" (Besser 2000a). While the default for physical artifacts is to persist (or deteriorate in slow increments), the default for electronic objects is to become inaccessible unless someone takes an immediate pro-active role to save them. Thus, we can discover and study 3,000 year old cave paintings and pottery (even though the pottery may be in shards that we need to piece together). But we're unable to even decipher any of the contents of an electronic file on an 8-inch floppy disk from only 20 years ago.
Digital technology and high speed networks are leading to sweeping changes throughout society, and moving image production and distribution are in no way immune to either the technological changes nor to the social expectations that these changes have induced.
Thus far, the most far reaching changes in production have been felt in the arena of special effects. For years most special effects have been done digitally. In the past the completed digital effects were transferred back onto film and intercut with the rest of a production, but as general moving image production itself becomes increasingly digital, this intermediary transfer to film will become far less common.
Small-budget independent productions are increasingly being shot and edited in digital form. According to director Mike Figgis, "there is clearly a technical revolution taking place. You can edit a film on a laptop, and there is the Internet, the streaming and downloading capabilities. These are the technical elements of the revolution" (Silverman 2000). He believes that this is leading to massive changes in the industry, "Like anything, once you open up a system to those outside the tight corps who control it, you get a massive increase in product. You also get a lot more talent exposed to the possibilities of creating something new. I'm really looking forward to that kind of chaos and the results. Ö But the real revolution will come when we challenge what I call our biblical way of making films -- the way we edit, shoot and score our films, which is very stagnant. I hope that young filmmakers will continue to say, 'I don't want to do it like that.' Hopefully, with the new technologies, nothing will stop them" (Silverman 2000).
It is only a matter of time before high-budget productions are entirely shot and edited in digital form. The most talked-about foray into this field is Star Wars Episode II, scheduled for a summer 2002 release. According to George Lucas, "The tests have convinced me that the familiar look and feel of motion picture film are fully present in this digital 24P system, and that the picture quality between the two is indistinguishable on the large screen" (Laguna 2000). According to Jim Morris, president of Lucas Digital, "The image quality of the new Sony camera and the Panavision lenses exceeded our expectations, and really validate the 24P system as a great new tool for moviemaking. All of our hopes about doing digital capture for the big screen have started to be realized" (Laguna 2000). Though most productions don't have the budget of Lucasfilm, it is only a matter of time before further demand for this technology drops the prices enough that digital production becomes commonplace for the studios.
Digital distribution coupled with digital theater projection is not nearly as imminent. The first such distribution was June 6, 2000 when Cisco Systems and Qwest Communications transmitted Fox's animated adventure movie Titan A.E. from Los Angeles to Atlanta. There have been other experiments since and more than 2 dozen theaters worldwide are equipped for just one of several standards for digital projection (Digital Light 2001) and some analysts contend that this number will jump to 500 by the time of the release of Star Wars: Episode II (Laguna 2000),but the process is far from mainstream. Competing standards (NIST 2001) and the large cost of installing digital projection equipment will slow the growth of this type of projection. It is also unclear whether the recent bankruptcy of major theater chains (Loews, United Artists) will slow or accelerate this type of distribution. When we eventually reach the point where digital distribution of commercial releases is widespread, economics will dictate that many of those works will never be converted to film or video. But this is unlikely to happen this decade.
Technological changes have altered users' expectations in a variety of ways. One can make the claim that the time-shifting features of the VCR helped instill a user mindset of viewing a video any time of day or night, and that this in turn created a market for video-on-demand and for cinema multiplexes that staggered starting times so that a particular new release might be seen every half hour.
The WorldWide Web is leading to further expectations of immediacy, as well as increased desires to see both massive amounts of related materials, as well to view material in fragmented ways. The act of "web-surfing" involves a user bouncing from one tangentially related fragment of information to another. Web surfers will seldom read an entire lengthy document online, but will skim part of a document, jump to something related to it and briefly read that, then jump to still another related fragment.
Recent enhanced DVDs appeal to the web-surfer mentality. Adding additional material about the making of the film, interviews with cast and crew, stills from the set, out-takes, and other ancillary materials all appeal to the web-surfer expectation of having a vast array of related primary-source material available. Over time we may very well see a demand for users to just view particular clips (Besser 1994) within a completed movie. And on the horizon is a whole new set of products that involve repurposed clips that we can only begin to imagine. We do know that today's primary multimedia delivery vehicles (both DVDs and the Web) are enhancing user expectations of extensive interactivity.
The digital impact mentioned here is likely to promote widespread changes within the moving image archival community. The increasing amount of material originating in digital form (some of which may never be transferred to film or video), the release of moving image products that contain a variety of ancillary material, the increased focus on fragments that need to be easily found and that sometimes may be repurposed and reused in multiple digital products -- all these elements imply significant changes in practices for moving image archives.
Technological developments have led to a large number of users no longer being satisfied with merely viewing end products. The high demand for additional content implies that some organization needs to supply the ancillary material that helps contextualize the finished product. Interviews, scripts, correspondence, sketches of sets, special effects, out-takes, and even moving images of initial casting calls are all valuable assets that surround a completed work. In the past, only a limited number of this type of material was saved, and often it was saved outside the moving image archive (in records management units, print archives, or special collection libraries). In the future, as new digital products and services emerge, there will be increasing pressure to minimize the dispersal of these assets. And moving image archivists who do not move quickly to widen their areas of responsibility may soon find themselves marginalized and subordinated to digital asset managers.
Archivists need to shift from a paradigm centered around saving a completed work to a new paradigm of saving a wide body of material that contextualizes a work. They also need to proactively seek out material (particularly moving image material) that may today be routinely be thrown away, but in the future may prove historically and/or commercially valuable. And they need to fulfill their traditional role of making sure that this material will persist over time.
Archivist involvement in the stages before the final cut implies new skillsets. Ingesting out-takes means developing new skills for organizing and managing this type of material. And doing a good job of managing special effects data implies understanding how to keep software files accessible over time.
Preserving special effects files may prove to be critically important. Several decades from now, a person looking back on a film like The Matrix will be far less interested in the film as a whole, and much more interested in the special effects and how they were done. Access to the special effects data files is likely to be valuable in understanding the historical development of moving image material, and the final cut on film reveals little of the ground-breaking processes involved.
As we have seen with both the Web and DVDs, there is increasing demand to view material in fragments. This type of fragmented use is a perfect complement to a post-modern era, where mass cultural elements are repeatedly re-contextualized. Promotional units within a studio, advertisers, production companies, and end users all periodically request to see and/or use a particular clip. This implies an increasing need for access at lower levels of granularity than a completed work. Moving image archivists need to prepare themselves for requests at this lower level of granularity, and would do well to follow some of the literature on methods for finding clips that do not rely upon human labor to catalog and index all the sub-parts of a work (Besser 2000b, Turner 1999, Goodrum 1998).
Archivists shifting to articulate an asset management approach can have strategic advantages. Some of the greatest influx of money for preservation in the past 20 years emerged when studios realized that there was an after-market for older films. Today we are living in an age where content repurposing is a driving economic force, and there is high expectation that any given media asset will be used in a variety of secondary multimedia products (from a clip on the Web, to incorporation within a video game, to a variety of DVDs and CD-ROMs, to even including clips of one film within a subsequent film [like The Limey]). Savvy administrators recognize that today's capital investment in adequately preserving and indexing media assets can pay off in long-term repeated use and re-use.
Still, the shift from managing completed works as a whole to managing a range of assets will be a profound one. And much of this shift requires background and knowledge about how to make digital files persist over time.
Information encoded and stored in digital form is fragile, but in very different ways than film stock. And though digital storage shares some characteristics with video storage, it is different from that as well. Below we will outline several special problems with preserving works in digital form, but first we will begin with the simplest aspect: the physical storage medium.
Film is a relatively long-lasting storage medium; barring a few exceptions (such as nitrate and Eastmancolor), film stored under proper conditions is stable and relatively long-lasting. Video storage, on the other hand, is unstable. Compared to film, videotapes have a relatively short shelf-life. The physical strata used to store videos decays relatively quickly, and video preservationists recognize that they need to periodically refresh the contents of a videotape by copying it onto another physical strata before the original deteriorates.
Digital storage, like video storage, requires periodic refreshing because the physical storage strata decays. Digital storage offers the illusion that preservation is not a problem because, unlike analog storage formats (such as film and video), a digital copy is ostensibly an exact replica of what was copied (whereas each copy of a film or video loses quality from that of the previous copy).
But though digital refreshing is itself near-lossless, works stored in digital form raise enormous other preservation problems. Chief among these is the problem of rapidly changing file formats -- files encoded in AVI or MPEG-1 or the various flavors of MPEG-2 can be periodically refreshed onto new physical strata, but it is highly unlikely that those formats will be viewable a decade from now. To understand this problem, we need only to turn to recent experience with much simpler word processing documents.
Word processing files (which are primarily ascii text, and thus much simpler formats than moving or even still images) are generally readable for half a dozen years after they are created. But even these word processing formats become inaccessible after a dozen years. Fifteen years ago Wordstar had (by far) the largest market penetration of any word processing program. But few people today can read any of the many millions of Wordstar files, even when those have been transferred onto contemporary computer hard disks. Even today's popular word processing applications (such as Microsoft Word) typically cannot view files created any further back than two previous versions of the same application (and sometimes these still lose important formatting). Image and multimedia formats, lacking an underlying basis of ascii text, pose much greater obsolescence problems, as each format chooses to code image, sound, or control (synching) representation in a different way.
Elsewhere this author has outlined other digital longevity problems such as "the translation problem," "the custodial problem," "the scrambling problem," and "the inter-relational problem." (Besser 2000a) He has also specifically applied these problems to electronic art (Besser forthcoming). All of these are relevant to digital preservation of moving image material. Particularly notable are "the custodial problem " and "the translation problem."
"The custodial problem" focuses upon who should be in charge of making something persist over time. Though we have developed traditions of which organizations (and who within a given organization) should take responsibility for preserving and maintaining various types of analog material (film, video, stills, correspondence, manuscripts, printed matter), no such traditions exist yet for digital material. As a result of this, much current material originating in digital form falls through the cracks, and is unlikely to be accessible to future generations.
For example, print archivists and special collections librarians who aggressively pursue print-based collection development in their particular specialty areas claim that it should be the responsibility of their organizationsí computing staff to pursue collection development of material originating in digital form. Yet those computing staff claim that it should be the subject-matter specialistsí responsibility to pursue collection development of digital materials. Meanwhile, much of this fragile material is not collected at all. Motion picture animation studio archives that have had established procedures for saving sketches and cells typically have no procedure in place for saving the digital files that are now replacing those sketches and cells.
Many moving image archivists feel they have neither the resources nor the technical knowledge to take charge of digital files of moving image materials. They have no money for file-servers and no idea of how to develop a long-term digital migration strategy. So digital moving image files end up either not being collected at all, or they become the responsibility of a department that has not been trained in archival and preservation practices (such as an information technology department or a digital asset management department).
Though at the present time resource allocation and technological skills may force the handling of digital material into another department, this is a dangerous long-term strategy. Archivists have well developed training and skills for handling moving image materials, and these skills are seldom found in staff from other departments. As costs for handling digital materials diminish and as strategies for long-term maintenance of digital files become better known, reasons for handling digital material separately will start to fade, and administrators will begin to realize that digital files of moving images have much more in common with film and video than with word-processing files and databases. At some point, the idea of handling digital moving image files in a separate department will sound as old-fashioned as establishing separate departments for 16mm , 35mm, and cinemascope film formats.
A number of experiments are underway to explore strategies for maintaining digital content over time. We still need to develop guidelines and best practices so that organizations and individuals who want to make the effort to try to make digital information persist will know how to do so.
A key function of archives is in ensuring the authenticity of a work. Print archives do this by amassing "evidence" and by maintaining a "chain of custody" (Council 2000). Film archives follow a variation of this through strategies like identifying the release negative. But when works are subject to repeated acts of "refreshing" as most approaches to digital longevity propose (see section "General Approaches to Digital Preservation"), these traditional ways of ensuring authenticity break down. Files repeatedly copied to new strata face the likelihood that changes will be introduced into these files, and we know little about how to control mutability across repeated "refreshments". This set of problems constitutes "the custodial problem."
Another important issue is how a work translated into new delivery devices changes meaning ("the translation problem"). While a lay person may occasionally confuse the two, people in the cultural community are clear that a photograph or poster of an oil painting is definitely different than the painting itself, and that a video of a motion picture film is not the same as the film. We clearly understand that a reproduction of a work (particularly changing into another format) may convey certain characteristics of that work, but is dramatically different than that work. The faithfulness of the photographic reproduction processes has raised questions about differences between originals and reproductions (Benjamin 1978, Besser 1997, Besser 1987), particularly of photographs. But those of us in the cultural community still recognize that a digitized photograph displayed on a screen is quite different from the paper-based photograph it was digitized from, or that a motion picture film converted and shown on a video screen is quite different from the original film.
Today, most electronic moving image works (both video and digital) are displayed on cathode-ray tube screens (CRTs). With the advent of liquid-crystal and other flat-panel display units, a decade from now CRT screens may be as rare as black and white monitors are today. And fifty years from now it is unlikely that one would be able to even find a working CRT screen. For some electronic works (certainly for artistic ones that concern themselves with the "look" of a CRT), attempting to display that work on a flat-panel screen would result in something that the creator would regard as poor reproduction of his or her work (perhaps akin to a photograph of an oil painting). For one of his pieces that opened in the new Tate Modern Museum, video artist Gary Hill told the museum that they can replace fading CRT screens with other similar-sized CRT screens, but he was adamant that replacing any of them with flat-panel screens would significantly alter the meaning of his work (Laurenson 2000).
Computer-based moving image works are often designed for particular screen dimensions. As screen resolutions get higher, these older works end up looking smaller and smaller on contemporary screens. (For example, a work created to fill a 640X480 screen would take up about 1/3 of a contemporary 1024X768 screen.) This raises issues of how best to display older digital works on newer digital screens. Though there are certainly parallels between this problem and those experienced by film archives wanting to display older films with proper lenses, in appropriate aspect ratios and original frame rates, digital works convey the illusion that one merely needs to play them and they will be displayed appropriately. With traditional media, the separation between the work (stored on film or video) and the display device is clear; with digital media the public often does not understand the separation between the stored work and the display device (particularly since the stored work may be repeatedly copied from device to device or even streamed)." [...]
BESSER Howard, Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material? ( en ligne), UCLA School of Education & Information Studies, Accepted for publication in: The Moving Image, Fall 2001 written March 2001. Text accessible : http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Papers/amia-longevity.html
D.C Title : Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material?
D.C Creator : BESSER Howard
D.C Subject : digital imaging/digital preservation/film archives/moving image/preservation
D.C Description : this text explains the various "approaches to preserving digital materials and the author points to two paradigm shifts that will be likely for moving image preservation."
D.C Publisher : UCLA School of Education & Information Studies
D.C Date : 2001-03-01
D.C Type : Text
D.C format : html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Papers/amia-longevity.html
D.C Source : http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/
D.C Language : english
D.C Relation : http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Longevity/
D.C Coverage : -
D.C Rights : -
This text is an extract of the original text.
Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material?
Accepted for publication in: The Moving Image, Fall 2001 written March 2001
Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information Studies http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/
Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information Studies http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/
"Digital imaging and broadband networks are changing the moving image production and distribution process. In response to these changes, preservationists need to not only re-think some of their daily practices, but also need to engage in some fundamental paradigm shifts in how they view the preservation process. This article first describes some of the technological-induced changes in moving image production and distribution. It then discusses how those changes are altering viewer habits and expectations, and how those in turn affect how we will need to deliver and store moving image materials. Then the article explains the various approaches to preserving digital materials. Finally, the author points to two paradigm shifts that will be likely for moving image preservation: from preserving completed works as a whole to asset management, and from preserving an artifact to preserving disembodied content.
Introduction
The advent of digital technology is leading to widespread changes in moving image production. These changes are reverberating through all aspects of moving images -- from distribution channels to user expectations. Though the timelines and extent of many of these changes are overly inflated, these changes are still likely to force a dramatic shift in the film preservation paradigm. Key shifts will cluster around 2 areas: the first -- a movement from saving finished works as a whole to an asset-management approach that deals both with component parts of works and with ancillary materials that relate to the work. The second -- learning how to shift from a mode focused on preserving an original negative or print as a physical artifact to one instead focused on saving a digital work that has no tangible embodiment.
Electronic works are encoded and usually stored on a physical storage devices such as a digital or analog tape. The most obvious impediment to electronic longevity is what this author has termed "the viewing problem" (Besser 2000a). While the default for physical artifacts is to persist (or deteriorate in slow increments), the default for electronic objects is to become inaccessible unless someone takes an immediate pro-active role to save them. Thus, we can discover and study 3,000 year old cave paintings and pottery (even though the pottery may be in shards that we need to piece together). But we're unable to even decipher any of the contents of an electronic file on an 8-inch floppy disk from only 20 years ago.
The problem of digital changes and user expectations
Digital technology and high speed networks are leading to sweeping changes throughout society, and moving image production and distribution are in no way immune to either the technological changes nor to the social expectations that these changes have induced.
Thus far, the most far reaching changes in production have been felt in the arena of special effects. For years most special effects have been done digitally. In the past the completed digital effects were transferred back onto film and intercut with the rest of a production, but as general moving image production itself becomes increasingly digital, this intermediary transfer to film will become far less common.
Small-budget independent productions are increasingly being shot and edited in digital form. According to director Mike Figgis, "there is clearly a technical revolution taking place. You can edit a film on a laptop, and there is the Internet, the streaming and downloading capabilities. These are the technical elements of the revolution" (Silverman 2000). He believes that this is leading to massive changes in the industry, "Like anything, once you open up a system to those outside the tight corps who control it, you get a massive increase in product. You also get a lot more talent exposed to the possibilities of creating something new. I'm really looking forward to that kind of chaos and the results. Ö But the real revolution will come when we challenge what I call our biblical way of making films -- the way we edit, shoot and score our films, which is very stagnant. I hope that young filmmakers will continue to say, 'I don't want to do it like that.' Hopefully, with the new technologies, nothing will stop them" (Silverman 2000).
It is only a matter of time before high-budget productions are entirely shot and edited in digital form. The most talked-about foray into this field is Star Wars Episode II, scheduled for a summer 2002 release. According to George Lucas, "The tests have convinced me that the familiar look and feel of motion picture film are fully present in this digital 24P system, and that the picture quality between the two is indistinguishable on the large screen" (Laguna 2000). According to Jim Morris, president of Lucas Digital, "The image quality of the new Sony camera and the Panavision lenses exceeded our expectations, and really validate the 24P system as a great new tool for moviemaking. All of our hopes about doing digital capture for the big screen have started to be realized" (Laguna 2000). Though most productions don't have the budget of Lucasfilm, it is only a matter of time before further demand for this technology drops the prices enough that digital production becomes commonplace for the studios.
Digital distribution coupled with digital theater projection is not nearly as imminent. The first such distribution was June 6, 2000 when Cisco Systems and Qwest Communications transmitted Fox's animated adventure movie Titan A.E. from Los Angeles to Atlanta. There have been other experiments since and more than 2 dozen theaters worldwide are equipped for just one of several standards for digital projection (Digital Light 2001) and some analysts contend that this number will jump to 500 by the time of the release of Star Wars: Episode II (Laguna 2000),but the process is far from mainstream. Competing standards (NIST 2001) and the large cost of installing digital projection equipment will slow the growth of this type of projection. It is also unclear whether the recent bankruptcy of major theater chains (Loews, United Artists) will slow or accelerate this type of distribution. When we eventually reach the point where digital distribution of commercial releases is widespread, economics will dictate that many of those works will never be converted to film or video. But this is unlikely to happen this decade.
Technological changes have altered users' expectations in a variety of ways. One can make the claim that the time-shifting features of the VCR helped instill a user mindset of viewing a video any time of day or night, and that this in turn created a market for video-on-demand and for cinema multiplexes that staggered starting times so that a particular new release might be seen every half hour.
The WorldWide Web is leading to further expectations of immediacy, as well as increased desires to see both massive amounts of related materials, as well to view material in fragmented ways. The act of "web-surfing" involves a user bouncing from one tangentially related fragment of information to another. Web surfers will seldom read an entire lengthy document online, but will skim part of a document, jump to something related to it and briefly read that, then jump to still another related fragment.
Recent enhanced DVDs appeal to the web-surfer mentality. Adding additional material about the making of the film, interviews with cast and crew, stills from the set, out-takes, and other ancillary materials all appeal to the web-surfer expectation of having a vast array of related primary-source material available. Over time we may very well see a demand for users to just view particular clips (Besser 1994) within a completed movie. And on the horizon is a whole new set of products that involve repurposed clips that we can only begin to imagine. We do know that today's primary multimedia delivery vehicles (both DVDs and the Web) are enhancing user expectations of extensive interactivity.
From saving completed works to managing assets
The digital impact mentioned here is likely to promote widespread changes within the moving image archival community. The increasing amount of material originating in digital form (some of which may never be transferred to film or video), the release of moving image products that contain a variety of ancillary material, the increased focus on fragments that need to be easily found and that sometimes may be repurposed and reused in multiple digital products -- all these elements imply significant changes in practices for moving image archives.
Technological developments have led to a large number of users no longer being satisfied with merely viewing end products. The high demand for additional content implies that some organization needs to supply the ancillary material that helps contextualize the finished product. Interviews, scripts, correspondence, sketches of sets, special effects, out-takes, and even moving images of initial casting calls are all valuable assets that surround a completed work. In the past, only a limited number of this type of material was saved, and often it was saved outside the moving image archive (in records management units, print archives, or special collection libraries). In the future, as new digital products and services emerge, there will be increasing pressure to minimize the dispersal of these assets. And moving image archivists who do not move quickly to widen their areas of responsibility may soon find themselves marginalized and subordinated to digital asset managers.
Archivists need to shift from a paradigm centered around saving a completed work to a new paradigm of saving a wide body of material that contextualizes a work. They also need to proactively seek out material (particularly moving image material) that may today be routinely be thrown away, but in the future may prove historically and/or commercially valuable. And they need to fulfill their traditional role of making sure that this material will persist over time.
Archivist involvement in the stages before the final cut implies new skillsets. Ingesting out-takes means developing new skills for organizing and managing this type of material. And doing a good job of managing special effects data implies understanding how to keep software files accessible over time.
Preserving special effects files may prove to be critically important. Several decades from now, a person looking back on a film like The Matrix will be far less interested in the film as a whole, and much more interested in the special effects and how they were done. Access to the special effects data files is likely to be valuable in understanding the historical development of moving image material, and the final cut on film reveals little of the ground-breaking processes involved.
As we have seen with both the Web and DVDs, there is increasing demand to view material in fragments. This type of fragmented use is a perfect complement to a post-modern era, where mass cultural elements are repeatedly re-contextualized. Promotional units within a studio, advertisers, production companies, and end users all periodically request to see and/or use a particular clip. This implies an increasing need for access at lower levels of granularity than a completed work. Moving image archivists need to prepare themselves for requests at this lower level of granularity, and would do well to follow some of the literature on methods for finding clips that do not rely upon human labor to catalog and index all the sub-parts of a work (Besser 2000b, Turner 1999, Goodrum 1998).
Archivists shifting to articulate an asset management approach can have strategic advantages. Some of the greatest influx of money for preservation in the past 20 years emerged when studios realized that there was an after-market for older films. Today we are living in an age where content repurposing is a driving economic force, and there is high expectation that any given media asset will be used in a variety of secondary multimedia products (from a clip on the Web, to incorporation within a video game, to a variety of DVDs and CD-ROMs, to even including clips of one film within a subsequent film [like The Limey]). Savvy administrators recognize that today's capital investment in adequately preserving and indexing media assets can pay off in long-term repeated use and re-use.
Still, the shift from managing completed works as a whole to managing a range of assets will be a profound one. And much of this shift requires background and knowledge about how to make digital files persist over time.
Problems with Preserving anything Digital
Information encoded and stored in digital form is fragile, but in very different ways than film stock. And though digital storage shares some characteristics with video storage, it is different from that as well. Below we will outline several special problems with preserving works in digital form, but first we will begin with the simplest aspect: the physical storage medium.
Film is a relatively long-lasting storage medium; barring a few exceptions (such as nitrate and Eastmancolor), film stored under proper conditions is stable and relatively long-lasting. Video storage, on the other hand, is unstable. Compared to film, videotapes have a relatively short shelf-life. The physical strata used to store videos decays relatively quickly, and video preservationists recognize that they need to periodically refresh the contents of a videotape by copying it onto another physical strata before the original deteriorates.
Digital storage, like video storage, requires periodic refreshing because the physical storage strata decays. Digital storage offers the illusion that preservation is not a problem because, unlike analog storage formats (such as film and video), a digital copy is ostensibly an exact replica of what was copied (whereas each copy of a film or video loses quality from that of the previous copy).
But though digital refreshing is itself near-lossless, works stored in digital form raise enormous other preservation problems. Chief among these is the problem of rapidly changing file formats -- files encoded in AVI or MPEG-1 or the various flavors of MPEG-2 can be periodically refreshed onto new physical strata, but it is highly unlikely that those formats will be viewable a decade from now. To understand this problem, we need only to turn to recent experience with much simpler word processing documents.
Word processing files (which are primarily ascii text, and thus much simpler formats than moving or even still images) are generally readable for half a dozen years after they are created. But even these word processing formats become inaccessible after a dozen years. Fifteen years ago Wordstar had (by far) the largest market penetration of any word processing program. But few people today can read any of the many millions of Wordstar files, even when those have been transferred onto contemporary computer hard disks. Even today's popular word processing applications (such as Microsoft Word) typically cannot view files created any further back than two previous versions of the same application (and sometimes these still lose important formatting). Image and multimedia formats, lacking an underlying basis of ascii text, pose much greater obsolescence problems, as each format chooses to code image, sound, or control (synching) representation in a different way.
Elsewhere this author has outlined other digital longevity problems such as "the translation problem," "the custodial problem," "the scrambling problem," and "the inter-relational problem." (Besser 2000a) He has also specifically applied these problems to electronic art (Besser forthcoming). All of these are relevant to digital preservation of moving image material. Particularly notable are "the custodial problem " and "the translation problem."
"The custodial problem" focuses upon who should be in charge of making something persist over time. Though we have developed traditions of which organizations (and who within a given organization) should take responsibility for preserving and maintaining various types of analog material (film, video, stills, correspondence, manuscripts, printed matter), no such traditions exist yet for digital material. As a result of this, much current material originating in digital form falls through the cracks, and is unlikely to be accessible to future generations.
For example, print archivists and special collections librarians who aggressively pursue print-based collection development in their particular specialty areas claim that it should be the responsibility of their organizationsí computing staff to pursue collection development of material originating in digital form. Yet those computing staff claim that it should be the subject-matter specialistsí responsibility to pursue collection development of digital materials. Meanwhile, much of this fragile material is not collected at all. Motion picture animation studio archives that have had established procedures for saving sketches and cells typically have no procedure in place for saving the digital files that are now replacing those sketches and cells.
Many moving image archivists feel they have neither the resources nor the technical knowledge to take charge of digital files of moving image materials. They have no money for file-servers and no idea of how to develop a long-term digital migration strategy. So digital moving image files end up either not being collected at all, or they become the responsibility of a department that has not been trained in archival and preservation practices (such as an information technology department or a digital asset management department).
Though at the present time resource allocation and technological skills may force the handling of digital material into another department, this is a dangerous long-term strategy. Archivists have well developed training and skills for handling moving image materials, and these skills are seldom found in staff from other departments. As costs for handling digital materials diminish and as strategies for long-term maintenance of digital files become better known, reasons for handling digital material separately will start to fade, and administrators will begin to realize that digital files of moving images have much more in common with film and video than with word-processing files and databases. At some point, the idea of handling digital moving image files in a separate department will sound as old-fashioned as establishing separate departments for 16mm , 35mm, and cinemascope film formats.
A number of experiments are underway to explore strategies for maintaining digital content over time. We still need to develop guidelines and best practices so that organizations and individuals who want to make the effort to try to make digital information persist will know how to do so.
A key function of archives is in ensuring the authenticity of a work. Print archives do this by amassing "evidence" and by maintaining a "chain of custody" (Council 2000). Film archives follow a variation of this through strategies like identifying the release negative. But when works are subject to repeated acts of "refreshing" as most approaches to digital longevity propose (see section "General Approaches to Digital Preservation"), these traditional ways of ensuring authenticity break down. Files repeatedly copied to new strata face the likelihood that changes will be introduced into these files, and we know little about how to control mutability across repeated "refreshments". This set of problems constitutes "the custodial problem."
Another important issue is how a work translated into new delivery devices changes meaning ("the translation problem"). While a lay person may occasionally confuse the two, people in the cultural community are clear that a photograph or poster of an oil painting is definitely different than the painting itself, and that a video of a motion picture film is not the same as the film. We clearly understand that a reproduction of a work (particularly changing into another format) may convey certain characteristics of that work, but is dramatically different than that work. The faithfulness of the photographic reproduction processes has raised questions about differences between originals and reproductions (Benjamin 1978, Besser 1997, Besser 1987), particularly of photographs. But those of us in the cultural community still recognize that a digitized photograph displayed on a screen is quite different from the paper-based photograph it was digitized from, or that a motion picture film converted and shown on a video screen is quite different from the original film.
Today, most electronic moving image works (both video and digital) are displayed on cathode-ray tube screens (CRTs). With the advent of liquid-crystal and other flat-panel display units, a decade from now CRT screens may be as rare as black and white monitors are today. And fifty years from now it is unlikely that one would be able to even find a working CRT screen. For some electronic works (certainly for artistic ones that concern themselves with the "look" of a CRT), attempting to display that work on a flat-panel screen would result in something that the creator would regard as poor reproduction of his or her work (perhaps akin to a photograph of an oil painting). For one of his pieces that opened in the new Tate Modern Museum, video artist Gary Hill told the museum that they can replace fading CRT screens with other similar-sized CRT screens, but he was adamant that replacing any of them with flat-panel screens would significantly alter the meaning of his work (Laurenson 2000).
Computer-based moving image works are often designed for particular screen dimensions. As screen resolutions get higher, these older works end up looking smaller and smaller on contemporary screens. (For example, a work created to fill a 640X480 screen would take up about 1/3 of a contemporary 1024X768 screen.) This raises issues of how best to display older digital works on newer digital screens. Though there are certainly parallels between this problem and those experienced by film archives wanting to display older films with proper lenses, in appropriate aspect ratios and original frame rates, digital works convey the illusion that one merely needs to play them and they will be displayed appropriately. With traditional media, the separation between the work (stored on film or video) and the display device is clear; with digital media the public often does not understand the separation between the stored work and the display device (particularly since the stored work may be repeatedly copied from device to device or even streamed)." [...]
2/01/2007
Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections
Bibliographic reference.
M. TURNER James, HUDON Michèle, DEVIN Yves, Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections (en ligne), CAIS 2000 (Canadian Association for Information Science) : Dimensions of a
global information science, Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference, 7 p.
Text accessible : http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/turner.htm
D.C Title : Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections
D.C Creator : TURNER M. James, HUDON Michèle, DEVIN Yves
D.C Subject : analysis/image collections/indexing/moving images/thesaurus
M. TURNER James, HUDON Michèle, DEVIN Yves, Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections (en ligne), CAIS 2000 (Canadian Association for Information Science) : Dimensions of a
global information science, Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference, 7 p.
Text accessible : http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/turner.htm
D.C Title : Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections
D.C Creator : TURNER M. James, HUDON Michèle, DEVIN Yves
D.C Subject : analysis/image collections/indexing/moving images/thesaurus
D.C Description : this text develops "common methods for shot-level and scene-level description of moving image documents, in order to foster discovery and retrieval of these resources worldwide."
D.C Publisher : CAIS 2000 (Canadian Association for Information Science) : Dimensions of a global information science, Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference. Editor: Angela Kublik
D.C Date : -
D.C Type : Text.
D.C Format : html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/turner.htm
D.C Source : http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/
D.C Language : English
D.C Relation : Actes du Colloque http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/index.htm
D.C Coverage : Canada
D.C Rights : -
This text is an extract of the original text.
Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections
James M. Turner, Michèle Hudon, and Yves Devin
Université de Montréal
"Abstract
In the rapidly-growing networked environment, it is critical to develop common methods for shot-level and scene-level description of moving image documents, in order to foster discovery and retrieval of these resources worldwide. In this paper, we describe the methodology used and report preliminary results obtained in a project designed to study existing tools for indexing moving images at the shot level. A number of institutions holding moving image collections were recruited as partners, and visits to them were then made to complete a questionnaire and gather other information during a structured interview. Preliminary results show that a variety of tools are used for indexing moving images, and that those institutions which have been able to invest in building good indexing tools over the years have seen the quality of those tools suffer in the wake of cutbacks in resources needed to maintain them.
D.C Publisher : CAIS 2000 (Canadian Association for Information Science) : Dimensions of a global information science, Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference. Editor: Angela Kublik
D.C Date : -
D.C Type : Text.
D.C Format : html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/turner.htm
D.C Source : http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/
D.C Language : English
D.C Relation : Actes du Colloque http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/index.htm
D.C Coverage : Canada
D.C Rights : -
This text is an extract of the original text.
Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections
James M. Turner, Michèle Hudon, and Yves Devin
Université de Montréal
"Abstract
In the rapidly-growing networked environment, it is critical to develop common methods for shot-level and scene-level description of moving image documents, in order to foster discovery and retrieval of these resources worldwide. In this paper, we describe the methodology used and report preliminary results obtained in a project designed to study existing tools for indexing moving images at the shot level. A number of institutions holding moving image collections were recruited as partners, and visits to them were then made to complete a questionnaire and gather other information during a structured interview. Preliminary results show that a variety of tools are used for indexing moving images, and that those institutions which have been able to invest in building good indexing tools over the years have seen the quality of those tools suffer in the wake of cutbacks in resources needed to maintain them.
1. Introduction
As we enter the new millenium, we observe that the organization of moving image collections is still characterized by ad hoc information systems. In the rapidly-growing networked environment, it is critical to develop common methods of shot-level and scene-level description, in order to foster retrieval and ultimately, to share resources worldwide. Researchers are aware of the problem, and two streams of research which complement each other address the issues involved. The first stream focuses on low-level access to images using methods from computer science and concentrates on statistical techniques for deriving characteristics of images that help promote retrieval. The second stream focuses on high-level access to images using methods from library and information science, and concentrates on the use of text to create information useful for retrieval, information which is especially valuable since it is not available from the images themselves.
The materials contained in film libraries, television libraries, and both film and television stockshot libraries is usually of a general nature. Thus managing the terminology used to index these collections involves descriptor lists and thesauri which are often constructed from scratch to reflect the particular local reality of the collection. For the researcher who looks in many collections to find material for use in film and video production, this means relying heavily on the resource persons who work with each collection and learning a number of different retrieval systems and indexing vocabularies.
It has been thought that a thesaurus for indexing everyday film and video materials would become unmanageable after a certain point because there are so many kinds of persons, objects and events to describe that it would eventually become impossible to manage the semantic relationships between them. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that term creation levels off once sufficient terminology for indexing most shots has been created. This paper describes a research project which belongs to the second or high-level research stream and which aims to study the characteristics of thesauri used for indexing moving image collections at the shot level.
What is the point at which term creation levels off? How many terms for describing moving images does a thesaurus need to contain in order to be considered complete enough to describe a general collection adequately? Are the terms similar from one thesaurus to the next, or are collections so particular that an individual tool is required for each collection? Would it be reasonable to try to construct a general thesaurus of everyday persons, objects and events that could be shared among moving image collection managers? These are the research questions our project addresses.
The general goal of the study is to reach an understanding of the organization of existing vocabulary-management tools for moving image collections. The specific objectives are:
to discover how many terms, excluding proper names, are contained in a controlled vocabulary for managing general moving images collections before term creation levels off;
to identify patterns among terms in the existing thesauri created for moving image collections;
to assess how patterns found can contribute to building a shared vocabulary useful for special collections containing general material.
2. Background
Moving image collections are largely found in movie and television production facilities, but they are also to be found in many other contexts and environments, such as corporate libraries, government agencies, documentation centres of research groups, holocaust museums, religious archives, and so on. Librarians have developed a great deal of expertise with managing print collections, but there are no generally- and widely-accepted tools available for organizing moving image collections. Visual resources librarians and researchers are working on problems related to art collections and to slide collections of works of art, but moving image and other non-art picture collections need urgent attention. This is due to the profusion of production and the consequent mushrooming of such collections in recent decades, including television news libraries and stockshot libraries. To be of help to their user base, these collections need to be catalogued and indexed at the shot level.
In the context of working groups around the planet trying to work out metadata standards for the management of all kinds of digital materials, high-level metadata standards for moving image databases have not been studied. We hope that the results of our study will make a contribution in helping establish a theoretical basis on which standards can be built." [...]
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