France-based DigiFilm Corporation is developing a “sustainable” and “cheaper” data archive with its Archiflix film system.
DigiFilm’s co-founder, Antoine Simkine, also started 1990s French film production company Duboi, which was involved in hundreds of French films and international blockbusters, from Delicatessen and Joan of Arc to The Muppet Christmas Carol and Alien Resurrection.
In those days, the film industry had to move from analog to digital for archiving its prized assets, with a number of expensive PCs and storage boxes being used by the studios.
Simkine said a typical US film studio spends about $20,000 a year on digital preservation of each title. Over 50 years, this amounts to $1 million. Technology migrations and manipulations required will “inevitably lead to errors and losses.”
“If a film has not been exploited for some time, financially driven decisions will lead to discontinuing maintenance, which will result in the work disappearing for good,” added Simkine.
While cinema films are indeed an archive target for the ArRCHIFLIX technology, Simkine told this week’s IT Press Tour in Valletta, Malta: “Cinema is only 5 percent of what needs to be stored on this media. And DigiFilm offers customized solutions for providers serving content owners. We’re not a service provider ourselves, we are creating business opportunities for other people.”
Archiflix is based on the recording of visual digital codes on film, and is an alternative to traditional archiving methods of microforms, which are analog reproductions of source files. Any microform restoration results in a raster file and not the source file, so no metadata is preserved. That’s not good if a film company wants to reproduce titles in different ways, and benefit from residual opportunities.
Simkine claims that data stored on Archiflix film will “last 100 years” and the company has commissioned ongoing research tests to simulate the aging of its film through light and heat to illustrate the lifetime of the data stored on it.
“Providing you have the readers/sensors to access the data, and you always will considering how the film industry evolves, you will be able to read your data in 100 years’ time,” Simkine said.
DigiFilm has developed a machine with storage capacities that can be accessed on-premises or through the cloud as-a-service. The commercial launch of the service is expected next year, with the firm having already built a “commercial prototype” machine for storing the film. It has a manufacturing partner that makes the machines on demand.
The cost of using the system through service providers, which lease the machine, is based on a combination of usage and film data volume.
The type of partners Archiflix is seeking include film labs, service providers to national armed forces, architects, transport companies, space agencies, weather organizations, geospatial firms, oil and gas companies, mineral extraction companies, the public sector, and other verticals that use data that has to be accessed long-term.
Investment bank BPI France is an investor in DigiFilm. The company is valued at €1.8 million by Simkine, who says the firm has just received €200,000 in additional second-round seed funding, “ahead of a Series A round.”
Bootnote
The Arctic Archive World’s Piql film is claimed to have a 1,000-year life.
