Question: the blogpost mentions archivists needing 16mm projectors. Now I assume they would use these projectors to archive 16mm film but how / why?

Why not scan film in instead of.. projecting it on a wall and filming that to archive?

At least thats what I’m extracting from the blog with my fair but limited knowledge, if someone could enlighten me it’d be greatly appreciated!

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gwbas1c 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Why not scan film in instead of.. projecting it on a wall and filming that to archive?

It's a different experience: When viewing film, the picture flickers and shakes. Film grain is substantially different than pixels.

As much as I enjoy modern digital formats, it's important to appreciate the goal of preserving viewing film.

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sublinear 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If it's to be archived it's going to end up encoded as pixels.

I think the question was more about the capture of fine detail. A scanner will digitize much more image detail than any capture of the projector output. Although, reading the article it seems an emphasis was placed on color accuracy. I'm not sure if a scanner is necessarily as good at that.

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kmoser 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you're archiving motion picture film, there are no pixels, only film stock. The archive process may include digitizing, but even then you still have to deal with the original film media, which is the primary task of a film archivist.

	▲	nebula8804 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When you play it back, you don't get the same look of a physical medium rapidly moving through a mechanical machine. You just don't.

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cameron_b 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are some scanners good at that but not at the scope of a 2 hour film.

The other factor is that a projector is the first part of allowing others to view films, and getting the light source nailed down could open the doors to making new prints of those films - a different path to archiving.

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DidYaWipe 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He asked why a projector is relevant for archiving, not viewing.

The only answer I can imagine is for viewing newly-discovered film to determine its content and condition, in order to decide whether it's worth scanning.

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charcircuit 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>the picture flickers and shakes

This can be emulated with a post processing effect.

>Film grain is substantially different than pixels.

The grain can be recorded at a high enough resolution that the human eye will be unable to tell the difference when it's being projected.

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sublinear 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't know much either, and this is all way before my time, but I'm going to guess that getting sound off the film (if it has it) has got to be one of the reasons.

The other being that just operating a suitable projector as intended is the simplest and most accurate way regarding timing compared to finding or writing software to handle scans. I'd think they'd want to do both.

	▲	DidYaWipe 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The sound retrieval is a good point. I don't think of sound on old movies.