very inventive staff and very skilled staff. They were able to sit down and come up with scripts, essentially write code that would enable us to do the very specific things that we needed to do. Not everybody is that lucky. We're just really, really lucky that we have some amazing people on staff and that has enabled us to really up our game in the last five years or so in terms of what we deliver and how we are perceived in the international community.
Maynooth will be the long-term storage, with active material kept in Dublin.
We're still going to be based here and there are crew rooms down in Maynooth. What we will do is that it's a phased moving, because obviously we're going to need material here to digitise and material here to work on. So material that is the master colour vault, where everything is there for preservation and we would only really take it out if we want it to re-digitise it, then that can all go down to Maynooth. The climate control in maynooth is going to be much colder than here. It's going to be 4 degrees. You are not really going to want to be interacting with that material so that material can go down in a phased way. And then it's really not that difficult to move it because the audits have been done and we know where everything is. So it's just really changing the location on the database. Material that we need to interact with more often will stay here because we will be freeing up space here to take in new collections. We will be able to work on them here and do all of our processing and digitisation and cataloguing. Maynooth is the deep storage. It's colder, it's a purpose built building, and there's room to work. If somebody goes down there and they need to work out something we will have equipment down there so they don't have to bring it back up here, but essentially the idea is that it is our deep storage for our long-term master and some non-master
material. Because we have this digitisation plan now, that's what we do, we digitise. The version that you see up online on the IFI player is just our mezzanine or proxy file. We will have captured the raw file scan that has come out of the scanner. It's enormous and you couldn't do anything with it. It is essentially a negative, a digital negative. That is our master preservation file and we do that at 4K and that just goes into the equivalent of the vaults in Maynooth, into deep storage. We don't go near it unless we want to take it back out to make a smaller copy of it that we would then do restoration on or whatever else we want to do. We essentially have the master film in our really cold storage in Maynooth and the master digital file in our digital repository in deep storage. And it is the exhibition copies that are available. It's incredible amount of data. It's DPX so every frame is an individual file and then it's in a container that just plays it. So if you have one frame that's damaged it doesn't ruin your film. We have metadata for every single frame and we can tell if it has changed because we run Fixity on everything. If we move something or even if we don't and we run a validation check on it once a year if something has happened to even one pixel on one frame the computer will tell us but there is an error here that your digital fingerprint doesn't match and that something has happened. Which is brilliant because you couldn't do that with actual film or with actual people. The computer will just run the script, run the program, and tell you if anything has been altered. It can tell you that the digital fingerprint doesn't match and we can see that there is any issue here. If it is just one tiny pixel on one frame then the whole film isn't ruined because every single frame is an individual file. We found that when we were sending out work externally that you would send it to a facilities house and they couldn't understand why you would want the raw scan out of the scanner. Because that's not what they are used to for production or whatever. It's really unwieldy and it's really hard for them to move those files around. And then we wanted to run Fixity on them so that we could see if we are moving anything around if anything had changed. It's just a completely different setup. Facility houses have the tools and the ability, but they just have completely different workflows. They are used to getting things through quickly and they don't understand why you would want all of this extraneous information. But as preservationists we have to have it. That's the core of what we do. Storage is always an issue, you are always running out. And digital storage is becoming an issue now too.
The extra capacity that Maynooth affords the IFI means that they have future-proofed their ability to collect and store Irish film material.
There is a projection and the projection has been done on different possibilities different scenarios. When we first did our projections about 10 years ago they were based on film because we were still getting a lot of film in then. Then maybe about 5 years ago we did another projection based on the amount of film that we were getting in which was considerably less. And now we have another projection based on what we get in on film which is
28 CinÉireann / March 2018