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12 Million Historic Photos Scanned to Web
Snosty writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting that British Pathe, a cinema news service dating to the 19th century, has scanned one image for every second of their 3500 hours of 35mm film. That makes for 12 million images covering everything from the Boer War to the Beatles available on their web site!"
A use for the Storage Tank perhaps
I took a couple of courses on film archiving and preservation back when I was a film school student, so I guess I have a couple of things to point out here.
1) One would think they want to profit from licensing the hi-res images for commercial use. I don't really know if it's okay to release important images from important early films that geeks of my kind value and cherish for commercial iconographic use just per se. I understand BP's need to be financially compensated for their trouble, but at least do it for money.
and, 2) Proper preservation must be taken in the original form. 35mm films should be transcribed to 35mm so they can be watched in original form in the future. I think nitrate must be sacrificed (even though they say it has a different glow on projeciton) and acetate used instead, but the importance of original media in film archiving is not to be understated.
This is a subject that really touches a nerve down with my deepest feelings, so, um, forgive me if I got cocky or arrogant or anything.
At one picture per second, that comes out to 12.6 million pictures for the whole alphabet. My guess is that the 3500 hr estimate was a bit hight which would bring the actually number closed to 12 mil even for the whole thing.
Oh, you were kidding!...nevermind
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..