Project Details
- Date: 2019, 2022
- Client: NFI, Hungary
- Partners: Silicon Computers and Future Trading
- Location: Budapest, HU
As the central organization of the sector, the National Film Institute focuses on the entire film, television, and moving image industry of Hungary. The main goal of its diverse activities is the comprehensive development of the sector and ensuring its long-term competitiveness in the region.
Established in 1957, NFI-FA is responsible for safeguarding and enabling access to the film heritage of Hungary as the only public collection for audio-visual content. The Archive has the most extensive film collection in Hungary and houses approximately 72,000 film titles, and about 360,000 inventory items.
Challenge:
For a Film Archive, the most important task today is to preserve the film collection, by digitising in the highest quality, at an optimal speed and maximum used capacity.
Restoration and transfer of films from flammable nitrate stock to safety film materials has always been a priority for NFI-FA, and in 2017, a major film digitisation and restoration programme was launched, restoring 120 feature films to 2K or 4K quality. Today, the aim is to digitise the Archive’s entire film stock. Backed by annual government funding, NFI-FA is now able to fully restore a larger number of films than before, at 4K, thus preserving this heritage and making the content available to wider audiences. The NFI request was 4k/5K realtime scanning, and also working subsequently with digital (scanned) versions in realtime from a central repository. HW performance, especially of central storage, was critical.
Solution:
Film scanning technology with a range of high quality
In 2019, we delivered two film scanners,MWA Spinner S and DFT Scanity WetGate, Elements SAN storage and Quadriga Film Quality Control Software. In 2022, together with our partners at Future Trading, we delivered an upgrade of the existing SAN storage - an extension of the NvME SAN - Elements BOLT.
At NFI-FA, 90% of their film collection can be classed as “difficult” in terms of the scan and restoration tasks. Our solution provides a controlled, high speed film ingest, and addresses a number of other key archive film issues.
We are looking forward to the time when these historical remastered / restored films can be shared by all.
“The addition of the WetGate to the Scanity has vastly improve our processes. Base scratches can be ‘removed’ during the scanning process, which means the restoration process is faster and more efficient than before.”
Benedek Kaban, Technical and Development Manager at NFI-FA