Swedish Film Institute Chooses Front Porch Digital

Front Porch
Digital, Inc. announced
that the Swedish Film Institute (SFI) is using
a DIVArchive V7.0 CSM system to store digital masters of all films it currently
subsidizes, as well as its legacy archive of approximately 8,000 Swedish films
going back to 1897.

DIVArchive V7.0’s open Archive eXchange Format (AXF) technology helps SFI
accommodate any storage format and protect against changes in the formatting
landscape.

"When
Swedish cinemas eliminated 35mm film to go all digital this year, it meant we
started archiving digital masters rather than prints, so we had to buy a system
that could enable us to store and manage large amounts of data," said
Lars Karlsson, IT project manager at SFI. "DIVArchive is built for just that purpose by a company with many years
of experience in dealing with the issue of storing digital data for film, which
is different from other types of digital data."

SFI, Sweden’s national film archive charged
with preserving the country’s film heritage, chose DIVArchive V7.0 not only
because of Front Porch Digital’s expertise in the area, but also
because it incorporates AXF technology. Using the non-proprietary,
media-independent storage format ensures that SFI will be able to access and
store any type of video data, no matter what the structure or physical carrier.

"The
open-source AXF storage format protects our investment because we won’t be
relying on a single vendor or storage method in the future," said
Karlsson. "We will always be able to
retrieve the data regardless of what happens to the company that created the
format or to the storage platform itself."

SFI will employ a SAN disk, which will act
as a source and destination for the archiving. The DIVArchive system will take
legacy files from the SAN disk, convert them to AXF format, move them to a tape
library, and copy them to a second tape library – which will be a backup for
the first.

The company will begin building this workflow as soon as the SAN
disk is in place. The plan is to link DIVArchive with the SFI film database and
all its metadata. Anyone who works at SFI can access the database, and several
of them can add information to it. There is also a Web version with searchable
content for anyone with Web access.

"SFI
is one of the first film archives to include digital archiving – rather than
physical tape – in its core business," said Rino Petricola, SVP and MD
of Front Porch Digital International. "By
using DIVArchive V7.0 and open-source AXF as a long-term preservation format,
SFI is poised to handle any file format that exists now or in the future."

DIVArchive is Front Porch Digital’s CSM
system, the software layer that connects storage to video applications and
equipment. The latest version, DIVArchive V7.0, supports complex DPX packages
and enables video-like operations on film-carried content, making the solution
desirable for film production and postproduction applications. The system implements the new open-source AXF technology to protect, preserve, and facilitate the exchange of
content among storage systems, today and for the future. It has
the ability to interconnect every element of operations from archive to
production to transmission.