Preserving digital cinema: a new center in Spain offers support

A new company born in Spain, Preservation 35 (P35), is beginning to offer services to ensure that the films and series we watch today can also be viewed tomorrow. Paradoxically, it aims to achieve this by taking a step back to «take a step forward»: it offers production companies, archives, film libraries, and institutions an integrated system of different technologies that restore and transfer digital or analog files to polyester photographic media that guarantee «the preservation and quality of digital memory reproduction forever».

This return to the physical has been advocated by representatives of P35 at the San Sebastián Festival: Fernando Labrada, the company’s president, and Juan Carlos Lossada, director of the commercial area. Both have explained that the company’s greatest achievement is integrating the different technologies from three international companies (PIQL, Kodak, and Vintage Cloud) into a single service and location: the Comprehensive Preservation Center (CIPA), located in the Technological Park of Andalusia, which is responsible for restoring and transferring audiovisual archives to these media that are claimed to be «indestructible».

The most crucial part of the process is the PIQL technology developed by the aforementioned Norwegian company. They are the ones who, along with Kodak, have created these 35mm polyester films, as well as specialized machines for converting digital to film media and others capable of reading these media. Along with the real-time restoration technology from Vintage Cloud, which automatically restores the film during playback, P35 offers all these technologies and a Security Vault in the same place, the CIPA, where they can be stored in optimal conditions. It’s the only center of its kind in Europe, and it’s located in Málaga.

Preservation, more value than conservation

During the presentation of the P35 project, which also extends its solutions to all kinds of documents and files beyond cinematography, Lossada and Labrada have emphasized the concept of preservation over conservation when discussing audiovisual heritage. «Conserving very well is useless if preservation isn’t possible», Labrada asserted, using the example of a well-preserved film in an archive that cannot be reproduced anywhere after a few years due to the obsolescence of digital formats, a danger that UNESCO has already warned about several times.

Labrada emphasized the importance of creating an «ethics of care» regarding audiovisual heritage, meaning raising awareness about the importance of giving long life to film archives in order to convince companies, institutions, and organizations of their cultural and economic significance, encouraging them to invest resources in this matter. «If there had been an ethics of care, perhaps the fire at the Cinemateca of San Paolo could have been prevented», said the company’s president. The fire in July of last year resulted in the loss of 4,000 tons of materials from the history of Latin American and global cinema.

The company’s president, who directed RTVE’s Documentation Center in the 1980s, has called on «all authorities to participate» in the film material preservation process, which is currently in crisis due to the emergence of digital archives and the threats of an increasingly hostile environmental context. Both Labrada and Lossada have stated that they have been in discussions with various specialized institutions for some time. Among them is the Spanish Film Archive: «We have made significant progress with the Film Archive, a joint working agenda», Lossada told Cine con Ñ.

A small cost in a film’s budget

In addition to cultural and heritage reasons, Lossada has also stated that there are economic motives to invest in this avenue of physical preservation. With the current high volume of production, especially from the streaming sector, a longer lifespan for films or series will allow for more commercial opportunities. «We want P35 to be an ally to safely and effectively activate all kinds of audiovisual collections and assets that can find powerful distribution and circulation outlets in this way», explained the commercial director in a statement to the press.

According to its representatives, creating this polyester support for the future would cost around 13,000 euros per film, a fixed figure they consider quite small when included in the overall budget of a medium-sized film in Europe, which can be around 2 million euros. Less than 1% of the total, which would, of course, be even smaller for a high-budget film.