Engineers developing technology to restore Hollywood movie classics.

Great works of literature have existed for hundreds, even thousands of years. But half the American films produced before the 1950s have already disappeared.

Film is not an eternal medium; with time, it begins to decay until its components eventually break down, literally, to dust. At the nation's largest film archives, officials with tight budgets face daily choices about which movies to copy onto new film and which to leave to the ravages of time.

As archivists struggle to prevent these pieces of American cultural history from fading away, engineers are developing computer technology that might eventually be capable of fully preserving the nation's vast stockpile of feature films. And while the kind of storage capacity needed for long-term preservation isn't yet available, specialists are already using digital technology to restore some of the greatest Hollywood classics.

At the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the second largest collection of American feature films in the United States, curators open hundreds of cans of film every day to check for signs of decay. With only a limited preservation budget, officials have to prioritize which films to save based on rarity, the condition of the original print, and subjective judgments about the value of the film as a historic document, said archive spokeswoman Cornelia Emerson. Those that don't make the cut are simply lost forever.

The methods used at the UCLA archive for preserving films have changed little in the last 30 years. Officials simply copy the movies onto new film, which is then stored in a special climate-controlled facility in Hollywood. Although research has proven that film shelf-life can be enhanced by up to a century by storing it in cold, dry environments, the main collection at the UCLA archive is not climate-controlled; only the newly preserved copies get special treatment.

Quality problems

Copying, as anyone with a photocopier or a tape player knows, has its drawbacks. Continually making copies of copies degrades quality slightly with every reproduction.

Ultimately, computers might come to the rescue of future historians as a tool for film preservation. Photographic information can be digitized, altered and stored on computers, then reconverted back to film. The advantage of this technology is that each successive film copy of this stored information is identical, with no drop-off in quality; the disadvantage is that the process is immensely time-consuming and expensive, and the amount of digital information in a single film is overwhelming. Until developers come up with new storage media or learn to condense digital information, experts agree that digitization is an unfeasible method of film preservation.

There is no digital film preservation going on right now, due to its high cost, confirmed Michael Friend, director of the film archives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. "Film is still by far the best medium for long-term preservation that we have, despite its problems," he said.

To date, the only film that has ever been completely digitized is Wait Disney's animated classic "Snow White." All 120,000 frames of the feature were scanned into work stations at Cinesite Digital Film Center in Hollywood, where dust and other defects were erased, pixel by pixel, and faded colors were enhanced. The film contained so much digital information, an estimated 3 terabytes of data, that enough digital tapes to fill a large moving truck were required to store it all. Workers then reconverted the data back to film.

Cinesite's portion of the project took 16 weeks, and while Disney officials decline to reveal the cost of the "Snow White" project, entertainment industry analysts place the price tag at about $3 million.

At those prices, digitizing of entire films would seem cost-prohibitive for all but the most valuable movies, the main reason digital preservation is currently unfeasible. The UCLA archives, with an annual preservation budget of less than $1 million, could not afford to digitize even a single film each year.

Prices may decline

Experts say improvements in technology will eventually bring the cost of digital preservation down to manageable levels.

"In five or 10 years, I think the price will go down to where (digital preservation) is affordable," said Jerry Pooler, restoration supervisor with Cinesite. "I'm sure that stuff like 'Gone With the Wind' and 'Ben Hur' will be good candidates for it."

Even in the three years since the restoration of "Snow White," high-tech developers have made tremendous improvements in digital technology, Pooler said.

Cinesite is currently working on another complete digitization of a classic film - Pooler declined to reveal the name of the film or the studio funding its restoration. But the results so far been impressive, he said.

"Right now, the quality of the work we're doing (on the undisclosed project) is probably 10 times better than the work we did on 'Snow White,'" Pooler said.

Nonetheless, even Pooler admitted that, for now, the main function of digital technology is film restoration, not preservation. Damaged sequences of classic films can be restored on the computer by copying digital information near a scratch or tear and electronically "pasting it" over the damaged area. Cinesite performed this kind of patchwork repair on some of the title sequences of the classic film musical "My Fair Lady," Pooler said.

At Sony Pictures Entertainment, which has invested heavily in a digital facility for film restoration and special effects, classics such as "On the Waterfront" and "Bridge on the River Kwai" have been subjected to digital repair work.

As the technology improves and its use increases, it may well attract the same kind of criticism leveled against film colorization. After all, restorers have to rely largely on guess-work when attempting to match the new, digitized version of a film with its original version.