NFAI set to digitalise its collection

The National Film Archive of India (NFAI) will soon start the process of digitising the celluloid films it looks after.Having zeroed in on a laboratory to whom the films will be outsourced, the NFAI is now awaiting the final approval from the ministry of information and broadcasting. “The process will begin sometime in December, as we are awaiting approval regarding a small technicality from the ministry,” Vijay Jadhav, director, NFAI, said. Around 100 films will be sent in lots of 20 for digitisation in the next one year. Black and white films, silent films and colour films in a highly deteriorated condition will be given priority.For starters, the NFAI has done celluloid restoration of all its archived films. Before the 1950s, all films were printed on cellulose nitrate format, which wasn’t long-lasting and led to a lot of wear-and-tear. During the 1970s, films archived at the NFAI were converted to the safety base of acetate cellulose.“The films are on this safety base now, because it is protective and doesn’t catch fire easily,” Jadhav said. He added that ideally, to make the archived films stay in durable condition, complete restoration on the celluloid format is a better idea.This procedure involves manual cleaning, followed by scanning, colour gradation, frame-by-frame correction, storage on the reliable LTO4 digital format and finally printing the restored film on fresh raw stock. “This costs around Rs 12 lakh per film. That’s why we are not going for it. Currently, digitisation of our archived films seems to be the next best option,” Jadhav said.The selected laboratory will send back LTO4 tapes of the digitised films to NFAI. “Currently, digitisation of films on the LTO4 format is a viable option. But doing away with the celluloid format cannot be the best solution for the time being, unless we have a format that will last for a long, long time. Given the state-of-the-art technology that changes by the day, such a format is still a big question mark,” Kiran Dhiwar, film preservation officer at the NFAI, said.Budget at hand for the planned digitisation of these 100-odd films process is around Rs 1.5 crore. Jadhav intends to request for a budget of Rs 100 crore for the next five years from the I& B ministry.Recently, a workshop on film preservation and restoration was held for film technicians in Kolkata. The NFAI had participated in the same. Another area of preserving the current lot of films is duplication or transfer of old negatives onto fresh raw stock without having it undergo scanning or in-depth correction. For quite some time now, the NFAI has been outsourcing the work of transfer of black and white films to three laboratories in Mumbai. For example, the landmark Marathi film, ‘Shantata Court Chalu Ahe’ was transferred on fresh black and white stock once it came back from one of these laboratories. Even the laboratory at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) has done some film duplication work for the NFAI.