Swedish Film Institute picks Front Porch Digital's DIVArchive V7.0 for film preservation

Front Porch Digital has 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.

SFI, Sweden's national film archive charged with preserving the country's film heritage, chose DIVArchive V7.0 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.

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.

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 is the first of its kind to implement the new open-source AXF technology developed by Front Porch Digital to protect, preserve, and facilitate the exchange of content among storage systems, today and for the future. DIVArchive V7.0 has the unique ability to interconnect every element of operations from archive to production to transmission.

More information about these and other Front Porch Digital products is available at fpdigital.com.