The Fox Movietone News Preservation Project: Operational and logistic aspects

The Fox Movietone Newsreel Library, consists of approximately 40+ million ft of 35 mm film, much of which is an nitrate base. To handle, catalog, and digitize this amount of material required the development of a number of procedures, techniques, and computer systems, as well as the creation of an entire infrastructure, Twentieth Century-Fox contracted with WRS Motion Picture and Video Laboratory in Pittsburgh, Pa., to operate this infrastructure. This paper describes some of the many problems that were solved as part of this massive undertaking.