Archival & Preservation

Here is how this works in practice. Archive preservation for Hungarian shoots runs through the long-term-storage operations at Mafilm, Pannonia Post, and the Magyar Filmlaboratórium heritage post-lab. Plus national-archive partnership at the Magyar Filmtörténet Filmarchívum (Hungarian Film Archive, founded 1957) in Budapest. We set up the creation of LTO-9 preservation masters at 18 TB native per cartridge, written in LTFS so each tape mounts like a filesystem and person assets can be retrieved without re-spooling the whole archive. Picture is preserved as ProRes 4444 XQ and uncompressed DPX image sequences for negative-equivalent restoration masters.

Here is the short of it. Audio is preserved as Broadcast WAV at 48 kHz / 24-bit with full Dolby Atmos ADM BWF for immersive titles. And each asset is checksummed with MD5 and xxHash on write, verified on read, and re-verified annually as part of the upkeep schedule. Two copies are written at minimum. One geographically separated from the primary set. And a LTO migration plan is scheduled each five generations so content moves forward from LTO-9 to LTO-10 and beyond without becoming trapped on obsolete media.

Here is the breakdown. Beyond physical preservation, we manage the metadata and rights logs that makes an archive usable decades later. EBUCore and PBCore catalogue records, ARTISJUS, EJI, and MAHASZ music sign-ups under the Hungarian Copyright Act 1999, cue sheets, dialogue lists, and the chain-of-title forms needed for re-distribution. For TV networks, we manage MTVA and RTL Klub catalogue restoration. The Magyar Televízió, Magyar Rádió, and Duna TV public-TV networks heritage tapes alongside the commercial telenovela archives.

Here is what that looks like on the ground. And we set up with Pannonia Film Studio on the Vuk and Hungarian Folk Tales animation heritage that Pannonia preserved from the 1970s and 1980s. For features, we deposit a preservation set at the Magyar Filmtörténet Filmarchívum under the national-archive deposit programme. This secures the title for the long-term cultural record and makes it ready to future restoration efforts in 4K and beyond.