Swedish Film Institute Deploys Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive V7.0

Front Porch Digital 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.

“When Swedish cinemas eliminated 35mm film to go all digital this year, it meant we started archiving digital masters rather than prints, so we had to buy a system that could enable us to store and manage large amounts of data,” said Lars Karlsson, IT project manager at SFI. “DIVArchive is built for just that purpose by a company with many years of experience in dealing with the issue of storing digital data for film, which is different from other types of digital data.”

SFI, Sweden’s national film archive charged with preserving the country’s film heritage, chose DIVArchive V7.0 not only because of Front Porch Digital’s extensive expertise in the area, but also 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.

“The open-source AXF storage format protects our investment because we won’t be relying on a single vendor or storage method in the future,” said Karlsson. “We will always be able to retrieve the data regardless of what happens to the company that created the format or to the storage platform itself.”

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.

“SFI is one of the first film archives to include digital archiving — rather than physical tape — in its core business,” said Rino Petricola, senior vice president and managing director of Front Porch Digital International. “By using DIVArchive V7.0 and open-source AXF as a long-term preservation format, SFI is poised to handle any file format that exists now or in the future.”

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.