Two years ago I would have agreed with you. But I bought a video projector and I've found it to be a very cinematic experience. It's quite mind-blowing and intense as there are no distractions. I loved cinemas 40 years ago as a kid. Unfortunately the "experience" isn't what it was and many people who go are quite anti-social.

Imax theatres use 70mm film Also they have archives just like this one.

(9 years later) I think the Godfather and Wizard of Oz restorations say otherwise, since we can scan things in 4k+ now, digital has allowed (for the most part) the preservationists/restorers the ability to find all the elements, scan them once in a very gentile machine, and put the film back into storage. But yes, film is king.

@@sgtpepper1138 There's certainly appeal to handling the film only "once" but as a side effect, they are digitally interpolating out dirt/scratches etc. instead of actually cleaning the film. This degrades the output product and in my opinion, endangers the film in the event of future attempts at restoration. The emulsion of the film is somewhat fragile and passing that dirt through the machine and having the film wind around it again can cause further damage. Another of the most important parts of traditional restoration is finding the best possible elements to use: which could be the original negative, the interpositive or even a combination number of other sources. That has also gone the wayside with digital restoration. "Just scan what you have, tweak it and call it good." Sometimes they tweak it too much too, crushing blacks or blowing out highlights, removing all the grain so everything looks plastic and fake, skewing the color is another big one. Both traditional and digital restoration have advantages and disadvantages, but price is the number one factor in this projects most of the time rather than what's best for the movie, sadly.

Then print the cleaned up image to polyester film for storage as well as the digital "negative"

@@TheGingerburger That's fairly common. Whether one does photochemical restoration or digital restoration, they almost always make a preservation copy on film and a replication copy, also on film.

@@stephenbaldassarre2289 Yes and it's still better to make prints directly from film rather than scanning the film and doing a film-out.

Because water mains aren't guaranteed to be functional 24/7.

Then again, cellulose acetate will slowly decay too.

I don't believe that. Digital is binary 101010000101010101010 It can be stored on many different formats. Even DVR with checksum. Dozens of methods... like tape, also with checks (like raid-5)

Archival video is saved on professional data tape which is certified stable for 20 years or more. With the introduction of cheap hard drive storage, more and more archives are saved on cloud storage.

" and any digital copy must be transferred to a new digital copy every five years or so because it's so unstable. " what?

@@Notelu Video and digital formats rapidly become obsolete, and the formats are frequently non-transferable. For serious archival film preservation, it involves scanning the original, doing correction and repairs in digital and then outputting to modern polyester film stock, which can be stored for about 200 years.

@@GBOAC cloud storage is NOT archival

They should digitise it and print it to polyester film for storage in an old mine because the digital copies need backing up every 5 years while polyester film will keep the image safe for atleast 400 years