The Swedish Film Institute made the decision in 2012 that all its co-productions would be made digitally rather than on 35mm film. As part of this, it needed a digital archive system, and has implemented the DivArchive from Front Porch Digital. One of the features of the latest version of DivArchive, 7.0, is its support for the emerging AXF archive file format. AXF is intended as an open, non-proprietary format which will support any type of video data, no matter what the structure or physical carrier. “When Swedish cinemas eliminated 35mm film 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 of the Swedish Film Institute. “DivArchive is built for just that purpose by a company with many years of experience in the storing of digital data for film, which is different from other types of digital data. “The open-source AXF storage format protects our investment because we will not be relying on a single vendor or storage method in the future,” Karlsson added. “We will always be able to retrieve the data regardless of what happens to the company that created the format or to the storage format itself.” The plan is to link DivArchive – and its disk and tape sub-systems – with the SFI film database and all its metadata. Anyone working at the institute will then be able to access the database, either directly or through a web interface.
