Peter White - Head of Technical Development, East Anglian Film Archive
About the East Anglian Film Archive
The East Anglian Film Archive was the first Regional Film Archive in England to be established as an educational resource and covers the counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. We share the building with the Norfolk Record Office but the archive has been owned and operated by the University of East Anglia since 1984 as a not-for-profit research and public access resource.
The film and video collections date from 1896 are mainly of non-fiction material such as advertising films, corporate videos, documentaries, family and personal films, home movies, local newsreels and regional television news, publicity films, educational material, travelogues, and films by civic bodies and regional organisations. The archive holds two significant television collections covering the output of Anglia Television and BBC East from their beginnings in 1959. The archive also stores a number of other high profile collections including the film library of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers, dating from 1932.
What does your job involve?
My job largely involves the process of transferring film to digital master files and storing them. When I first came to the archive there were lots of different projector-based telecines for transferring different gauges of film. The problem was that these systems were sprocket driven, caused some wear to the film, and were not of high quality.
I set to work building up telecine systems that would allow for the low cost conversion of film to digital video, that would produce pictures and sound of high enough quality that we could call them our ‘digital masters'. These could then be compressed to different formats for viewing by researchers and the general public. First we managed to secure a donation from Anglia TV of a telecine machine, then another one from a friend of the archive. Through our contacts we finally obtained a third from a Soho post production facility.
My job involved overseeing and putting together the equipment and hooking up the telecine machines to ordinary computers that would digitise the output. This PC based digitisation system allows us to transfer footage from film to digital at the same quality as a Digbeta system. We are now one of the technically best equipped regional archives in England.
My work now mainly involves operating, maintaining and upgrading the transfer and digitisation equipment as well as training staff and volunteers on how to use the system. Since the archive can't fund itself completely through footage sales to broadcasters or sales of compilation DVDs, we are also reliant on university subsidy, grants and project-based financing. This means that most of my team are on short-term contracts, so training is a regular feature of my work.
It's also my responsibility to manage the staff and resources and schedule work to ensure that we carry out both the funded project work and the ongoing work of digitising the archive. We also have to respond to external requests to digitise footage that come through the main office. These are typically requests from Anglia TV or BBC East for archive footage to be used in a news report that evening, or requests for individual films to be transferred to DVD.
It is also part of my job to teach telecine/digitisation for the MA in Film and Television Archiving that is run by the University of East Anglia in conjunction with the archive.
To read the full interview with Peter, you can download the PDF below:
Peter White Archive Case Study 2009
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