ABSTRACT
The commercial entertainment film industry’s successful wide-scale deployment of digital cinema exhibitions throughout the 2000s and 2010s effectively transformed analog motion picture film from an industry standard into a niche medium with only small-scale commercial and industrial support. This chapter provides a general understanding of film as an artistic medium, introducing aspects of care, identification, and inspection, as well as provides a brief overview of analog, digital, and hybrid duplication. Film projection and exhibition is covered from the perspective of presenting film-based art, both theatrically and in a gallery setting. Institutions are archiving both the raw scan and sound captures and the corrected versions (the DSMs) as uncompressed digital files. DPX files are most commonly used. Sound is archived as separate uncompressed audio files and synced to the picture in software. Quality control of analog and digital film requires careful and regular calibration of all devices used in the process of duplication and/or digitization and in playback.
