Color-separated paper film prints

Cellulose nitrate, the original material used for motion picture films, had a couple problems: it would self-decompose chemically, often unpredictably, and it was exceptionally flammable being chemically very close to modern gunpowder.

Cellulose acetate, a replacement first used around 1910 and improved somewhat in succeeding decades, is comparatively non-flammable. Unfortunately, like cellulose nitrate it still has problems with chemical breakdown.

Polyester filmstocks are probably pretty good, but they've not been around long enough to establish their archival properties.

For truely long-lived film archiving of modern films, therefore, I would suggest applying the concept of color separations to a very old technology: printing motion picture films onto (non-wood-based) photo paper.

Although paper-roll films cannot be projected conveniently as can transparent films, archived movies generally shouldn't be projected anyway--their use should be to generate viewing copies of movies (whether in film or digital format) which can then be viewed without risk of damage. And scanning paper roll films should work just fine for that.

To avoid issues of color dye stability, I would suggest printing films onto paper rolls as color separations--one frame each red, green, blue, etc. throughout the film. For recording multi-channel sound, a roll of paper wider than the 35mm film could be used; since the linear speed would be three times that of standard 35mm projection (for which optical sound has historically been deemed adequate) audio fidelity for even analog soundtracks should be adequate.

Although storing films in this manner would require somewhat more space than storing them in a composite-color format, this approach should have a few advantages over current archival methods:

-1- Because the films would be printed using silver-halide chemistry without the use of dyes, the emulsion should be exceptionally stable. Hundred-year old films printed this way survive today with minimal degredation, so there's no reason not to expect another hundred.

-2- Use of color separations would ensure that if any part of the film does fade for some reason, the different color components could be extracted easily and accurately.

-3- The format would be reasonably self-apparent with the media. One of the major problems with many types of modern storage--especially with video--is that as formats become obsolete there's no good way to get at the old material. One can't very well look at a videotape and see what needs to be done to read it. By contrast, someone examining a motion picture stored as described could easily determine what needed to be done. The recurring patern every three frames would clearly suggest a color separation, and the wavy lines would be clearly recognizable as soundtracks. Although some experimentation might be required to determine what order the color components belong in, and which soundtrack corresponds to which channel, it should not be hard to figure such things out.