Post by Syed Haitam Amjad Banoori

Now that I have more time on my hands, I have decided to continue my film restoration and cinema archival project for Pakistani cinema heritage and cultural preservation. As a background, I started this study back in 2016, and gained speed by designing a locally built scanner that uses a similar infrastructure as the Blackmagic Cintel scanner, however at build costs less than 1/75th of the factory build machines out there, with the same quality output. With a user friendly interface that needs close to no training to operate, and uses AI to handle the actual transfer to high quality uncompressed files that can than be cleaned, and encoded to create digital copies of these films, capable of being screened at any modern day cineplex, or online streaming service. The ultimate goal of this project is to create an institute or body that would operate at state level (as Pakistan has no state body that works to catalog or make any efforts to take on this titanic task), working on collecting, cataloging, and carrying out the actual technical process of transferring these old films to a modern digital format, and then creating a library for students, researchers and art centres to access. There are multiple factors to consider when talking about archiving, cataloging and digitising the Pakistani films from the 1950's till the late 2000's. A thorough research into the current conditions of these films has led to the conclusion that a lot of these films, due to weak piracy and copyright laws in Pakistan, and due to the shutdown of many of the original studios that held the copyrights to these movies, have now been lost to private collections that are fading away (literally), or eroding away due to vinegar syndrome in unregulated storeroom conditions. The only copies or prints we have access to are mainly available on YouTube, which are mainly old VHS transfers, which were probably made to distribute these films illegally. These versions are not even close to the real beauty of some of these films. And the cinemas that still run old prints of some of these films are being demolished every other day. National loss - heritage dying away with each passing year. There are many other factors, and findings that I have established to be true of the fact that this post might not be enough to try and explain the loss we have gone through, and are going through. This has so far been a passion project of mine, and from today onwards I open its doors to anyone, willing to help, contribute, or even share to others the news of what has to be done to save what we have. I am leaving space for anyone, in the comment section, to ask questions, or is willing to contribute to the execution of this mammoth yet deserving challenge. #Pakistan #film #archive #35mmfilm #restoration #heritageconservation #cinemaculture #lollywood #digitization #preservation