The Archive Room is a video podcast about the people, practice, and power of film and TV archives. Hosted by Dominic Dare and Sandra Coelho, co-founders of LOLA Clips, each episode goes inside the world of archival footage with the practitioners who live it — archive producers, rights specialists, preservation experts, documentary researchers, and the custodians of some of the most significant film and television collections on the planet. From Hollywood studio vaults to national broadcasters, from music rights to digital preservation, The Archive Room covers how archival footage is found, cleared, restored, licensed, and brought back to life in the documentaries and productions you watch today. Every guest is a working professional with decades of direct experience. No theory. No commentary. Just the real story behind the footage. Dominic Dare (00:05) Welcome to the Archive Room. Today's guest is Jo Griffin. She is co-founder and director of digital and restoration at our three store studios, now part of the UV&S family. She leads restoration and digitalization workflows for a diverse and high profile client base. With over 25 years experience in the industry, Jo has worked with renowned organizations such as BFI, Wimbledon. Nestle, Warner Brothers, Disney, Jim Henson, Sony Pictures, among many, many, others. She combines a deep technical expertise with a strong sense of historical responsibility, bringing new life into fragile film and tech formats. Her work ensures that culturally significant content is not only preserved, but made accessible for future generations. Dominic Dare (00:51) So Jo welcome to the archive room. Thanks ever so much for joining us. tell us a little bit about where you're at at the moment and what your company, UV&S, does so we can kind of place you. Jo (00:55) Thanks for having me. So, Restore Studios is going to be our 10th birthday next year and last year UV&S, who are called Underground Vaults and Storage, bought us. So, the whole reason behind that was we wanted to expand into the States. We wanted to expand in the UK and we wanted to expand into the States and it felt like the perfect partnership because, you know, for me it's like a kid in a sweet shop. They've got you know, all these vaults over here, they've got a salt mine in Kansas, all with these cans, you know, lot of it untouched. So for me, it's like, let's let's join forces and start working out what what stuff we can kind of discover in in these mines and help clients start to monetize their stuff. You know, it's sitting there. They're paying for storage every month. Let's let's monetize it. So that's the plan. So we've moved into a brand new premises earlier this year in Stratford. to have doubled our floor space, we've bought some brand new scanners, so we're ready and raring to go in that expansion. And then we've built our mini facility in Wichita as well. So we've got a couple of film scanners in there. And the plan is there to stop clients having to ship their stuff, because obviously it's in the middle of America. It has to be shipped to the East Coast or the West Coast. So we're wanting to prevent the loss of damage or loss in travel. and we'll scan it in-house there and then we can send the files off to be worked on wherever and in that way we're saving people shipping costs all sorts. Dominic Dare (02:27) So, let's just kind of think about for people that might not understand this world particularly well. Part of your business obviously is to store and house video tape and film and we'll get onto how that works. A large part of it also is transferring stuff. So you go from an original tape or film item and then you transfer it. So could you just talk a little bit about what kind of tape and film formats you deal with? What are the harder ones and what... How does that look when a tape lands on your desk? What happens to it? Jo (02:56) Yeah, so as you know, there's many different tape formats. So we can handle anything from kind of VHS to HD cams SR, which was like the last tape format going and everything in between. So U-Mat's one inches betas as digis DV cam mini DV DVC pro. We've we've just bought a D3 deck, which are like gold dust. So we've just got one of those, which I'm sure is very popular. Once I tell people they can use that and then your HD cams and HD cams R's. Dominic Dare (03:22) haha Jo (03:25) So that's the kind of, that is like a simpler job because that you encode it to an SD pro res generally. And then that's done. That's all, know, sometimes you can do restoration on it, but you're limited with how much restoration you can do on tape compared to film. Dominic Dare (03:40) Right, and so physically that format lands and you have a huge rack. Is it in one room? Like, do you do it in multi areas? And whose job is it to QC it? Who are the people involved in that? Jo (03:54) Yeah, so within that encoding department, we've got in the actual encoding room, we've got the analog decks because you can't remote analog decks. So they have to be right by the person who's capturing them. But then things like Digis and HD cams and SRs, they can be remoted. So they sit in the machine room in the cool aircon area. And then, yeah, we've got a bit of software that we use called Metas which allows us to capture four streams at once so he can set off all the different decks and monitor all four streams as they're going through. Dominic Dare (04:23) what do they monitor for? Jo (04:24) Just tape drop out, any kind of damage to the tape, just so you can let the client know when we send them the file, they know exactly what they're getting. Dominic Dare (04:33) And you won't really know that right until you're actually running the tape, is that correct? Jo (04:37) No, that's the thing. You just don't know. Same with film, you know, until you stick it on the bench or on the scanner, you never know the full condition really until it's in there. You can obviously there's signs that which you can look at if there's like mold on the outside of a tape cassette. You know that that's going to be problematic. But yeah, tape drop out and stuff, you're not going to know until it's in a deck. Dominic Dare (04:48) Right. Sandra (04:48) Can you? Dominic Dare (04:55) Mm-hmm. Sandra (04:59) Can you tell Jo that if you get a tape, a project in, when they bring the material in, would you be able to tell just by looking at the film? Jo (05:09) What about to see what? Sandra (05:10) if there's damage or not, or if there's... Jo (05:13) Yeah, mean, with you physically can see it. if you're... The first thing we do when we get any film is we put it on the bench and we'll spool through it. And as they're spooling through it, that's when they'll see if there's any sprocket damage, if there's any tears within the film, or if there's any splices that are not strong enough. know, the tape that's used for splices, it degrades over time and becomes weaker so that the joints can snap. So we'll replace any old joints with... with brand new joints. So our aim is to, when it leaves our film prep department, it's kind of as strong as it's ever been and as clean as it's ever been. Because we'll put it through the film cleaner once we've repaired the film as well. Dominic Dare (05:51) What format land on your guys desk and you just go, God, one of the most difficult ones. Jo (05:57) To be fair, there's not really any. There's some really weird and wacky tape formats and we don't have decks for those. There's some real specialists out there that do that. So I will send people that way rather than get involved in that. Mainly it's the small gauge stuff because with the guy's hands, where obviously their hands are quite big, it's bit fiddly for them to manage sometimes. But no, we love it all. Bring it on. Dominic Dare (06:24) And so like, you know, in terms of, so, you know, the clients will have the material with you, you do these transfers for all these formats, and then you deliver out, you know, digitally or however you do that. You know, a side of the world that I'm certainly interested in, I think a lot of people listening might be, is restoration. And I'm really keen to understand right from the very beginning, either on a project you've worked on or just in general terms. You know, what happens, know, who does it go through? How does it start? And what are the individual processes that that goes to, to ultimately being something that you see these wonderful before and afters of a filter restored. So if you could talk us through that. Jo (07:02) Yeah, so I'll talk about a particular project that we worked on earlier this year, which is the Singing Detective. So it's the 40th anniversary, it was in May, so the BBC approached us at the start of the year and said that they wanted to do a big full 4K restoration on it, celebrate the anniversary and re-release it on TV and stuff. Dominic Dare (07:21) And that's with Michael Gambon from 1980s, right, I think. 85. Wow, yeah, of course. Jo (07:23) Yeah, 85, 40 years. So for me, my worry was, know, the best copy that existed was an SD kind of soft telecine transfer back in the 80s. It was, is the makeup going to hold up? Because, know, we're suddenly going from like soft SD to really clear 4K. And it was like, is the skin going to look like bad? But I mean, it looks amazing. mean, it shows you how great the makeup team are at the BBC because it looks fantastic. So, yeah, so basically we had a conversation with the BBC about these reels. They wanted to go from the 16 mil CRI and the separate magnetic sound. So we came in, the team assessed it on the bench, like I said, you know, checking for any damage splices, anything that needs to be honest, it was in pretty good nick. Dominic Dare (07:52) Perfect. Jo (08:13) So there wasn't much work to be done with that. Dominic Dare (08:15) So just real quickly, that's what, is that a film? That's one piece of film in a can plus sound separately? Like how did that come, yeah, okay. Jo (08:22) Yeah, yeah. So there were six episodes. So there was six cans of Mag and then I think there was two reels of film per episode, so 12 cans of film. Dominic Dare (08:32) And what's mag for people that don't know? Jo (08:34) So MAG is magnetic sound. So it's purely sound. Dominic Dare (08:37) Okay. on its own reel. Jo (08:39) Yeah. Yeah. Yes, so then the film was all cleaned and then in theory in the best condition it can be because for us the more dirt we can remove during the film cleaning process is going to save us hours in the restoration process. So then we popped it on our laser graphics scan station scanner and 4K scanned the film. So what that does is it takes an individual photo of every single frame of film. So by the end of each episode, you've got thousands and thousands of frames. And size-wise, you're looking at about four terabytes of data per hour of material. So quite quickly, that starts to rack up on your storage. Dominic Dare (09:17) Wow. Jo (09:21) And then you have a separate machine called an MB51, which is a separate MAG follower. And that's where you would transfer the MAG onto a WAV file. And then in the grade, you can then marry up the pictures and the audio together to ensure they're in sync. Sandra (09:35) Can I ask Jo, there are different types of restoration that you can do. Can you just go through what the basic ones are to what the full, depending on budgets, I guess if you've got a small budget, you get a different type. Jo (09:46) Well, this is always the thing. Yeah, it's like how long is a piece of string because, you know, a restoration can be anything. So take say take a feature film. It could be anything from three days to a month to restore it, depending on what level of restoration they're asking for and what their budget is. You know, the software that we use is called Phoenix made by Filmworks. And there's about 34 different tools within that. And across those 34 tools, can use them depending on whether you've shot on film, tape or digitally. So you can go through and pick what tools are going to work. obviously with us, we generally restore stuff from film. We'll use the film tools and the main ones that we use are stability because as film degrades over time, it just gets a bit unstable. Sometimes it's unstable in the camera itself. Scratch. it'll pick up scratches has been used over the time. Auto dirt to get rid of any black and white dirt within it. Flicker, especially on black and white stuff. And then we've got the manual pass as well. And then there's a few other odds and so tools that we use, but they're the kind of main ones that we'll use. So again, it depends whether the client wants to go through every single one of those processes or if they've only got a small budget, we'll generally just do like an auto dirt pass on it. just to get rid of the worst of the dirt. So it's not too distracting for the viewer. Dominic Dare (11:06) And so just to backtrack through that sequence, so we've got, we've taken the film and the mag, we've put it in to be cleaned. We've then put it into Phoenix, right? Is that kind of the next step into that? No. Jo (11:17) No, so we've prepped it, we've cleaned it, we've scanned it, it then goes into the grade. So that's where we'll go into the grade. And then, you know, we had a reference of how they wanted the colour for it to look, because obviously it had been done before. So the colourist is responsible for kind of grading and getting the overall look of the film. So they'll adjust the colours, the brightness, contrast, saturation of the film. Dominic Dare (11:20) Right. Okay. Yeah. Jo (11:44) And obviously having a reference helps because, you the main thing is you're wanting to get the skin tones correct. And that kind of helps you. But obviously an issue for us is if something's been scanned elsewhere and not on a great scanner or the levels are not as flat, you know, when you scan something, you want everything as flat as possible. So... nothing's clipped, nothing's crushed. So you've got the full range to work with when you get in the grade. So if someone scans something not great on a not great scanner, you're kind of working with one hand tied behind your back because there's only so far you can push it in the grade. So obviously when we grade it, we know we're giving our colorist literally everything he could need to grade it to get the best grade he can out. Dominic Dare (12:32) What was and what do the colorists actually do? Jo (12:35) So they'll literally adjust because it's a flat scan, they'll adjust the kind of red, green, blue channels, adjust the black and white levels to bring the color to how it should have looked at the time when it was shot. Dominic Dare (12:47) and that's where that reference still is hugely important for you to understand what the client wants. understand. And then, you know, how much is AI creeping into this workflow or is it at all? Because presumably that's a helpful thing or is it not there yet? Jo (12:59) I mean, we don't use any AI based tools at the minute. think we use is all algorithm based. I know there are AI tools coming in, but I mean, everything that I've seen so far is not that great, to be honest. It pushes everything too far. So I don't know if you've seen kind of stuff that's been colorized from like the like the early 1900s. It's just so smooth. There's like not an ounce of grain in it. So I still think there's a lot of work to be done on AI tools. I'm hoping at some point. Jo (13:27) they will help us certainly in the restoration and help kind of speed up that process. But we're always going to need an eye, a person's eye when it comes to grade or restoration because everything's so opinion based with how something looks. When you scan something flat, the director at the time was like, I want that scene to be really cold. how is AI going to know that's supposed to be a really cold scene? You could be a very warm scene. You can change that grade to warm or cold. So you're going to need an eye to always on these things at the end. Dominic Dare (14:00) Yeah. Sandra (14:03) Sorry. Dominic Dare (14:02) So we've got it through, it's done through the grade. Where are we going next with it? What's the final part of the journey? Jo (14:09) So then we're onto restoration. So that's when generally you'll start with a stability pass. You've got different options when you're doing that. You can either select like an object within the image for it to focus on and it will steady the image right there. Or you can in effect like pin down the four corners of the image and different ones work in different ways depending on what's within the image itself. Dominic Dare (14:11) Mm-hmm. Sandra (14:16) you Jo (14:34) So sometimes you just have to try a few different options to see what works best. And then, yeah, we'll do an auto dirt pass. So that's where the tool will look at the image and it's looking at pixels. It's not looking at anything that's in the image, it's all pixel based. So if something's there for say only a frame and it's only a couple of pixels big, it thinks it's dirt and it will remove it. So the tool shows up, it... Dominic Dare (14:39) Mm-hmm. Jo (15:01) converts the image to black and white and then it shows us everything in red of what it's going to remove from the image. Then we'll go through frame by frame after that process and just check to make sure it hasn't removed anything that it shouldn't have removed because obviously it's looking at pixels and not images. There's a few things which are a nightmare to restore. So one is sport because they love to remove the ball because it's moving quickly across the screen. Dominic Dare (15:08) okay. Jo (15:29) Birds wings flapping they like to disappear. Rain, snow, fire. If someone's got like sparkly earrings or a sparkly dress on or say swords in a sword fight, the shimmering that will get removed as well. If you're in a kung fu fight and the hands are moving very quickly you can lose the edges of the hands. So the most important part pass is going through and undoing anything that the shouldn't have removed. Obviously that sounds like a lot of work but the tool itself is so effective it generally will remove about 80% of the dirt which is far quicker than doing it all manually. So it's training people to have that eye to see what is actually dirt and it's removing it and what should be going back in. Dominic Dare (15:56) I say. Yeah, Fascinating. that, I guess that that's an algorithmic piece of software, right? Effectively. Yeah, I see. Jo (16:20) Yes, there's a very clever man in Sweden who writes all the algorithms for these tools. Yeah, he's amazing. Dominic Dare (16:25) I really. that's so cool. Brilliant. So super. So that's a really clear picture, actually. So that really helps us understand a bit more. And then so you've got it through that pass. You've done the dirt. Where do we where do we go next? Jo (16:39) So then in theory, at the end of it, you've now got your graded and restored final master. So at that point, we'll render out to say a ProRes to send to the client for their approval. So we'll send it over to them. They might say, can you tweak the grade here? Can you do a bit of extra work on this shot? And then once that's all signed off, it can be ready to be delivered. So again, multiple different ways you can deliver. Dominic Dare (16:50) Uh-huh. Jo (17:03) You know, the feature films that we work on with Arrow, when we deliver a 4K HDR ProRes, they're over a terabyte for just the ProRes feature. But we will still file deliver those, whereas other clients will happily take it on a drive or back it up to an LTO tape for kind of preservation purposes as well. Dominic Dare (17:23) Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's really interesting. mean, if you're thinking about the preservation. So let's kind of take it to another area now. So let's talk about the storage and how that kind of works. know, what are the ideal conditions? Perhaps you can talk a little bit about that. You know, what what's there any differentials between types of format and where they should be stored? Jo (17:47) Yeah, I mean, again, it always comes down to budget again. So at UV&S in the UK, we've got three different types of storage you can have. So we've got fridge storage, which is like six degrees up to ambient storage. So the fridge, generally you would want to put like your original legs in there to protect it because film will degrade over time and keeping it cold will slow down that degradation. But then in the mine, we've got it's perfect storage conditions because it's an ambient temperature and consistent humidity. So there's no fluctuations ever in the temperature. And that's a big issue. know, people store their home movies in the loft, which is like the worst place to store them because it's freezing in the winter and it's boiling in the summer. And that's what makes the degradation worse in film because it starts to get brittle and can snap. So having having that consistent temperature and humidity in the mine is perfect conditions for long-term storage. Dominic Dare (18:45) We're gonna probably hopefully run a still of this mine or some video if we can. mean a mine is kind of a little bit of an understatement. Tell us a little bit about what this place is and where it's located. Jo (18:58) Yeah, so the mine is located in Hutchinson in Kansas. It is something like 650 feet below ground, which I think is something like four times the size of the Statue of Liberty or something. You have to go in a lift for like two and a half minutes in complete darkness to get down there. It's so vast. You drive around in golf buggies. Yeah, and it's amazing. know, they store everything down there, paper archives as well as tape and film archives. Dominic Dare (19:26) And these were former salt mines, is that correct? Jo (19:28) Well, they're still working salt mines. Yeah, they're still mining salt and you can see it traveling out the building in another part of the mine, yeah. Dominic Dare (19:30) No way. That's insane. What an amazing place. So I guess like two questions really in terms of digital versus physical preservation. You know, at what point, so I find, you know, interested and I have some old film and solid tape, you know, is there any time that you can foresee where those assets can be got rid of? You know, are we at a point in time now where once you've done a scan of this sort, that is future-proofed? And is there a difference between tape and film for that kind of decision making? Jo (20:08) Yeah, so with film, no, never for our way, because all right, there's only so many pixels within film. So, you know, we're building these 13K scanners, but you wouldn't really scan anything at 13K. You'd use the sensor, but scan it as a six or eight K and finish in four, because, you know, the natural resolution of 35 is around four K anyway. But with technology improving, you just don't know what's around the corner. So you don't want to throw anything away with tape. It's slightly different because generally, you know, there's multiple copies of tape. So do you really need to pay to keep 10 copies of something? Probably not. But again, you know. That that is that, you know, technology is improving in that area as well. Personally, I wouldn't, you know, for the for the cheap cost of storing something, I'd say keep it just in case. the thing is, know, tapes obviously degrade quicker than film. So if they're not in any good condition, then there isn't any point in keeping them. But if they're in good condition, I would still store them. Dominic Dare (21:11) And then, know, is there, in terms of kind of the ethical decision, I mean, is it always your client's decision is what gets stored? I mean, do you ever kind of say to a client, look, you know, this thing's going to degrade too far, we're not going to keep it. You know, is there pressure, is there an issue there or is it always driven by the client's decision as to what's preserved? Jo (21:30) Yeah, always the client's decision, but you know, we did a project a couple of months ago and some of the tape that came over was in such bad condition and I was like, you're never going to be able to get a transfer off of this. So that we did help them destroy that because it was, there was no point in keeping it. But it's always the client's decision. Dominic Dare (21:49) Yeah, always a hard decision. But this is fascinating stuff. I think we're gonna turn to Sandra for a second to fire out a few more questions. mean, there's anything else you want, Sandra, that you wanted to throw in or any questions that are outstanding? Sandra (22:03) So from a novices point of view, explain to me what the different file formats it can come out in. So IE you've got LTO, you've got all these algorithms, these different words. What do they mean? A wrapped file, what does all that mean? Jo (22:20) God, I can't quite go into that detail. But basically, you know, for a long time now, everyone's generally been using on the archive side, an Apple ProRes file as their final deliverable. But, you know, people are starting to move into open source file formats because, you know, in theory, Apple could decide they're not supporting ProRes files anymore. I don't think that will happen, but in theory they could. So people have been working very hard over the last few years to develop kind of open source formats where anyone can access the code. So that those file types can always be carried on being developed. So we're starting to move into FFE1 and MKV files, which will certainly start to appear more over the next few years. The BFI and other national archives are going down that route. So then people will follow once they know the BFI are happy with the file formats. wait for someone else to test it first and then we'll follow. Dominic Dare (23:16) Yeah, yeah. Sandra (23:17) And I presume America would have completely different ones that are okay to the UK. Jo (23:24) Yeah, to be honest, I don't know if they're going down the same route. I'll actually have to ask them about that. Yeah, it's a good question. Sandra (23:31) Okay, so you now ready? The Archive Lightning Round. It's short questions, quick answers. It's basically saying the first thing that comes into your head. Okay, analog or digital, which secretly has your heart? Weirdest thing you've ever found in an archive box? Jo (23:35) Okay. Okay. and a little. condoms. Literally two weeks ago. Very old condoms as well. Very old. Dominic Dare (24:01) Degradated. Unrestorable. Jo (24:03) I will. you Sandra (24:07) clip that gave you goosebumps once restored. Jo (24:10) Also, I was the first to get that question. There was a scene in the complete and utter history of Britain that we restored for ITV and a shot was totally destroyed and Steph spent three days restoring this one shot and it was amazing what she did with it. Sandra (24:27) If Reels could talk, what would they say? Jo (24:29) Let me out! Sandra (24:30) Most underrated part of archive work. Jo (24:33) The restoration, I don't think people realise the amount of hours that we spend restoring something and then they watch it in 90 minutes and go, that's all right. Sandra (24:41) Biggest misconception about digital restoration. Jo (24:45) It's all done with AI. Sandra (24:45) And finally, what's the one archive project you would take to a desert island? Jo (24:51) Do you what I got asked the other day? Like what film would I love to be restored that's not been restored yet? being a massive Goldie Horne fan, I would say any of her movies. So I picked Private Benjamin. So I'll say that. Sandra (25:04) Well done! Dominic Dare (25:06) that's fantastic. That was really fun. Listen, Jo, we know you're incredibly busy, so finishing off some projects at the moment this week. So we're gonna let you go and say a huge thank you to Jo Griffin of UV&S and we'll be, yeah, absolute pleasure. And we'll look forward to catching up with you again, I'm sure very soon. Jo (25:21) Thank you. Perfect, thanks guys.