AV Preservation by reto.ch

If it’s not awesome, we don’t do it.

A stencil-coloured print of
Création de la Serpentine by Segundo de Chomón,
Pathé Frères, France 1908
(Courtesy by Österreichisches Filmmuseum, the Austrian Film Museum)

We are a small, highly skilled moving image conservation and restoration facility based in Switzerland. Our team provides worldwide comprehensive services that encompass the whole range of audio-visual preservation, and offers you Swiss quality at a competitive price. We have a particular commitment to the dissemination of audio-visual conservation and restoration techniques, and we support open-source projects which we believe are beneficial for the archival community. We are actively engaged in a number of relevant national and international professional bodies. We are running the Swiss Film and Video Directory.

Our Services Include

• film digitisation for both preservation and access purposes
• moving image restoration
• audio-visual files and data transformation
• data migration with file format maintenance
• digital archiving service
• consultancy, training and research on audio-visual preservation issues

News

Training

• The RAWcooked Project, by Jérôme Martinez and Reto Kromer at the FIAT/IFTA World Conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on 22–25 October 2019 [en]
• Open-Source Tools and Resources at Tate in London, United Kingdom, on 30–31 October 2019 [en]
• Physical conservation treatments for digitizing film: re-plasticization, by Diana Little, Greg Wilsbacher, Reto Kromer and Tommy Aschenbach at the AMIA Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America, on 13–16 November 2019 [en]
• On the Materiality of Audio-Visual Heritage at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in Donostia (San Sebastián), Spain, on 26–29 November 2019 [en]
• Film Preservation and Restoration Workshop India in Hyderabad, India, on 8–15 December 2019 [en]
• Medienkunst: Technologie und Erhaltungsstrategien III at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien on 7–10 January 2020 in Vienna, Austria [de]
• Umgang mit audiovisuellen Dateien in der Praxis, one-day Memoriav workshop lead by Sophie Bunz and Reto Kromer on 20 January 2020 in Bern [de]
• Gestion des fichiers audiovisuels en pratique, one-day Memoriav workshop lead by Emilie Magnin and Reto Kromer on 22 January 2020 in Bern [fr]
• Migration von Film- und Videodaten, in collaboration with the Fotostiftung Graubünden, on 1^st of February 2020 in Chur [de]
• Open-Source Tools and Resources for Audio-Visual Archives at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in Donostia (San Sebastián), Spain, on 18–21 May 2020 [en]

Patronage of the Arts and the Sciences

• AMIA, the Association of Moving Image Archivists
• FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives
• IASA, the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives
• SEAPAVAA, the SouthEast Asia-Pacific AudioVisual Archive Association
• Radicals (= «Orphan Film Symposium») at Österreichisches Fimmuseum in Vienna, Austria, on 6–8 June 2019
• Initializing Initiatives (= «No Time to Wait 4») at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest, Hungary, on 4–6 December 2019
• «Film Preservation and Restoration Workshop India» in Hyderabad, India, on 8–15 December 2019

Publications

• Reto Kromer: «On the Bright Side of Data Migrations», in IASA Journal, n. 49 (December 2018)
• Reto Kromer: «Matroska and FFV1: One File Format for Film and Video Archiving?», in Journal of Film Preservation, n. 96 (April 2017)
• Agathe Jarczyk, Reto Kromer, Yves Niederhäuser and David Pfluger:
  • Digitale Archivierung von Film und Video: Grundlagen und Orientierung [de]
  • L’archivage numérique des films et vidéos: fondements et orientations [fr]
  • Digital Archiving of Film and Video: Principles and Guidance [en]
  Version 1.1, Memoriav, Bern 2017

Tweets

2019–10–19