Moving Beyond Inertia
Manufacturing of Archive Film Scanners

We have organised an intensive Summer School about designing and building archive film scanners from scratch. It will take place during one week, from 3 to 7 August 2026, be hosted by our company AV Preservation by reto.ch and held mainly at the Park Innovaare in Villigen, Switzerland.

From a Dream …

We started building our own scanners in 2014, because we were not happy with the commercial scanners available on the market. Reto was inspired by Hermann Wetter (†), Vladimir Malogajski (†), Tommy Aschenbach, Jeff Kreines, Jim Lindner and Claudio Weidmann, as well as by his work colleagues Joshua Levy and Michal Cohen. The main concepts were first time synthetised in the presentation Reto gave at the Restoration of Film Heritage symposium on 12 April 2017 at the Slovenska Kinoteka (the Slovenian Cinematheque) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He was requested to repeat the presentation on 30 June 2017 at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. And many of the scanners currently available on the market use our ideas and/or patents.

We strongly believe that the digitisation of analogue film collections needs to be speeded up! But we often hear from film archives and institutions holding film reels that they cannot afford to buy a commercial film scanner nor to commission a service provider to do the work. We offered two visits on the sidelines of the FIAF Congress 2019 in Lausanne, where we also shared our experience in building archive film scanners. We also dedicated a Reports from the Field session to this very topic. It was Reto’s deepest wish to propose to the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in Donostia (San Sebastián), Spain, a one-week module on scanner construction for the academic year 2026–2027. Many students have contacted him about this goal over the years. Unfortunately the school is no longer interested of having him as a teacher, allegedly for financial reasons. As he had already begun to prepare this practical and experimental course, it became the very reason for this Summer School.

…  to Its Realisation

The aim of the Summer School is to provide an intensive one-week training course for experienced scanner technicians and operators with good knowledge of mechanics and electronics. Our team is complemented by several specialists in order to provide teaching and experimenting in a pleasant learning environment. The Summer School will supplement professional instruction with social events and local sight-seeing excursions. We have worked out a detailed course programme that includes unbelievable lectures, unforgettable hands-on sessions and spectacular demonstrations of innovative and cutting-edge digital technologies.

There are six student positions available. If there are more applicants than available places, a selection will have to be made; if there are fewer applicants than available places, the Summer School must be cancelled.

The fee for the one-week course is CHF 5 000 and covers training, accommodation (six nights from 2 to 8 August 2026), meals and course-related visits. Furthermore, participants are allowed to take home all prototypes they build themselves, with the exception of high-end cameras, but a high-quality industrial camera with lens and cables is included (3840 × 2748 pixel, catalogue value of CHF 663). Travel costs to and from Switzerland are not covered. Please note that accident and illness insurance is also the responsibility of the participants.

Closing date for receipt of applications is 25 June 2026 at 15:00 CEST (that’s 13:00 UTC). The link to the registration form will be online in a couple of weeks, but you can already ask us questions using the feedback form.

Draft Programme

Each day has the same structure and consists of lectures (one quarter of the time) and practical work with in-depth discussions of the results achieved (three quarters). The topic specified for each day should be considered the main topic of that day. Of course, things are correlated and cannot be strictly separated, but this separation is useful for didactic reasons. Different approaches and solutions are repeatedly planned, then implemented and finally discussed in order to explore their advantages and disadvantages.

2026-04-20