CEN/TC 457 'Digital preservation of cinematographic works' has finalized the work on the “Cinema preservation package” (CPP) which will help to facilitate the digital preservation of cinematographic works, for example digitalized movies.

CEN/TC 457 has been created late 2017. The scope of the technical committee included the definition and standardisation of digital long-term archive formats for cinematographic works. This task has been completed with the publication of

• EN 17650:2022, A framework for digital preservation of cinematographic works - The Cinema Preservation Package;
• CEN/TR 17862:2022, Guideline for the implementation of the Cinema Preservation Package (CPP) in EN 17650; and a reference software (available on https://gitlab.com/cen-pt457/cenpackager/)

The standard defines methods to describe the relationship of components of the cinematographic work and delivers the syntax to describe the package content. The standard itself defines the structure of the package and specifies the constraints that are necessary to enable compliance and interoperability.

This will help interested European film archive to set up an archiving workflow and long-term preservation. In addition, it will ease the exchange of digitized content between archives or other institutions.

To allow an easy implementation of EN 17650, a Technical Report (CEN/TR 17862) has been developed, which acts as a guideline to the standard. It gives additional information how to implement EN 17650 and gives additional explanations to the structure.

The software allows users an easy implementation of the Standard. It is designed for understanding the principles of the CPP and the one-to-one correspondence of defined structures with the descriptive text. It is not optimized for performance but allows already a use and implementation of the CPP.

The work in the technical committee was supported by several member from different European film archives and other experts in this field and will support archiving of European cultural film heritage.

It addressed the topic of preservation of digital cinema as included in the 2017 Rolling Plan on ICT Standardisation and was provided with financial support of the European Commission and EFTA based on the Framework Partnership Agreement (FPA) 2014.

For additional information please contact Mr. Michael Bahr (michael.bahr@din.de).