Archival & Preservation

Here is how this works in practice. Preservation strategy for productions completed in South Korea takes its cue from the protocols established by the Korean Film Archive (KOFA), the country's regulatory body for moving-image preservation, with the broader global consensus around LTO-8 tape and LTFS-managed offline storage. Our archive workflow begins with the creation of preservation masters in mezzanine codecs. Typically ProRes 4444 XQ or DPX sequences for theatrical features, lossless or visually-lossless intermediate codecs for series. Together with full metadata sidecars covering project identifiers, shoot dates, location codes, talent releases, and rights logs. Each master is checksummed at creation and reverified at every later handover so silent corruption is caught before it becomes permanent loss.

Here is the short of it. Tapes are written in duplicate, with one copy held in a climate-controlled vault and a second copy stored at a geographically separate site to protect against fire, flood, or seismic events affecting either site. Format obsolescence is monitored steady: the LTO roadmap, codec deprecation timelines. Shifts in colour-space standards are all tracked, with proactive migration scheduled before any preservation master risks becoming unreadable. For productions that need to remain searchable and retrievable rather than purely archived, we layer a media asset running system on top of the tape backbone so directors, producers. Rights-holders can locate specific shots, episodes, or campaign elements years after wrap without restoring an entire library.