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Archival

Archive the masters, projects, dependencies, and documentation needed to remaster the show. Confirm the studio or distributor specification, then include the following elements in addition to the distribution master.

Ungraded Archival Master

Render the complete conformed picture with final VFX, opticals, titles, and textless elements at the highest applicable resolution. Use camera-native log or scene-linear encoding, typically 16-bit DPX or 16-bit float OpenEXR. This is the digital equivalent of an assembled negative.

Graded Archival Master

Match the ungraded archival master's format and resolution, but include the final grade in the DI working color space. In a managed pipeline, archive the scene-referred grading space, not any camera-native encoding. Keep grading operations before the display transform so future masters can be generated from the same graded source.

Show Look Up Tables (LUTs)

Archive every LUT and transform used by the project: the display transform, creative looks, camera normalizations, technical conversions, and DCTLs. A future session must be able to rebuild the original pipeline.

Two dependency traps are worth checking before an archive is considered complete:

  • Encrypted DCTLs (.dctle) can carry an expiry date or a machine/license lock. They may simply stop working after a certain date or on a different system, silently breaking a re-grade years later. Treat an encrypted DCTL as an archival liability and obtain an unencrypted or license-free equivalent wherever possible.
  • OpenFX (OFX) plugin dependencies. A grade that leans on third-party OFX plugins will not reproduce without those plugins and the correct versions and licenses. It is the same failure mode as a missing LUT.

LUTs and their dependencies can be gathered and bundled for archive with Video Village's DRP Inspector, which reads a DaVinci Resolve project and reports any unexpected or at-risk dependencies (external LUTs, DCTLs, OFX plugins) so they can be collected before the project is stored.

Reference EDLs

Flattened EDLs of the finalized DI timeline, matching the master and archival renders, are generated so that they may be easily split (or notched) at edit points in a later session, possibly on a different platform than the initial DI.

Storage: LTO, cloud, and the trouble with hard drives

Use LTO, cold cloud storage, or hard drives as nearline copies. Compare full lifecycle cost, not media price alone.

The calculator below estimates the cost of archiving a given amount of data once, holding it, then fully restoring it: drag the sliders for your data size and retention period. It is a planning aid, not a quote: cloud rates and egress tiers change often, and the LTO figures separate the tape stock (hard costs) from a per-TB service rate.1

OptionHard costsArchiveStorageRestoreTotal

Estimates at mid-2026 rates for a single full restore to the open internet. Cloud storage is each provider's cold/archive tier. Egress tiers and provider rates vary: verify before budgeting. Backblaze and Wasabi assume the restore falls within their included free-egress ratio. LTO assumes you keep the tapes (no vault fee). See the footnote for the service-rate assumptions.

Read the total, not the headline rate. Cold-cloud tiers are cheap to store (~$1/TB/month) but bill heavily on retrieval and egress to get data back. Flat-rate clouds such as Backblaze and Wasabi offer free egress but cost 5–7× more to store. LTO inverts both. You pay a service to write and read the tapes, but the stock is ~$6/TB and holding is free, so its total stays flat and, at any realistic multi-year retention, it is the cheapest option. Glacier Deep Archive only undercuts it for holds under ~two years (drag the years slider to see the crossover). Cloud's real value is as an offsite copy with managed redundancy and no hardware to migrate. It is also a permanent bill exposed to price hikes and account risk.

Hard drives are not an archive. The usual claim that "an unpowered drive only holds data for a few years" conflates two different things and misses the real risk. Magnetic remanence on a shelved platter is good for a long time. What actually fails is everything around it.

The real failure modes are mundane and much more likely:

  • The drive nobody is monitoring. An archive is a process, not an object. A drive on a shelf is not being checksummed, so corruption is not detected, and there is no schedule that would surface a problem while a second copy still exists.
  • Mechanical trouble on spin-up. Drives that sat idle for years can fail to start: stiction, dried lubricant, seized bearings, degraded electronics. The data may be intact and unreachable without a recovery house, which is the moment you discover the archive was never tested.
  • Silent bit rot. Without checksums, corruption propagates into your only copy and into every backup made from it, undetected until someone tries to use the file.
  • Single point of failure. One shock-sensitive object, one filesystem, one enclosure, one interface standard that will eventually stop being current.

Hard drives are fine as a nearline copy. Never use one as the only long-term copy.

On a bonded or financed film, proper archival is contractual, not optional. A completion guarantor guarantees delivery to spec, including preservation elements. Negative and digital-media insurance assume professional storage, so archival masters generally must live on LTO with checksums, redundant copies, and offsite/vaulted storage. A lone hard drive satisfies neither guarantor, distributor QC, nor insurer.

LTO is the archival standard, but it requires migration. Tape is offline and air-gapped, rated ~15–30 years, and self-describing via LTFS. The catch is generational, and it just got sharper. Historically a drive read two generations back and wrote one, which is where the familiar "migrate every 7–10 years" advice comes from. LTO-10 (shipping since June 2025) dropped backward compatibility altogether: an LTO-10 drive cannot read or write LTO-9 media.2

The practical rule is therefore not a calendar interval. Migrate on the life of your drive, not the life of the tape, and never retire the last drive that can read your oldest cartridges. If you hold an LTO-9 archive, buying an LTO-10 drive does not extend it. It strands it unless you keep a working LTO-9 drive or migrate the data first. The tapes will outlast the hardware that reads them. That is the failure mode, and it is silent until the day you need a restore.

The smart default: 3-2-1, not one of anything

Keep three copies, on two different media, with one offsite. For an independent film that usually means two LTO copies, or one LTO plus a cold-cloud offsite copy. Verify each with checksums (an MHL, media hash list). Retain the graded and ungraded archival masters, textless elements, the audio stems and M&E, and the conform project. Whatever you choose, do not let a single hard drive be the only thing standing between you and a future remaster.

What belongs in a preservation package. The documentation travels separately as well as on the tape: a manifest that exists only on the LTO it describes is no help when deciding whether to restore.

  1. LTO hard cost = tape stock only (ceil(TB ÷ 18) cartridges at ~$105 each). Archive and restore are a managed-service rate (~$50/TB each way, per 2025–26 rate cards), typically with a ~20 TB minimum or an hourly rate for smaller jobs. In-house instead means buying your own deck, software, and hardware. You keep the tapes, so there is no vault fee. Cloud figures use each provider's cold/archive tier. Egress assumes one full download. Prices are from mid-2026. Verify them before budgeting. ↩

  2. LTO Program, LTO-10 generation overview: 30 TB native (40 TB variant), 400 MB/s native, and "LTO-10 tape drives do not support backwards write or read compatibility." ↩