Amsterdam Filmmuseum and Thought Equity Motion in $40m project

The Amsterdam Filmmuseum has entered into a partnership with US company, Thought Equity Motion.

The move is part of the Netherlands' hugely ambitious 'Images For The Future' project to digitise the country's entire film, radio and TV holdings. The Filmmuseum has around $40m (Euros 30 m) to spend on its digitisation and restoration projects of film.

Spread over a period of seven years, the Government's FES (Fund for the reinforcement of Economic Structure) is providing an overall budget of $207m (Euros 154m) for the digitisation of film, radio and TV content. 137,200 hours of video, 22,510 hours of film, 123,900 hours of audio, and 2.9 million photos from the different archives will be restored, preserved and digitised.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum, the National Archive in The Hague, independent Dutch think-tank Knowledgeland, the Central Discotheque in Rotterdam, and the Association of Public Libraries are also involved in the 'Images For The Future' project.

Denver based Thought Equity Motion, is now charged with digitising thousands of hours of feature films, documentaries, shorts and animation films.

The scanning of the Filmmuseum's holdings will be done on 2K resolution with encoding to amongst others High Definition and standard resolution. The long-term aim is to make the entire Dutch film collection available digitally for screenings in theatres, on websites, portals and video-on-demand.

Among the titles that have already been restored and digitised is George Sluizer's Twice A Woman (1979), starring Bibi Andersson and Anthony Perkins.

The Filmmuseum's alliance with Thought Equity follows on from its existing partnership with the Cineco/Hagefilm lab in Amsterdam and Cineric in New York for the preservation of the museum's films.

'The partnership with Thought Equity Motion is a great step forward for the Filmmuseum in its efforts to digitize its collection, and make it widely accessible for future generations,' Sandra den Hamer, director of the Filmmuseum, commented.