Te whare pūtaiao tiaki kiriata

Film preservation lab

The films in our collections are like hundreds of tiny windows into our collective past. Through them, we can glimpse what life was like for New Zealanders in the last century as they worked, travelled and went to war — and how they thought about their identity and their place in the world.  

But much of the collection was first recorded on nitrate and acetate film stocks, which deteriorate over time. In fact, you know a film has started to degrade if it smells like vinegar. When this happens, we’re at risk of losing important pieces of history. 

At Archives New Zealand, we have 3 main ways of preserving film. 

Storing films in cool, dry conditions slows the degradation process down. We keep our film collections in cool and cold storage vaults, at temperatures of 2 to 12 degrees Celsius.

This is not a permanent solution, though. To make sure we don’t lose what’s recorded on a film, we need either to digitise it, or copy it to a more stable polyester base.

It’s quicker and cheaper to copy films to polyester than to digitise them, so up until its closure in June 2023, we did most of our preservation mahi at our film lab. The lab had a special connection with the National Film Unit (NFU) — it began at the unit's original Darlington Road studios, and some of our team of expert technicians started their careers at the NFU. 

To work with delicate early films, you need to use machines like the ones that made them. Some of the only people in the world with the skills to do this worked at our film lab. It was the only lab of its kind in Australasia, and still had equipment from the NFU era — like our Apple IIe printer, which we bought in 1985, and black and white film printing machine from the 1930s.

The people who worked at our film lab delivered invaluable mahi with great commitment and expertise. The legacy of their work and their contribution to our nation’s history will be shared for generations to come.

The video shows how our film preservation lab copied films to polyester, increasing their lives by up to 500 years.  

In October 2019 the film lab finished a 4-year project to preserve the NFU collection. We preserved 1,300 films made up of 3,198 separate picture and sound reels — that’s 2.36 million feet of footage. Films from the NZBC — the precursor to Radio New Zealand National and TVNZ — are just one of the collections we worked on.

The lab continued its work preserving government films until the end of June 2023. It closed a year ahead of schedule, reflecting the current operating environment with the move away from photochemical film preservation to digitisation.

Digitising films means we can put them online, sharing the taonga of Aotearoa with the widest possible audience.

Film digitisation takes a unique set of skills and expensive equipment that we don’t yet have at Archives New Zealand. When our new Heke Rua Archives facility is built, we hope to be able to digitise films in-house — but for now, we work with an external provider to do it.

Find out about the new Archives building 

This is New Zealand 

Digitising ‘This is New Zealand’ (1970) has been our most challenging project. Produced for Expo ’70 in Osaka, the film displayed images of Aotearoa on 3 separate screens — a major innovation at the time.  

Watch This is New Zealand on YouTube 

Before we digitised it and put it online, ‘This is New Zealand’ hadn’t been seen for decades. This is because the 3 different reels of film needed to be run at once, on 3 interlocked projectors. Over the years, different technicians tried to combine the images onto a single film — but this decreased their quality. Advances in digital technology have allowed us to bring the film back to the screen. Our technicians worked with 2 of the film’s original creators to scan, grade and restore the original images, and combine them into one. We also remixed the stereo soundtrack into a Dolby 5.1 surround soundtrack.

Country Lads 

We scanned the NFU’s first official film, ‘Country Lads’ (1941). This was the first time we used a 4K scanner — a high-resolution scanner powerful enough to make a detailed copy of each individual frame of the 9-minute film.

Scanning at 4K meant we could capture the greatest possible amount of detail and picture information from each frame. It was a way of future-proofing — when we need to restore the film in the future, we’ll be able to make it look as close as possible to its original form.   

Visit YouTube to watch Country Lads 

You can also watch the films we’ve digitised more recently — ‘Letter by Robot’ (1960) and ‘Night Flight’ (1951).

Watch Letter by Robot on YouTube 

Go to YouTube to watch Night Flight 

Find more about our work 

If you want to know more about our film preservation work or you have a question about a film, you can contact an archivist to learn more. 

Fill in our form to ask an archivist about film preservation