Fans of The Walt Disney Company are in for a treat when the Inside the Walt Disney Archives exhibit arrives at the Graceland Exhibition Center in Memphis on July 23.
The traveling exhibit, which premiered in Japan in 2018, celebrates the legacy of the extensive historical collection held by the corporate archives of The Walt Disney Company, with behind-the-scenes access rarely granted to the public. And DT Heritage is honored to be a part of it. Guests will walk through a dazzling display of more than 450 objects, including original artwork, costumes, and props that tell the story of the Archives, The Walt Disney Company, and Walt Disney himself.
Part of that display is an inside look at how archivists at The Walt Disney Company digitize all of that material — in particular, flat objects and film and reflective material from their vast photo collection. That’s where DT Heritage comes in.
On show will be a FADGI 4 Star-ready DT Atom digitization stand paired with the Phase One iXH 150-megapixel camera made for Digital Transitions. This combination is prized for its speed, efficiency, ergonomics, and most importantly, incomparable quality, which far exceeds the strictest requirements of FADGI and ISO digitization standards. It’s the same copy stand the specialists at the Walt Disney Archives use every day in their imaging labs. Guests will see the iXH camera and DT Heritage Film Scanning Kit alongside a video that shows how The Walt Disney Company uses the equipment in real life.
One of the biggest challenges within the scope of this project was meeting the weekly, monthly, and yearly benchmarks the Archives had established for digitizing the millions of images in its physical collection, so throughput was critically important. Even more important was quality. The Archives wanted the ability to scan something once and then use it for a variety of different applications — without loss of quality — such as enlarging a 4×5 transparency to billboard size and even implementing the imagery into immersive experiences. DT Heritage technology helps the Walt Disney Archives meet those challenges head-on.
The DT Heritage iXH camera captures images instantly and outputs them at up to 14K resolution — the highest resolution available today — with massive dynamic range. It also exceeds national and
international imaging standards, so The Walt Disney Company can be sure its digital assets will meet all the necessary standards for repurposing well into the future.
Meanwhile, unlike homegrown solutions that can suffer from inconsistency and integration issues, our film stage and carriers are unique because they are designed for higher throughput and higher quality in this specific application. With the Phase One camera and DT Atom stand together, throughput is limited only by how fast users can safely handle the materials.
The Walt Disney Archives uses the DT Heritage setup to scan photo prints and transmissive materials such as film negatives, transparencies, and plates. In addition to these photographic materials the DT Atom can turn physical artifacts of all shapes, sizes, and ages — posters, bound materials, loose materials, documents, oversized materials, 3D models, and much more — into digital assets.
The Walt Disney Company has an advanced team of in-house archivists and imaging technicians who are well-versed in reprographic techniques. DT Heritage works closely with them to help with training, fine-tuning their workflow, and staying up to date on new software and hardware for their work. We also offer online training and certification courses that they have participated in through the years, which are especially useful when new employees join the team.