page_title: Paper print
section_title: First effort at reformatting
hierarchical_section_title: Paper print / First effort at reformatting
caption_attribution_description: English: Howard Walls (LoC, left) and Carl Gregory (NARA, right) copying a roll from the LoC Paper Print Collection, optical printer modified by Gregory, March 1943. Original caption reads "Fig. 2. Howard Walls (left) and Carl Gregory (right) copying a paper print roll on Gregory's modified optical printer, March 1943. [Photograph 64-NAX-528, National Archives and Records Administration, Still Picture Branch"
context_page_description: Paper prints of films were an early mechanism to establish the copyright of motion pictures by depositing them with the Library of Congress. Thomas Alva Edison’s company was first to register each frame of motion-picture film onto a positive paper print, in 1893. The Library of Congress processed and cataloged each of the films as one photograph, accepting thousands of paper prints of films over a twenty-year period.
  An unintended but fortunate side-effect is that while the actual films and negatives of this period often decayed or were destroyed, the paper prints sat ignored until the 1940s and were conserved. When this copyright deposit method ended in 1912, actual film prints were registered. Many films made before 1912 were lost forever because their original elements were too unstable for any lasting preservation or conservation. Paper prints, though, came with their own unpredictable nature, bringing migration challenges that rival the difficulties involved with the analog/digital conversions of today.
context_section_description: By 1902, the paper prints had accumulated to 1,413 according to the 1943 Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress. By the time of their rediscovery in 1939, over 3,000 were stored within a vault of the copyright office. Librarian Howard Walls made the discovery and described the scene this way:
  That vault had been open to all kinds of weather, but the grating was over a shaft so it never rained in there, it never snowed in there.  And the successive wrappings on these paper rolls protected them.  Each time it was wrapped around, the picture underneath was protected.
  Walls recruited a National Archives motion picture engineer, pioneer cinematographer Carl Louis Gregory, to help get the movies back into shape for screening.  Gregory observed the fragile state of the paper, some of which had sprocket perforations punched through.  Sprocket holes or not, the paper could never travel through a projector or automated printer without being shredded.
  Gregory designed a system that adopted many of the traits involved with shooting animation in that era.  Modifying a process optical printer, he was able to exchange sprocket heads and pull down pins that were necessary to advance the film and yet not tear it to pieces. An adjustable aperture plate was added to frame images that had been produced by a variety of cameras without any uniform standardization.  The transfer of the paper prints was done at one exposure setting without any consideration for the variations in image density of the negative, so Gregory adjusted his lighting that reflected off the print to maximize the information captured to a new film negative.  There is no record of the film format used to recapture the paper prints.
  The war years interrupted plans to migrate more films.  Later, Howard Walls would devote his time primarily to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and would try to initiate a program to rescue the paper prints at the Library.  Nothing seemed to get beyond the fundraising stage, though, as Walls was enveloped in management intrigue and other responsibilities to the Academy.
caption: Walls and Carl Louis Gregory (right) copying a paper print roll, using an optical printer modified by Gregory (1943)
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