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Digital Media Archiving Challenges Hollywood
HarryCaul writes "Movies are moving to digital, but what about long-term archiving of the master source materials? Turns out it's harder for digital media than for contemporary analog. Data is being lost, and studios have to learn to cope. Phil Feiner of the AMPAS sci-tech division says when he worked on studio feature films he 'found missing frames or corrupted data on 40% of the data tapes that came in from digital intermediate houses' How to deal with it? Regular migration from old media to new media. Grover Crisp, says Sony has put in a program of migrating every two to three years. Other studios are following suit, but what about indie features? Will we lose films like we lost the originals of the 20s?"
If they are concerned about digital data being lost: why not introduce redundancy? Make sure that the data is stored at many locations as possible (and also with a high quality). Luckily the Internet already has a solution for this problem: BitTorrent.
This will only get worse because they insist on the stupid DRM schemes. If a drive crashes you can usually recover a fair portion of the data, if the drive is heavily encrypted and the crash takes out the key to your cipher, then you are fairly fucked. Sure, it is fine today when everybody and his mother has a HDMI compliant player, but with the amount of key-revocations that will likely be necessary as the scheme is cracked over and over again, sooner or latter the increasing complexity of key-management will cause them to start getting lost. The issue is further complicated by having the "plain-text" all in a central place rather than in everybody's home, a hurricane could easily take out a decade's worth of art that way. Of course none of this will happen because the people who make decisions about where the unencrypted originals are stored have a good understanding of how cryptography works, which is why we have DRM to begin with ...
...but codecs are. Chances are we'll have the information in another hundred years but not the means to access it.
to the original Star Wars. Supposedly he has no original copies from which to return the original classic to us (Laserdisc work-arounds notwithstanding)
I doubt his word on this, but if true, he's a bigger fool that Ep 1 made him appear. In any case, its a great case for multiple digital back-ups.
Cost may play a role as well - as important as it is for film history to save as much as possible, how may film makers in the early stages of a career have the money to produce high quality, redundant backups? And then maintain their viability over the years?
Sure strage is cheap - but who can be sure the hardware will be usable in say 50 years? Can a disk last that long without being spun up regularly? Is optical disk / flash memory archival over time? Will the hardware be readable on whatever computer is in use then or will it be like trying to read an 8" CP/M disk today? Of course, then there is the codec issue as well.
Lucas was dealing in analog which make it even more difficult to properly archive copies for posterity.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I think the countless lost Doctor Who-episodes is a good example of how analog video storage isn't perfect either.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
However, what if they sent data that needs to be archived permanently through the first stages of the DVD mastering process, and produced an etched glass master disk. It seems to me that such a disk should last forever as long as it is protected from physical damage.
To avoid damage from creating new DVD stampers from the master if it needs to be read, maybe they could create a special archival reader based on electron microscope or something similar that could read the master disk directly without touching it.
A better question might be, "Will anyone really care that they can't watch a high-quality cut of 40-year Old Virgin in the year 2087?" If we are really worried about losing the content of a movie, then archive it to film and accept the faults (loss of image quality, cost of storage, risk of damage, etc.).
So they're going to be using equipment that utilises the analogue hole?
Sounds... hypocritical. The movie industry balks at us for archiving movies we already own, but they're doing it at a massive scale just to save their own ass.
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"This will only get worse because they insist on the stupid DRM schemes."
*sigh* Apparently slashmemes are bittorrented too. DRM ONLY affects copies, COPIES remember?* The originals would still have the problems they're having DRM or no DRM, and no I don't believe that having mass-copies of non-DRM content is as much of an assurance as you think. Just ask collectors what time does even to mass-produced items.
*And might I add those copies aren't exact originals. From the cutting-room floor, to the compression.
You really think they'd have DRM on the masters? Is that a joke or are you that crazy?