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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?"
Personally, I'd like to see methods like OpenAFS with a RAID/SAN data store. A great benefit of AFS is that it's ideal to work over a large IP network. Every night issue a update for all the nodes, a little like rsync I suppose in this respect, but it's ideal for a large infrastructure. Of course things like MD5 sums should be used on the files, perhaps split the large files with RAR or something, maybe use a .PAR file also. You know.. I think the pirate world has this sort of thing sorted already. Why don't the media giants take a leaf out of their book and see how others in the volatile world cope? Maybe they could use newsgroups for data retention?
Why UNIX?
I've never regarded CDs to be as durable as either analog tape or vinyl. From the point of view of permanence, I've always regarded the format as rubbish. If you look after both, on average a CD will last only half as long as a vinyl record.
Society has shown indications of advanced decline in a lot of ways over the last 20-30 years, but one of the main ways in which it has is that today, very little is designed or built with permanence in mind, or with genuine care invested in its' construction. In the past, things were made to last, and they were made by people who cared about their construction.
The main problem is quite simply overpopulation. I've often wished I could wake up one morning and discover that around 70%-75% of the global population had simply disappeared during the night. The sociological improvement that would be experienced by the 25% that were left would be astronomical. Every human problem that you can think of would be either completely solved or radically reduced in severity by that one incident. People would start actually giving a damn about things again. The individual would be considered worth something, rather than merely a drop in a collectivist bucket as is the case now. We would no longer have to contend with corporations staffed by demoniacs. The burden on the environment would be incalculably eased, and at least until the population rose again, sociopathic amorality and pathological lying would cease to be the basis of society.