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?"

Comments

use a data vault

[eneville]

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?