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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.
"... only wimps use backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."
I think it'd work well for the MPAA.
Go somewhere random
They can manage to "lose" the digital masters for every film Nicholas Cage has been in?
Archive final cut to 35mm film.
Wouldn't it be great if in 50 years the only version left of [Insert Future Classic Movie] was a screener with watermarks?
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.
Tape backup has a limited shelf life. There is an effect known as "bleed through" that degrades data simply because of the physical layout of magnetic tape backup. This maximum shelf life of data on quality DDS media is about five years, therefore data on tape must be renewed in intervals less than the "best before" date.
Additionally, daily backup tapes (differential or complete) have limited write cycles and must be replaced well before the manufacturers recommended maximum write cycles is exceeded.
Obviously optical media is not an acceptable backup solution, due to its many failure points. Tape is still the best, despite the requirement for periodic renewal.
Digital archiving 101 - get with it people.
There are two problems:
Data loss, where the data is actually lost. This is the equivalent of a scratch on a frame of the master negative. The cure is redundancy.
Obsolescence, where the format becomes difficult to read after a period of time. The cure is lossless copying to new formats over time and/or keeping old equipment around.
Another possible cure the the 2nd problem is to convert it to analog in an "easy to digitize" way.
For example, simply "printing" the movie to 3 black-and-white filmstrips, one for each color, is considered archival. These can be rescanned later if needed. For better archiving, use larger film formats.
Preserve each audio track in an archival analog format as well.
Of course this doesn't preserve all the data that a digital filmmaking process has, but you aren't any worse off than you would have been with an analog film.
If you want to, you can preserve each element of each scene separately, in an analog format or a completely-documented digital format but on an archival media, such as a "paper printout" stored on microfilm. I don't think most movie studios will go to this expense.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Turns out it's harder for digital media than for contemporary analog"
The negatives of the original 'Wicker Man' movie were either burnt or buried under the M3 motorway. From what I remember, some of the original 'Babylon 5' negatives were eaten by rats. They're gone, nothing will ever bring them back, because they're analogue media which can't be copied without quality loss.
The problem is the whole idea of a 'master copy' of the movie on media that goes obsolete. The benefit of digital data is that it can be copied any number of times without quality loss, so build a big RAID system and stick the movies on there. Over time it will be upgraded but the digital data will remain... the only time you'll put the data on tape will be for backups, though even then you'd probably be better copying it to other RAID servers at remote sites.
This isn't news -- at least not to those of us who deal with data.
The typical procedure is to do a media refresh (ie, copy it) every few years, and to check for damage. There are concepts like LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe), so those joking about BitTorrent aren't that far off, but it's a little more structured than that.
Dan Cohen gave a talk recently on "Can Today's Scientific Data Be Preserved? The Specter of a 'Digital Dark Age'", which touched on not only the issue of media failure, but also the loss of the knowledge to extract the encoded information. (much like the 'lost languages' that we don't understand now, how do we make sure that future generations have the necessary hardware and software to get the data back out?)
What's disapointing is just how fast the media is failing. Vendors give a 'mean time to failure' estimate that's based on perfect storage, and that they have no real ways of testing (because, well, if you say it's 40 years, are we going to have to wait 40 years before using it?). Even if you're duplicating your tapes, what happens when all of the copies were put on the same potentially bad batch of tapes?
Quite likely, we're going to lose data. And some of it's going to be because we no longer have copies of the data. The rest is going to be lost because there's so much crap being saved that doesn't need to be that we can't find stuff that still has value in the future.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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!
I have an archive of most of your _good_ material stored on my hard drives.
-William Brendel
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.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
The current trend in the archival industry is to convert everything to digital. Unfortunately scanning is often a destructive process. In my experience, I have scanned documents that were written over 200 years ago and were still legible. In order to scan these documents, we had to cut all the pages from the binding which effectively destroys the document. The data was then burned onto dvd-r and sent back to the company. If there is any problem with a single disk, there would be a permanent loss of over 100,000 documents.
DVD is fine for the consumer market, if the disc is damaged you can just buy another one. This is not the case with the film industry, once these original masters are gone, they are gone forever. Microfilm, however can last for generations. Even if there is some degradation in the film stock, you can recover almost all the original data. Film can be split into their primary colors onto different reels of microfilm and later be re-joined.
One of my duties in the scanning industry was to operate the microfilm scanner. In this case, these were documents, but any type of information could be theoretically stored. Current models are capable of scanning at least 600 dpi. One of the hardest things would be to rejoin the frames later on and make sure they are all in sync. The way a microfilm scanner works is that on traditional microfilm, there are small squares that mark each frame. The scanner scans continuously and the software searches for these squares known as blips and it will know where to capture the image. With the addition of medium blips for keyframes and large blips for chapters, you can be fairly certain that you will be able to retrieve all the information later. If there is a missing frame, you will only be missing 1 channel of color for that particular frame. This data can be digitally re-created later.
Unlike digital media, microfilm has been around for over 100 years. The images are stored optically rather than digitally so there is a minimal amount of equipment needed for retrieval. Reproduction of microfilm is relatively inexpensive and multiple copies can be produced from the master and can be stored in multiple off-site storage areas. If the master is digital, you can produce multiple copies that are all the same quality so there isn't a single original master. It may be possible to store the sound on microfilm as well. Software would have to be developed to encode and decode the data, but it is possible.
At the risk of being redundant, the idea of distributed storage is good. Tie in the concepts of ubiquitous computing, prolific high speed internet, vast amounts of unused HD space and clock cycles - Why not?
Doesn't google use massively distributed and redundant storage and processing now?
And when I say why not, I'm not talking about putting it in a rootkit, I'm talking about something along the lines of seti@home + bit torrent + whatever = a global data ether of our collective digital valuables forever being stored by everyone.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
You really think they'd have DRM on the masters? Is that a joke or are you that crazy?
Who knows, maybe Sun can sell a bunch of 'Thumper' boxes to Hollyweird for preservation of the digital masters.
Just back from Tinsel Town after talking to some of the dudes in the article. Still jetlagged, so it feels a bit unreal reading about it in Slashdot. Still, I'll do my best to explain why things are the way they are...
A film is not often made by a single body. If you are shooting to film, then this will get handled by an editorial department. You may have a fast telecine scan for reviewing the material as dailies. Some of these scans may be used as low-resolution proxies for initial grades. Some chosen bits of film may get re-scanned on a slower pin-resolution scanner for inclusion in the final film. Artificial rendered scenes and special effects may be done by specialist houses, then composited in a post-production house. Your film may have 25 4K images per second in the final version, but the data used to generate it is scattered over the place - if you think a good IT department should be backing all this up, then you haven't worked on a film, my friend. As deadlines approach, people may be working stupid hours, and filling up all the available storage. Then the film gets released, and either makes a billion dollars or doesn't. Either way, the tension is off, people take holiday and zonk out. Nobody will be picking over the cutting-room floor or its digital equivalent looking for things that might be useful twenty years from now. By the time people are back from holiday, they don't know or don't care.
Your end product may be big reels of negative film that you send to a film lab to make prints for cinemas. The lab should keep the golden master clean, and make most of the prints from a second copy. This would be a sensible time to make an archival print of the film. The lab can transfer the whole thing to black and white film. Black and white film does not fade, like conventional colour film does, even in the can. You are getting the print lab to do a pretty full backup of the released film when your people have all gone on holiday. These days you need to back up other stuff. The soundtrack is digital. You will have extra data for the releases in different formats (5:4 TV, 16:9 widescreen, IMAX, etcetera). Still, it is a lot better than nothing. But it is not often done.
The other think is to know what to archive. Very little of the newsreel film I had to sit though as a child to get to the cartoon has survived. Key stuff like the Queen's Coronation or the outbreak of WW2 was clearly history, and put on a special shelf, but little of the day to day stuff survives. There is one cache that survived when a cinema closed, and the tins of newsreel went into landfill. The cinema was in Alaska; the landfill was permafrost, and the film was kept in near ideal refrigetrated conditions. Apart from this fluke, it has probably all gone.
There will probably be digital solutions in time. Increasingly, as we have to manage more different sorts of digital data, there is a need to organize and track everything, which ought to mean it is possible to archive all the essential bits that go into any production. Many other people have posted on the problems of knowing what is on (say) a FAT16 Windows 3.1 disk in some 1980's image format. You can keep copying the data to overcome the degradation of the physical medium, but you still have to know what it means. I know of a system for archiving film images, where the people who did the archiving left the company, and one of them took the laptop with them that had the archiving software, so the ability to read the archives went with them. Do you archive the archiving system? Then, do you archive the system that archived that? Yes - basically, that is exactly what people are proposing to do. But it takes a bit of organizing, and we are not there yet.
Film, on the other hand, has visible images. The 35mm format has remained readable for over 100 years. Even where nitrate stock has flowed over time, we still know what shape it ought to have been. Sometimes we can get something back if we want it badly enough.
A simple analogue solution may be to
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.
Chances are that you wouldn't wake up.
You have GOT to be kidding. I have had too many tapes fail because of drop-outs, runners, and breakage. Cassette tapes are horrible.
I have the feeling he's talking about half-inch or one inch analog tape masters, which are quite good, and last a long time with little (perceptible) loss if stored properly. If he'd meant cassettes, he'd have said "cassette tapes".
Compact cassette tapes have always been regarded as one of the first true bastard inventions of the copyright-obsessed recording industry. Mechanically balky enclosures, thin tape that stretches easily...you name it - it took ten years to truly catch on and was subjected to a slow death by CDs.
I'm involved in some preservation of history & documentation, and the issue is both huge, and far ranging, not just movies. Here are a few issues, beyond those already stated:
- volume of data. Not uncommon for people to go on a vacation, and come back with 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000 images on 2 or 4 gig SD chips off thier digital camera. Who has the time to catalog them all? When film cost you - oh, say for arguement a dollar a shot, most people were very careful what they took pictures of to begin with, and keep them safe after the fact. We do not see very much of that attitude today, so paradoxiaclly, the more images a person has, the more likely they are to be lost over time. When it becomes too big an issue to sort the chaff from the wheat, many people just walk away from the job.
- archival materials very rare. Most color films have dyes that fade, most papers today have acid in them and will degrade over time. The list goes on, as it is not just CD's or DVDs that degrade.
- war on terror. A lot of information that is or was public domain is or has been disappearing from public libraries, web sites, etc. For example - not that I ever want to look at them, but the blueprints for the Detriot-Windsor tunnel used to be in the public domain, but not anymore.
There are many more stories, but we are creating a huge, huge memory hole at this very point in time. Maybe now that hte issue has caught the attention of th emovie industry, something might be done about it. Maybe not. Maybe 10,000 years from now the only thing left of our society to prove we were here might be our left over waste form nuke reactors that is still hot.