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

Re:Bitorrent?

[xerent_sweden]

Wouldn't it be great if in 50 years the only version left of [Insert Future Classic Movie] was a screener with watermarks?

Two problems: loss and obsolescence

[davidwr]

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.