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Afterlife Will Be Costly For Digital Films
Andy Updegrove writes "For a few years now we've been reading about the urgency of adopting open document formats to preserve written records. Now, a 74-page report from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences warns that digital films are as vulnerable to loss as digitized documents, but vastly more expensive to preserve — as much as $208,569 per year. The reasons are the same for video as for documents: magnetic media degrade quickly, and formats continue to be created and abandoned. If this sounds familiar and worrisome, it should. We are rushing pell-mell into a future where we only focus on the exciting benefits of new technologies without considering the qualities of older technologies that are equally important — such as ease of preservation — that may be lost or fatally compromised when we migrate to a new whiz-bang technology." Here's a registration-free link for the NYTimes article cited in Andy's post.
I cant help but relate some personal experience here. I know its not production quality, or lots of information, but I recently pulled out my Apple IIe from storage. It included the original 5 1/4 floppy disks and drives.
There was also a cardboard box with ~150 floppy disks, some as old as 20+ years. NOT A SINGLE ONE WAS BAD. Yes, "Zork" still works!
Could it possibly be that the quality of media just isn't up to the demands of a longer life of storage anymore? We all know how Cadillac runs that racket, as in sell the crappy car, and make the money off replacement parts. Has media storage gone the same way? As in 'sell the media, but just good enough to work for x years' before being replaced. And with the demands to increase revenue year over year for public companies, perhaps that time-frame has become shorter and shorter over the years to keep the money flowing in.
Or am I just being too cynical? But you know, a world where such works as "Zork" can survive and "Legally Blonde" can not, on their respective media, might not be that bad.
The original negative is rarely ever touched, except to make more intermediate positives. Even when they remastered the star wars trilogy, they did so from the intermediate positives made from the negative. The original negative should stay in good shape for a very long time, as it's really only accessed to make intermediate positives, usually 3 or so after the negative has been cut. You can always make more inter-negs and release prints from these, which means that the negative will probably NOT degrade due to usage, but from the natural wear of the dyes.
Also, the line in the article regarding digital editing is incorrect. Films are edited in digital form on the computer, but the edit decision list is given to a negative cutter who cuts the negative. There is no loss of quality editing digitally.
The reasons are the same for video as for documents: magnetic media degrade quickly,
The myth of bit rot on hard drives is just that- a myth. It's been perpetuated for two decades by the idiot Steve Gibson, selling his own snake oil (Spinrite), and unfortunately, not enough people are calling him on it. I thought it actually did something too, until I read that post from someone who actually knows how modern drives work. As the author points out, there's a track that can only be written at the factory, and if what Gibson claimed were true, ALL drives would be dying left and right after a few years. Funny how I've found drives made almost a decade ago working just fine now...
The problem hasn't changed; it's mostly obsolescence in drive interfaces, and the drives themselves (for tapes.) PATA is common these days, but everything is going towards SATA, for example.
Both DAT and 8mm were in common use as little as 6-7 years ago...but you'd be fairly hard pressed to find a place to but either now save eBay. And...do YOU want to entrust a backup to an ebay drive?
Please help metamoderate.
If you've ever seen the classic film Metropolis, chances are you didn't see a good 1/3 of the film, with digital, if they had been taken care of that poorly chances are you'd have nothing to watch.
Actually, the damage to Metropolis is due in large part to editing rather than damage of the film stock. Metropolis was edited early and often; the only time the whole, original film was viewed was during its original (and brief) German first-run. Subsequent German, US, and other world-wide releases contained major deletions, reordering of scenes, and other changes which significantly changed the storyline of the film. The only reason that we now know the original order the scenes were meant to go in, and just how much has been lost, is due to the discovery of the original score and title cards.
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The standard motion picture format is MJPEG2000. It's not a very efficient format, but it's well defined and going to be around for a long time: there's both a lot of hardware and software that relies on it, and it scales up to high resolutions.
The consumer format wars between Microsoft, Apple, Sony, and other companies have no influence on this.
DVD's have a fraction of the resolution of the original digital video and have already undergone lossy compression (e.g. MPEG2 video, AC3 audio). HD DVD/Bluray is also lower resolution than the original, and the compression is still lossy. As some others have mentioned, you ideally want to store all the film's components (unedited footage, audio, etc.) at the highest quality possible for re-mastering to new formats in later years.
Beyond that, single-bit errors in encoded data streams (e.g. MPEG2, AVC, MP3, AC3) can lead to large distortions in the decoded data. You really have to store everything raw in order to reduce the chances of severe corruption and increase the chances of recovery.
For any given resolution, there is a size of film that beats that resolution. Figure on about 100 line-pairs per millimeter of film for still frames, less for movie frames, and you'll be in good shape. If you want a nice margin of error, quadruple the size or resolution of whatever you are copying to in each direction. If your film hits the silver screen at 4,096 pixels in the vertical dimension, this is roughly 2000 line pairs or 20 millimeters of film, well within the bounds of standard movie film. Quadruple that and you've got 80mm. Granted that isn't a standard movie-film size but it's technically doable.
Color gamut may be an issue in edge cases, particularly if the digital color has a higher dynamic range than color film will support. Black and white film used for certain archival purposes has a dynamic range big enough to hold the 12-bits-per-color that digital cinemas use. Color film may be a problem though - either the dymanic range will have to be flattened a bit or the highlights or shadows sacrificed. Printing the film multiple times with different settings should preserve all the color information.
References: Digital Cinema. The HD quality we're talking about here is much higher 'resolution' than even 64-inch film 64-inch film??? Most hollywood film movies are 35 or 70mm, which is less than 3 inches. Also, as far as preserving the 'instructions' to make a film... film is an art. Simply preserving data on camera angles and having some kind of code will not do. Films aren't computer programs - they're art. Being able to reliably copy the Mona Lisa exactly the way it was originally painted will never replace the value of the actual Mona Lisa. If this is true it is true only in a hyper-technical sense. For the average consumer and even the average scholar, an exact brush-stroke-for-brush-stroke reproduction using materials identical to the original materials would be more than adequate.
When you watch a film-print movie you are not watching an original anyways. You are usually watching copy or even an nth-generation copy. Plus, if you watch any print played more than a few dozen times, the copy you are watching has scratches and other damage not intended by the artists.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Hypothesis: it can be as important to lose data as it is to retain it. If all knowledge were preserved, the human specie would be incapable of processing it (with our current technology) in a meaningful way. The problem becomes more advanced when you change 'knowledge' to 'data'. Natural selection occurs as fundamentally in our pursuit of knowledge, our collections of art, and our collective memories as it does in the survival of species. Data must be sacrificed for information to be gained. That we desire to preserve as much as possible is as admirable and honorable a goal as any, and that pursuit should continue unhindered; however, milk will be spilled, movies lost, and species vanished. Without a way to meaningfully index all of the data in all the genres of all the mediums present to date, the goal of preservation is somewhat hollow. This Utopian world in which the Library of Alexandria is preserved is without virtue unless I can find "What Would Jesus Wear to a Funeral on Thursdays?" in a timely fashion.
If it looks like a duck, let's call it a moose.