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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.
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.
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.