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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.
Why is it more expensive to preserve a bunch of bits and bytes than, say, a reel with analog information, printed on some soon-to-be-brittle plastic? I'm very sure the latter will decay in a quicker fashion.
Preservation was a lot easier when the media lasted longer but by far the largest problem is the increase in the amount of data.
What is interesting is that old analog film & tape also degrades, but does so more gracefully. They also get degraded by reading, not just by storage. Archives of old footage etc have largely been converted to digital to allow older signals to be accessed without damaging the originals.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
release the file into the public domain and put it out on bit torrent? You'll get lots of backups made, for free. It will get converted to new formats, and backed up again, for free. Oh, you want future profits? Then quityerbitchin about the archival costs.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
As jonadab once put it:
:-)
> Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it
Yes, and those who do study history are doomed to watch in frustration
as it is unwittingly repeated by those who do not
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Or, if they don't preserve Chicken Little, will the sky not fall?
Seriously, IF the older films are an authentic art that deserves preservation, the why is most of it scrapped on the cutting room floor? why are all the really old films sitting still on their Nitrate Stock in archives in hollywood slowly turing from film to dust?
AS others point out, released to the Net a movie is saved in various codecs, on various media (hard drive, tape CDR DVDR laserdisc even film FOR FREE just like music and most other data is. Horrible thought that; information in the hands of the people.... unsupervised, heck UN TAXED!
In the 15th century the Church tried desperately to put an end to this new Printing Press because it was putting their scribes out of work. They even excommunicated printers. Now we do the same only we use Lawyers.
I await the next turn of the wheel to see what damn foolishness humans are yet capable of..
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
It's not just the finished product, it's all the footage they keep around for different editions, remastering, deleted scenes, etc. And the source material is often not compressed in a lossy format. Sure, 4000 TB will store a lot of DVDs, but it won't store many movies in raw format. And only a fool wouldn't also have backups.
Be relentless!
The answer is simple, copy it over frequently.
Yeah, from the article, are several silly things are going on here:
Find free books.
Where he compares salt mine storage of analog media to storage of digital media, and decides to just multiply his made-up $208k figure by 100 years to come up with.. wait for it... $208 million. I guess that's why he went into journalism and not the sciences.
Leaving out the humongous math error, why can't you just store the digital fucking media in the same salt mine? The things that damage analog film are the same things that damage digital media.
Is it any wonder we have the expression "lies, damned lies, and statistics"? This article is all three, with some incompetency thrown in.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Once again repeat after me... the benefit of digital is not that it LASTS FOREVER or is EASIER TO PRESERVE. It is that it is EASY TO COPY.
Who gives a rats ass if a given copy of a film will degrade in 10 years. I can make a 100% perfect copy of the thing in minutes. Copy the data every year. Hell copy it 100 times. Copying also makes the obsolescence of formats meaningless.
I still have emails and RTF documents written in 1994. These are 100% perfect copies of the original data. Is that somehow to be interpreted by brain-dead fear-mongers that any day now my data will be "obsolete" since the obviously 15-year old media is almost degraded beyond recognition? Or are people a bit more intelligent and realize I have already copied this from hard drive to disc and back about 30 different times?
- L. Torvalds I know that's moded funny, but that might actually be a very good argument for "open sourcing" movies.
First, what kind of film was it that had a tendency to burn? Nitrate-based film?
Second, I just heard that the studio that produced Aerosmith's first album has lost the masters, so they're going to re-record it.
This kind of problem isn't new, and blaming it on electronic media is silly.
Yes, you do have to take steps to ensure the availability of it in the future - but the same is true of analog versions too. If you don't have a good filing system, or your 'vault' is the backseat of a car in southern California, the reels are going to get damaged/destroyed/lost, too.
I was on a railroad photographers' list for a while, and I remember the digital/analog debate came up one time. Someone said, "I'll be laughing when you lose all your files because your hard drive crashed and don't have pictures any more!" Obviously he never considered he could easily lose his negatives/slides, or have them damaged in a flood or fire. Analog media has different risks and storage requirements, but they BOTH require proper storage. (And, frankly, digital has the additional advantage that it can be easily backed up at multiple sites with no loss in quality.)
Maybe they are living in 2007, where they are paying a $200,000 a year licensing fee to a patent troll who got a patent for "A business process which preserves digital motion pictures".
In all seriousness, the biggest obstacle to preserving a history of our culture is copyright. If the owner of the copyright doesn't care to preserve the piece of our history that they have their monopoly on, the information will simply deteriorate and there is nothing legally that can be done about it. We can only hope that the evil dirty thieving pirates save our history for future generations.
..in that order.
Yes - You don't need to have 5.25" drive now to read back data that you stored onto an 'old' IDE drive 2 years ago. And that's a bad example because you can still get 5.25" drives. 200 years from now when we're working with crystalline storage methods, we won't have to read back from HDD platters.. just from the holographic storage drives that things were transferred to with the last generation of storage devices.
Will we still have film projectors 200 years from now? Possibly not.
Whocares - because the formats used to store digital film aren't exactly H.264 or whatever fancyschmancy codec the copyright-infringent care about; google 'digital intermediate'. And yes, those formats do tend to change, but they all remain lossless and, again, things can be transferred with each generation.
Will we still know what to do with film 200 years from now? Ahhh.. there's the kicker.. probably, yes.
This is also where the cost comes in - you have to keep upgrading to the latest formats and the latest storage devices to ensure that there will be no 'digital divide', so to speak.
With film, you don't incur this cost. It's lossy in an analog sense, but if somebody looks at a film reel 2,000 years from now - and we assume to still have the same visual system in our watersacks - it will be trivial for them to see, literally, that it is a series of pictures which, in succession, appear to animate. Even if there's no device to play them back then, it would be trivial to build one from scratch using very rudimentary knowledge.
With digital, even if you have the latest format and the latest hardware to read the device it's stored on, it is non-trivial for the layman to read this file and be able to put it back into a picture; in fact, it tends to take people with intricate knowledge of the device and the storage format.
Personally I'm all for doing both, costs be damned, if the material is important enough. That said, do we really need to hold on to all material forevermore? Like a history book, it should be enough to retain the highlights (be they positive or negative), and not cling onto minutiae, as a society. Similarly, like family archives, those who believe something to be well worth the preservation for future generations (either within the family or civilization as a whole), will - or at least should - do so on their own and have history prove them right, or wrong.
> I know that's moded funny, but that might actually be a very good argument for "open sourcing" movies.
I wouldn't call it "open sourcing" exactly, but let's just say that films won't soon go extinct, at least as long as there are people willing to copy them.
Actually, that's how books survived. The only ancient books we have now are the ones people thought were important enough to copy regularly, plus a few random things that survived for a ridiculously long time.