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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.
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
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?