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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.
Technicolor dye transfer (imbibition) prints were much less fugitive. Color separations onto black and white film stock (often termed YCM for yellow, cyan, magenta) are much more robust. Production of these separations (and imbitition relief "matrix" films) was intrinsic to the Technicolor printing process (even if the film was shot in conventional tripack negative, then transferred to Technicolor for printing), and films where these intermediates were saved (or where someone presciently thought to have a set of YCMs made), are much safer for the future than anything kept only on color stock.
In the 70s there were some photo places (especially in Los Angeles) that marketed Eastman Color Negative 5247 movie film (short-end remnants from the movie industry) as a cheaper alternative for 35mm color negative still photography, and printed this onto 5283 color print film (same as movie prints) for 35mm slides.
I recently found a few boxes of these that I had shot back then (and stored under entirely careless, or Arrhenius/Murphy if you prefer, conditions). I am not good at evaluating color negatives by eye, but the positives were faded either to mutated colors or to almost nothing.
Even simple technologies can have amazingly short shelf lives under conditions of disuse. I recently turned on my stereo system after close to 3 years of not being used. The amplifier, CD player, and LP turntable all failed to operate. Part of this might have been due to de-formed electrolytic capacitors; these appear to have more-or-less repaired themselves after a couple of hours with the power turned on. Both the CD player and the turntable suffered additional electromechanical problems that required a combination of manual exercise and cleaning to rectify.
None of these devices have anywhere near the scary sophistication of a modern hard disk drive.
Seeing as I cannot remember what I last set my external firewall password to, imagine the additional challenge of future Hollywood being bitten deeply in the butt by present Hollywood's favored time-bombed destined-to-be-lost-art proprietary DRM technologies, with the keys long since dissipated in Hollywood's perennial miasma of mergers, acquisitions, lawsuits, cocaine, and personal vendettas.