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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.
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."
- L. Torvalds
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.
They had to hire an MSCE to migrate the data from proprietary Windows Long-Term Archival Backup Media Video format (.wltabmv) to the new, safer (from pirates and such, arrr) long-term Windows Long-Term Protected Archival Backup System Against Pirates And Intellectual Property Theft Format Media Video (.wltpabsapaiptfmv)
And some, god help them, migrated to Apple's Almost Better Than The Competition So You Can Feel Better About Using A Proprietary Format For Only Three Dollars a Pop Codec (.aabttcsycfbauapffotdapc). Those Apple Engineers cost bocoup bucks.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
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?
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.