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The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
A new study shows that storing the digital master record of a film costs much more than storing archival prints. "To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master. Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is 'born digital' -- that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film -- pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault."
This may be true, but the cost of preserving digital content is halving every year, and can digital content can persist indefinitely; while the cost of preserving film is generally going up, and film can not be preserved forever.
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How does it cost more to store a bunch of files on a few duplicate hard drives than it does to maintain the facility AND personnel required to keep film negatives in excellent condition? I mean, isn't that one of the advantages to an all-digital film? Everything gets stored as a 0 and a 1, and can easily be duplicated however many times you want with no loss or degradation to the original source?
Someone care to explain why it costs so much to buy a few hard drives?
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This story must have been written by a journalist clueless in the ways of technology. How does storing a hard drive in a salt mine any more costly than storing a film version? Where does the extra electricity come in? Have one primary version, make a backup (or 2 or 3) and put them in storage. If you're paranoid, verify and/or re-duplicate every few years. The cost of verifying regularly vs reconstructing degraded film should be a wash at worst. It should easily favor the digital versions.
Its all about the storage medium used. You're telling me you want to rely on a hard drive thats been sitting in storage for half a century or film? Film can be restored and if the picture degrades then you stil have something to work with. What happens when you lose bytes here or there in your digital film? Pixelation or loss of a frame all together. Then comes the problem of codecs? Will anyone be able to play a VC-1 file 50 or 100 years from now?
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Because nobody wants to expend more than a few dozen gigabytes (at the MOST) on a movie for personal viewing purposes. The task here is to preserve the "originals," the full-resolution, lossless cuts that were filmed on the set. I think I read that the footage that actually appears in Spiderman 3 constitutes 4 TB of information. Consider that a bunch of un-used footage also needs to be saved, and you'll agree that only a few insane enthusiasts would ever be willing to download and preserve that amount of information (at least with technology as it is now).
You could store it as a big stack of DVDs, but how about a few 500-1000GB hard drives?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
$200K to keep a few bits from rotting?
...just as Hollywood's writers began their walkout.
Oh... that explains it.
It's a conveniently timed report to bolster a negotiating position: "you can't possibly ask for more money, look how much it costs us to store this stuff!!"