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."

Comments

time

[Lord Ender]

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.

Not really

[ArchieBunker]

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?

Re:Not really

[orclevegam]

Then comes the problem of codecs? Will anyone be able to play a VC-1 file 50 or 100 years from now? They will if you also store the algorithm the codec uses. You can always re-write a codec in the future, so long as you know how it's algorithm and data structures work.

Re:Not really

[PopeRatzo]

It appears to have finally happened: the ever-shrinking distance between now and nostalgia has finally reached its zero-state. We are now nostalgic for our present.

Maybe we should rethink the importance of preserving popular culture indefinitely in all its pristine digital glory. Why should we spend any money storing the Dukes of Hazzard movie for 100 years, except to fuel the campy nostalgia of future wankers who probably should find something better to do with their time? It's possible that we've already wasted enough time and energy on kitsch.

I mean, it's nice that I can buy a boxed set of all the Francis the Talking Mule films, but I'm pretty sure I could live without it. It's the navel-gazing egotism of this generation that thinks every speck of its cultural exhaust is gold that needs to be protected for future generations.

I'm willing to see society put a few bucks aside to preserve culture, but I think we should wait at least a decade before deciding to go long-term with any given artifact. That would allow us to better vet the material that we're going to keep. Maybe we can have a second and third-tier of stuff that can be saved using a lossy format. I bet it wouldn't cost me more than $200k to keep a divx of the 2005 film Son of the Mask. I'm pretty sure that's plenty good enough to insure that future generations don't miss out on anything.

Re:Not really

[Score Whore]

You keep saying "store the codecs" which means you're not thinking about this problem in a sane fashion. You don't compress. At all. That's the point of archival. It's not a matter of some geek boy lossfully reencoding his porn collection to fit on CD. It's a matter of keeping the original source material forever. There's no codec here. Just store the data flat with as many bits of precision as you have in your source material. End of story. The only real question is do you store this on spinning disks or stopped disks. Put it on a bunch of hard drives with some parity and error correction codes. Then shut them all down along with the entire infrastructure needed to read the data. Periodically fire it back up to verify that any bit rot that has come along can be corrected and then shut it down again. Every ten years or so, migrate the whole thing to whatever is new in storage. But don't ever compress this shit.

Re:Expensive Duplicates

[Falladir]

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).