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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."
what the hell are you talking about? Put the video on a high capacity plastic storage medium like HD DVDs or holographic disks (yes they exist) and stick em in the cold storage. How fucking hard is that? Plus, can't hard drives sit there and keep their data unpowered, out of a server, out of a datacenter, in the regrigerator for a long time too? Surely not as long as plastic but why would you even say that they'd be constantly live and powered in a server? There's absolutely no point to that
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Someone who cares ought to come up with a method of transferring digital information to celluloid so that it can be stored with the cheaper storage costs. I'm not talking about a print, but storing binary files on film. A 70mm reel ought to hold a ton of properly formatted digital data and error correction.
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It is not just buying another drive
$300/TB, currently.
power for the drive(s)
Approaching zero (minus a few hours per year for making a copy) if you store them offline.
power for the server(s) using the drive(s)
Ditto.
costs of the backup architecture for DR
A minimum-wage drive-jockey and a handful of PCs with EZ-Swap drive cages.
costs of cooling the datacenter housing all of the above
AKA "the dry and somewhat temperature controlled (40-110F) basement of any office building in the world"
maintenance agreement costs for all of the above
See "minimum-wage drive jockey" and add a broom.
costs related to the admins who manage all of the above (salary, benefits, etc.)
See "minimum-wage drive jockey".
And that presumes they use HDDs and make a new copy once a year (keeping a few years as redundant backups and "working" masters)... Although I normally consider tape drives a waste of time and money, in this situation, they seem even more ideal than HDDs. The "handful of PCs" cost goes up, but the cost-per-copy drops drastically.
Even if you replace "minumum-wage drive jockey" with "qualified IT professional or three", I can't see how you'd get anywhere near $12k per year.
Even if it did cost a quarter million a year that's still a fraction of the salary the so called "talent" makes for the big movies, there is plenty of money in the movie industry to pay for a datacenter for long term storage of the film.
Maybe the movie industry should hire some people from Google to help them design a large scale redundant storage facility, Google seems to have the entire web cached, adding movies - even at a few TB each - shouldn't be a problem for them.
Television shows aren't much better. I have a friend who does TV editing - a major complaint he has is that there is dozens of hours of footage for hour long TV shows now - movies are worse. Major motion pictures can have over 200+ hours of footage for a 2 hour movie. Here a few cites I could find with a quick google on "feet of film" (the industry standard):
Titanic - 1.3 million feet of film (about 240 hours of footage) - http://www.northern.edu/wild/th100/flmprod.htm/
Dukes of Hazzard - 620,000 feet of film (120 hours of footage) - http://www.avid.com/profiles/080805_dukes_filmcomposer.asp?featureID=910&marketID=/
Knocked up - over 1 million feet of film (180 hours of footage) - http://www.orange.co.uk/entertainment/film/19332.htm?linkfrom=%3C!--linkfromvariable--%3E&link=link_1&article=filminterviewknockedupsethrogenpart1/
I think that you could probably safely compress all of the "extra" footage that you don't know whether it is worth keeping or not. Maybe hundreds of hours of the crew talking to one another while re-doing scenes will be interesting to someone down the line, but probably not. And I doubt that they will need the original quality to be intact in any event.
:)
Note that in the days of real film, you wouldn't have that extra footage at all, since film is expensive and they couldn't afford to just keep the cameras rolling.
By my rough estimate, 700 hours of extra footage would compress nicely in 1080i to about 10 GB/hour (going way overboard - blueray quality), giving you 7 TB. I can't believe that there would be 700 hours of stuff worth keeping... I mean, Christopher Guest is pretty famous for letting the camera roll, and his stuff usually comes in at about 80 hours. So you could back up every single shred of a Christopher Guest movie at blueray quality in less than 1 TB. Then you could preserve a "raw" version of the final cut of 2 hours in another 2 TB (even the bleeding-edge "4K" format only uses about 220 Mbps). So you could store an entire Christopher guest movie plus - what the hell - another TB of audio, data, and photos, and still come in under 4 TB. 10 years from now, that amount of data will be so infinitesimal that people will be laughing about there being any debate at all. Hell, in '93 a hallmate of mine bought a 1GB drive for $1000. You can now fit that in your pocket for $10. 1TB would cost you about $500, and I suppose that it is possible that in 15 years, you'll be able to get that for $10 and fit it in your pocket. So then you'd be able to store a raw Christopher Guest movie in your pocket for $20
But you are probably right, they probably think that they should keep every scrap of digital data completely uncompressed. They'll have to get over that or accept that they are keeping more raw data than they were in the past, and thus will have to pay more. In some cases (George Lucas, for example), it is patently obvious that they should keep every last scrap of digital output that he has. George has made more money remastering Star Wars than most producers will make in their entire career. Keeping the computer file that stores Jar-Jar Binks is similar to keeping the giant model of the UFO from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".
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