Slashdot Mirror
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."
It seems Slashdot could teach them.
DUPLICATION is a lot easier with digital forms of media. I mean, holy crap /., this is probably one of the fastest dupes in the same field of interest I've ever seen.
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.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Dupe
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Yeah, it costs a ton of money in disk space, mirroring, bandwidth, and power bills to maintain all those duplicates of the original.
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?
Living With a Nerd
Stupid mods....
Your ad could be here!
that still play just fine.
Just an observation.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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.
calculate computer costs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
/. is refreshing their file-storage format to avoid obsolescence. This thread is in the new format. The one from two days ago is in the old format.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This is just Slashdot's method for reducing storage costs!
Sounds like they need Slimfast or Sego....
CelluLOSE in humans is fat?
CelluLOID in film is SLIM
ANY ideas for product names (other than CompressFAST)?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
just store the master on HD-DVD or Blueray and put it in your refrigerator next to the milk and butter...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I could see the cost exploding if they keep the data in a data wharehouse so that they can actively access it at any given time. However, if they were to put it on laser disc, blue ray, dvd, HDDVD and a hard drive. Then, leave it sitting in a vault they wouldn't have to worry about it. The hard part is still having ready easy access to the original file.
How about they just shitcan everything and spare us another needless re-release?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Most of the points worth discussing were brought up there.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why is it that the idiots of the world are the ones that make comments like these? Does this idiot think that people will be moved by this?
Back to analog, everyone.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Looks like /. has also been affected by the screenwriters strike. o.O;
home
you know, all this cost is only for movie studios and publishers who wish to keep their stranglehold on these movies. Yes, they're old, and they require money to keep them up and preserved... so that they may rerelease or resell them in the future. An obvious solution would be to release these old films into the public domain... then i'm sure any number of operations or groups would be more than happy to spend the money maintaining these films.
so your solution is to put the info onto DVDs, which you then follow with the statement that there is evidence that the media might breakdown after time... Sounds like such a cheap solution may not be so viable. Maybe not a quarter-million dollar/yr problem, but me thinks that it's going to cost slightly more than some walmart DVD-Rs and Bob the intern to change the DVDs as they pop outa the burner.
DVD's on average begin to experience decay within TWO YEARS of creation.
While the minimal decay is not noticed by you or me, it is noticeable by machines that copy things.
To obtain the same high end storage with no detectable loss offered by raid storage, you pretty much would need to copy the DVD's every 18 months or so. Expenses for doing this mount up pretty quickly.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They should just upload the data to the web and with all the copies made they could easily recreate the original. In other words...we'd be glad to help.
Are you talking DVD-Rs, or pressed DVDs, and what sorts of storage conditions? I would think a pressed DVD inside a nitrogen filled hermetically-sealed safe should be good for a very long time indeed.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Actually I said DVD or HD. There are also 2 different kinds of DVD, pressed DVD, and DVD-R. DVD-R do have problems with breakdown, but as far as I know the only problem with pressed DVDs is oxidation. In a pure Nitrogen environment, oxidation shouldn't be possible, so I see no reason why a pressed DVD in nitrogen would suffer any sort of degradation.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
This is not the first time this story I've seen people comment on how digital footage can be archived by storing it on DVD.
This is, in a word, ridiculous. MPEG-2 is a lossy format. The quality is good, of course, and perfectly acceptable to most audiences, but it's entirely unacceptable for an archival copy, which should ideally be stored in whatever format it was recorded in (which is typically lossless).
Ultimately, that's the difference between preserving analog and digital video: it's fairly cheap and easy to maintain a copy of a digital film of reasonably acceptable quality for viewing purposes. But preserving a pristine archival copy that can be later used as a master is considerably trickier than that, and requires a lot more overhead (currently) than analog preservation. There's also the degradation factor: degraded analog material is easier to restore than degraded digital material. Likewise, digital material typically requires more complicated (and more expensive) hardware to access than analog material.
The numbers seem slightly high to me, but not alarmingly so. The costs will come down over time, but digital will remain more expensive than analog for these purposes for a long time to come.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
I read the original article and I gather that the problem with maintaining digital copies is as much the choice of format as anything else. My newest PC can no longer render avi movies that my 2001 era digital camera took. I am sure that if I invested the time to find the right codec, I could read it, but the point is that even after you manage to find an archive medium that will last for decades without any deterioration, you next need to find a format that will survive. This includes the technology and software necessary to read the medium. It is becoming increasingly likely that all optical-based disks will become obsolete within the next ten years. Will the readers still work after that period of time? Or will some of the components fail over time? The problem of the movie industry is the same problem we face for our own digital archives, whether for business or personal use. If anybody wants to be able to read the current digital data you have to be prepared to constantly reformat and convert material or you will have to hire engineers and programmers to figure out how to extract the data.
Even when film is "preserved", it degrades significantly over time. There are a lot of older films where copies exist but are nearly unwatchable. The more expensive digital preservation has the extra benefit of actually preserving the film intact.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If all they stored was the finished film, then 90% of the commments in the original article would be applicable. But read the article - thats only a factor of 10 more expensive - not a big deal. The real problem is that they aren't storing the finished film. They are storing EVERYTHING. Every shot from every camera used during production (and because digital is "cheap", that means that a film can have 1000's of hours of footage, that now needs to be stored in lossless high definition format). Not to mention storing everything related to the post production special effects (dozens of effects in typical movies - 100's or 1000's in a big effects movie). Before digital, what was there that could be saved besides the dailies (which weren't that bad because directors were forced to be frugal with film do to its expense)? Now the storage needs require 100's or 1000's of hours of footage to be saved...with formats that take up a gig or more per second, on media that needs to be replaced or refreshed every few years.
Shit these fuckers talking about conventional technology. If current technology doesn't cut it, make something that will. Don't just sit around and whine about it.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
It has only been in the last 5-7 years that professional photographers have started to consider '35mm' format digital cameras as production ready for still photography, i.e. close enough to equaling film to make it worth their time. It is commonly accepted that a high-quality 35mm full frame color image contains about 20-25 megapixels of color and luminance data. Most Hollywood films were historically shot in what you might call "half 35mm", i.e., basically a frame size of 24x18mm, so use half that. A 70mm format image contains about 8-1/2 times more image size than a half frame 35, which is where IMAX size screens get their detail and fun. Times 24-30 frames per second, seconds per hour, 2 hrs, you get a minimum of around 2 terabytes of data. AKA 120-2 sided high density DVDs for the half 35mm copy, or 18 terabytes for the IMAX version. i.e. roughly 1100- 2 sided high density DVDS for the Imax version.
For archival purposes, consider the expense of all those DVDs vs keeping one master copy of the film in a can....
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
The original article, The Digital Dilemma, is all about licensing, redistribution rights, things like whether reformatting to avoid obsolescence is equivalent to making a derived work and thus require license fees and royalties (an issue even for the studios, depending on the artist's contracts). I've only briefly browsed it, but given that background I suspect that they're factoring guesstimates of this kind of thing into the costs... at any rate, it's more information to argue about.
They should just print the data in hex on some acid-free paper and throw into vacuum bags. Religious documents lasted (fairly well) for thousands of years on primitive paper. For extra security, print the MD5 sum of each page in its footer. W00t!
Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by moving to where you can't find them.
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.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
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.
Not to mention the digitising process that starts it all off. Few people use analog media for watching films these days.
...but most of it isn't worth archiving anyway. Keeping everything because it might be culturally enlightening someday is "hoarding." It's a mental disorder. Seriously: make your money on it, get your screen credit, release it on DVD, and then just stow it somewhere. If the original footage of Waterboy doesn't last 100 years, my great grandchildren will be none the worse off. The good stuff will stand the test of time due to continual reformatting as time goes by. We're not obligated to make things easier on future anthropologists.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
...they come back from the grave and haunt on the front page, no matter how hard you hit them on the head with the "dupe" tag - I think Max Brooks should update his Zombie Survival Guide to include dealing with undead Slashdot stories...
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
Do hard disks really sieze up if they don't get used?
Isn't there a better form of archival storage? Tape or something? Or better hard disks?
Must be the writer's strike.
feel sorry for them that the codec and format changes they are implementing to try and get us to buy three copies of the same movie are costing them money? Awww... poor MPAA. I will shed a tear for you next time I think about paying $10 to see a movie while eating my $30 popcorn.
You are obviously not an electronic mass storage professional, because your answer could not possibly be further from the truth. The fact that it got modded 2, Interesting) is interesting in that it proves that people on /. haven't got a clue either.
.mod file I could play out of my LPT-port-sound-contraption 18 years ago is now useless because mod players and those devices are far from ubiquitous (I found the .mod format converter, but can't find any schematics for that capacitor-LPT-sound-thingy I put together back in the day).
A hard drive is a mechanical part that will cease to function if the lubrication (I kid you not) goes dry. So sticking a whole bunch of hard drives in a safe for ten years most likely results in you scrapping 8 out of 10 disks for mechanical reasons. Then the magnetic information that is stored on those disks will degrade with time even under perfect conditions. This is why the shelf life of data on an inactive hard drive doesn't surpass 2 years.
DVD's and CD's supposedly should last for 20-100 years depending on whose marketing bullshit you are reading, but in practice up to 15 years is the maximum before the thing starts degrading. Tape suffers, albeit less, from the same ailment hard disks suffer from, even the current batch of LTO-3 and 4 WORM media.
The current generation of MO or UDO drives however use a laser to heat up particular clusters of particles after which it uses a magnet to create the 1 respectively the 0. This means that they are (nigh) impervious to magnetism or heat as long as those two are not combined. MO/UDO is therefore the only medium that will survive for long times on a shelf.
The obvious solution therefore, since HDD's are getting cheaper and bigger, is to stick all that data on active hard-disks, and keeping it alive. Keeping it alive means also having to do backups. All of this requires system administrators. And rules, management, business processes and whatnot, and at the end of the day you will have managed to build an expensive data center. It works, but not as cheaply as putting boxes of film in a basement for 50 years, sorted by title/alphabet.
Obviously, the physical survival of the media is not the only worry, we're also aware of the fact that the
But all that aside, this article is a dupe. And so are the comments claiming it's a dupe. I'm getting a strange sense of Deja-Vu, because it's not the first time I see ignorance on the subject of electronic data management either.
Or even a RAID, so you actually have to have degradation on 2 drives in the same place to lose any information.
Or ya could store it in film in the can-- seems like the rate of decay for Kodachrome was supposed to be about 180 years before Kodak pulled it [due to Fuji's competitive product Velvia making the K-14 process obsolete, by the way], and scan it into whatever digital format you need in 50 or 100 years....
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Ah yes, here it is. I don't usually complain about dupes, but 30 seconds with the site search turned that up - and it only took that long because the search was so slow.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Once you reach a point you are going to drop the film; post a copy of the data for download by whoever wants it.
You are the only person who can sell it; but lots of people will keep your data for you for free. And even offer it up for others to save for you as well.
The lost profits are probably less than the cost of archiving the material in 95% of the cases.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I believe the idea is to store them as data-DVD's, where it's just another way to store the bytes, in whatever format you want.
Ok, so HD is out (didn't know about the lubrication, thanks for the info). What breakdown process is involved with the CD/DVD? I know the -R format of both of those suffers from dye breakdown, but I thought the only danger pressed optical media faced was oxidation which should be possible to avoid by storing it in Nitrogen. Is there some other process that degrades pressed media I'm not aware of? Also for the HDD/data center solution, shouldn't you be able to reduce the overhead by just using mirroring hot-swapable HDD RAIDs and just having a tech swap out the drives as needed? I suppose the danger there is that with the rate HDD are updated the entire array could quickly go out of date, but maybe a networked cluster could offer some sort of solution. Instead of worrying about the particular hardware you just need software to make the system a node on the cluster and mirror data. As nodes die they could be replaced by newer hardware and you just update/port the client software as needed. Networking tech evolves at a much slower pace than HD or CPU so that should provide a little longevity.
As for formats, that's rather easily gotten around by storing everything in a well defined format that's recorded as well. So long as the codec documents are kept in a reasonably current format there should be no danger of losing the old data as converters could be written to update it to the latest formats.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
They just upload their movie to the FTP server, and everyone in the world backs it up.
I think I would like to go into the storage business. If this is even halfway true, then it looks like very little real cost, and boatloads of profit...
Hi, ever have an original thought? Oh sorry....
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
I'm not so sure. I was present at a mass sponge migration!
Duplicating is taking place. And, when duplicating takes place, that means there's more than one. There may be two or three, Miss Tyler, two, three, or four. I'm taking about dup'in'! Dup'in'! Duplication!
I didn't know if it was lossy or not. That's why I advocated copying it onto multiple formats. Also, I never said you should shrink it out of it's original format. If I was to backup onto a dual layer dvd I'd keep it in it's original lossless format and just burn the data. It might take a 50 pack or so. But, in storage on high quality DVD's I'm willing to bet it'll last a while.
Ironically, if they would just release older (say >10 years) material into the public domain; the collectors, fans, libraries, etc would have no trouble ensuring continuity of the data for hundreds of years.
Oh wait - that's right - it's about the future profit potential, not about altruistic archival of material for humanity. Personally, I make my living by copyright, as I'm guessing most Slashdot folks do. And yet, I maintain no illusions that my copyrights are going to maintain my income for the rest of my life, let alone my children's lives. This is just another example of how Hollywood feels they are somehow entitled to what the rest of the world has to work for.
Hey Hollywood: If you intend to make future profits from your copyrighted works, then fine - figure out the logistics of digital archival (and how to pay for it) yourselves. But don't think I'm going to shed so much as a single tear of sympathy over your "problems" of ensuring your future income.
"If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years."
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
That's a relief it's a dupe. For a second there I thought I'd zoned out and it was still two days until Christmas.
Hard drives, tapes and other devises store the data as magnetic fields representing bits. If I remember correctly, these magnetic fields will fade over time. For short term storage this is fine but, with time,the adjacent bits will eventually blur together. For long term storage, shouldn't optical storage be used? This would also eliminate the need for additional hardware, all you would need is some form of an appropriate vault.
Getting the torrent is free.
Although some of the suggestions I've read on slashdot seem to have missed the article addressing them; the price in question seems high.
How big is a digital master with a lossless compression? Would 40 Terrabytes do it?
To pick a technology at random: That would be 100 LTO3 tapes... 200 to have a duplicate of each tape.
That would be $16,000 to archive whatever you could fit on 40 Terrabytes.
According to Verbatim, an LTO3 tape has a storage life of 30 years. Assuming we halve that, we have just over $1000 per year in physical storage devices. We also have a days work for one individual for 15-years of storage (let's tack on another $1000 in inscidentals).
In 15 years you'll have to fire up the LTO3 you kept in storage and retrieve them to transfer them to whatever you are using then, but I doubt the costs will go up.
Buy a copy of WinRAR and a few spindles of quality media. Break the digital master into RAR files. Burn the RAR files DVD's as data files. Store the DVD's in the vault next to the film. Profit. How can this be more expensive than storeing film? Soulds like the people who are saying this be the same people involved in the production of so many awful movies. Same apparent lack of intelligence, they exhast their technical aptitude sharpening pencils, they have never backed up their own system and have probably lost data. All of this leads them to drool on themselves when confronted with something that requires a mildly technical solution that an above average middle school kid could implement.
Repost? What is this supposed to accomplish? Fighting bit rot of yesterday's news?
Wow. I'd almost forgotten 'bout that player. Good thing I found your schematic here.
Just download the v1.12 and read the included file, Mp112.doc. Look for the section headed "How to make a D/A converter for five pounds" and you'll be in business!
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I've seen more than a few TV shows documenting the great measures taken, at extreme expense, to "restore" old film footage that is about to turn to dust. While there is a lot of amazing work going on, it may illustrate that part of the problem is that they quite literally "toss the film in a warehouse and forget about it" for the next 50 years.
I believe to accurately represent the long term cost the film storage option needs to include the 10's or 100's of millions they have spent to restore old films that were degraded due to poor storage. At the price given I suspect it does not.
So the real news here is when you keep things on massive disk arrays the computer tells you each time a drive fails and someone goes out and replaces it. Where as when film turns to dust there's no warning; and often no one notices until it's too late.
Why not outsource it? There are thousands of people willing to maintain digital copies of those movies FOR FREE! Just create and submit a torrent and you would be amazed at all the free storage you'd get...
$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!!"
Is everyone a moron around here? The only solution I have ever seen for long term digital storage is by far the cheapest, and easiest - though not the most compact. What about 2D barcodes? Just PRINT the damn info onto paper (the 2D barcode stuff has pretty good data density) and stick it in a cabinet or two. Jeez, it shouldn't take a damn rocket scientist. That will be good for 100+ years, is easy to read back into VOLATILE storage again, can be duplicated infinitely and relatively cheaply, and requires no maintenance. What is wrong with you people??
The question isn't where can we store our terabytes and terabytes of information for a 100 years and never touch it, the real question is where can we store our terabytes of information and allow it to be used to generate copies for sale at any time in a current format? I imagine the answer for the industry will resemble the Internet Bookmobile, where a consumer needs only submit the name of the movie they want, indicate a format and shipping preference, and the movie arrives for set price - a portion of each sale will be applied to keep the data migrated to a fresh format, and when interest wanes, a studio could decide to migrate to a "final copy" and "burn" the film to celluloid. That would the last hope for a film, resulting in lowered storage costs for the long haul, at the expense of accessibility and flexability.
;^)
The problem is the current storage model doesn't take into account the long tail of retail, and ignores the ability of technology to create new revenue streams to fund storage options...
Just think, if a movie house could order up a "print" of any movie ever made and show it in a theater - and offer DVD, HD or Blu-Ray copies to be delivered to the home of anyone that wanted one..Heck, I'd pay REAL MONEY to see Stop Making Sense on a big screen with the sound turned up to 11
Ken
More quasi-informative tripe from mainstream media. I like old movies - a lot - so I'm a fan of Turner Classic Movies. From time to time, they've gone over what it took to restore this or that film to viewable, and those were in cold storage (and not all on celluose, either). The costs given by the article don't match reality.
While the subject is an interesting intellectual one, the entire comparison is specious for obvious reasons, including entropy.
Nothing to see here.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
If hard disks and DVDs will not last for 100 years, use early technology like punch-cards. If the film CAN last that long, make a new digital format, punch-film.
P.S.
Now, hire illegal aliens to make all the punches, and you can store a movie for the cost of two cases of beer.
myminicity link... again
--your friendly neighborhood anti-troll
Not being sure if this is meant to be funny or not, I'll provide a little math:
"Watercode" (a high density 2D barcode) is rated at 440 bytes/cm2 (Microsoft has a color 2D barcode which has maybe a 25% higher data density).
Disregarding the fact that you'd probably be storing the data on drums of paper, and not sheets, what follows is a calculation of the number of A4 sheets required to store a movie in original format.
A4 is 210x197 mm2 = 413.7 cm2.
At 440 bytes/cm2, that's 440*413.7 bytes/A4 = 182028 bytes/A4 ~ 0.2 MB / A4 (with very generous rounding up, so it covers the MS color barcode as well).
At several TB for a digitally shot movie master, that's... well... a lot. More than 5 million sheets of A4 paper per TB, in fact.
I'm not going to get into the whole weight or storage space issue here, let's just agree that's an unmanageable amount of paper...
Feel free to argue that modern laser printers have whatever high resolution you feel like using.... but there's a reason no commercially available barcode has that kind of data density. If you feel the job can be done much better, I suggest heading down to the patent office...
I know that it is going to change, and soon I'm thinking, but if you notice the pattern...they write something slightly relevant, then provide a link to ripway, contactlog, dwarfurl, xrl.com, etc...
The thing is, movies are typically shot in high definition nowadays. Those aren't going to fit on a DVD uncompressed, even a double layer DVD. Honestly, you'd have trouble fitting them on a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc without some form of lossy compression. And that's just the actual film itself, mind you, with all of the cut footage and extraneous material that is typically excised from the final product. It's not unusual for the total amount of deleted scenes, alternate takes, and so on, to equal or exceed the amount of material actual kept in the final cut of the movie.
And DVDs are a problematic storage medium, anyway, for archival purposes. Kept in a controlled environment, modern analog film will last for a very long time (a hundred years or more). And even if there is some degradation, it can be more easily reconstructed than digital media. On top of that, you need to contend with format shifting and other hurdles facing any kind of digital technology. Analog film from 1900 can still be played back on most modern projectors, and, even if you're deal with an atypical format, it's still relatively easy to deal with (frames of analog film are human readable). DVDs have been around for less than fifteen years, and we're already looking at BR or HD-DVD as possible successors. In fifty years I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if you have a hard time finding hardware that can read DVDs. Which means that a realistic preservation schedule will need to factor in format shifting every decade or so, which is a lot more attention than is required for analog media.
And that, of course, assumes that we're talking about legitimate DVD pressing facilities: DVD+/-R discs are not suitable for archival purposes, as their lifespan is considerably shorter. And that's an additional expense that is frequently beyond the means of smaller studios and independent filmmakers. The benefit of digital media is that it is comparatively inexpensive to produce and distribute. But only if you're doing so on a level that is not suitable for long-term storage and maintenance. The costs climb very quickly when trying to deal with those concerns. Until rather recently, the standard solution to this has actually been to shift back into an analog format for preservation purposes, but there's an increasing awareness that this is unacceptable for a variety of reasons.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Can you use that to store 4 terabytes permanently? If not, then it's not very useful for this purpose!
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I've got DVDs in my collection that are 10 years old. And they haven't been kept in a storage environment either. I find it hard to believe the assertion that they break down after 2 years.
This is digital data. There is either degradation that affects the data or there isn't.
Just for kicks I just pulled out my old collection of Redhat 6 made on an old DVD-R when it was current arround 1999. It reads perfectly.
The ultimate solution is one that lets you pull up the original from the archive in less than a day and be editable. You don't have to make a single large file out of the movie when you put it on disc. You can spread it out over serveral discs quite easily. Every operating system since dos supports this. No big deal. Also, the reason the file storage is so huge is the number of cuts they use. The 30 plus extra renders etc. All that plus the movie probably consumes a terabyte of space. Thats the equivalent of roughly 100 Dual layer discs or more. So that kinda of rules out DVD as a storage medium anyways. BR, and HD-DVD make a better storage option overall. But I'd use them as an onsite backup more than anything else. The other direction you can use is half a dozen Data tapes and stuff them in a Nitrogen filled safe. Companies have used it for years with no major issues. It's not like the data storage is really prohibitive unless you need same day access to it. Thats where the costs start to really climb.
Further, it costs a ton of money in disk space, mirroring, bandwidth, and power bills to maintain all those duplicates of the original.
Table-ized A.I.
Disk storage is increasing at an *exponential* rate. Think of the parable about grains of rice on a chessboard...that's what exponential is.
In fifty years a single desktop PC will be able to store every movie ever made in uncompressed format (no codec necessary). Your entire datacenter will cost less than the cost of storing a single film print.
No sig today...
Compression? We don't need no steenkin' compression...
No sig today...
>"not counting the fact that film is still considered superior in terms of
> contrast ranges compared to digital...?"
Ummm....movies are filmed, edited and post-processed in digital format.
>"It has only been in the last 5-7 years that professional photographers have
> started to consider '35mm' format digital cameras as production ready for still photography"
Oh, you're comparing professional studio equipment to 8-bit digital cameras...
>"roughly 1100- 2 sided high density DVDS for the Imax version."
You need to think outside your bedroom. I don't think they'll be using DVDs for this....
No sig today...
[500 years in the future]
Zernot, "Come over here I found an ancient data storage module!"
Flormplop, "Let's see if we can see any ancient videos."
*put data module into their super complex quantum computer*
Flormplop, "What's a W...M...A and Do You Want To Update Your Licenses?"
Zernot, "Shazbot!"
I presume you're talking about off-the-shelf CD-Rs, which certainly wouldn't be used here. Gold CDs are well worth the investment if you're planning long-term storage of data, and are certain to last at least reasonably near a century. Make a copy every ~50 years, and you have some extra insurance. Use some extra discs to store parity information (ala par2) and you have even more insurance against either a couple entire discs going bad, or several individual CDs being usable, but having a number of unreadable sectors.
Indeed. It suffers from several other issues as well. Degradation of the tape, wear and tear from reading the tape, any electromagnetic field (eg. static) etc.
The "current generation"? Are you suggesting there were previous generations of magneto-optical drives, that DIDN'T use OPTICS and MAGNETICS to store data?
These two sentences are bullshit from beginning to end. Sound like you've got lots of stock in Sony, or some other major MO company. Or at least you've bought-in to their bullshit press releases.
If you heat a MO disc up to it's "Currie Point/Temperature" the magnetic orientation (all stored data) will be erased. No magnetism is needed. In fact it is inherently true for any material that uses magnetism to store data. That is how MO discs are erased so they can be rewritten.
Optical discs are no more susceptible to heat than MO discs are, and aren't at all susceptible to magnetism (or more accurately, the potential for decay of a less robust magnetic layer). And it's not as if either is highly susceptible to heat, either... Unless you plan on keeping your discs in an oven, or have someone intentionally put the discs in a drive and trying to overwrite them, neither should degrade due to heat, within a century's time.
Finally, you neglect to mention that it's much more difficult to read MO discs than purely optical formats (CDs/DVDs/etc.). The equipment must be much more accurate to follow the tracks on the MO discs. Unlike purely optical discs, MO is highly sensitive to alignment issues. As such, the difficulties in recovering data from an aging or damaged MO drive are about the same experienced when recovering data from HDD platters (ie. alignment issues), as well as tapes, as you've mentioned. After a few decades, I'd be much more worried about being able to read ANYTHING from a MO disc, than I would a CD/DVD...
For rewritable media, MO is probably the most reliable format currently available. It supports around 1 million erase/rewrite cycles, compared to the ~100 with CD-RW. But it doesn't compare nearly as favorably to write-once optical media.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The reason paper is a preferred storage method to digital formats is NOT because paper has some special properties that prevent any degradation from occurring over the centuries. The reason paper is reliable, is that the written word is so incredibly low density, that extensive decay of paper over centuries does not render it unreadable.
As soon as you use high-density data formats to write on paper, that advantage disappears entirely, and every single lost particle becomes unrecoverable data.
If you took high-density bar-codes to the extreme, using a reliable backing material like metal, and putting it in a circular form to make reading it easier, you'd have reinvented the CD.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
When something is claimed to cost an order of magnitude more than it should, it's because someone WANTS it to be expensive.
If only they'd toss all that stuff into the public domain and bit-torrent. Then it would circulate forever "on-the-net" and not cost them a dime.
And both versions speak in general terms. I want to know the numbers.
I.e. How much DATA is saved for an all digital, big budget feature like Superman Returns (the example from TFA).
Is it Gigabytes, terabytes or Petabytes? That basic starting point would help me know if the $208K per year figure even begins to make seance.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
That basic starting point would help me know if the $208K per year figure even begins to make seance.
:)
If you're having a hard time figuring it out, why not ask the spirits?
Why hasn't anybody mentioned solid state disk yet? With no moving parts and presumably a ridiculous life span it seems like the way to go. If your willing to use lots of small disk instead of one large one, the price per GB is manageable. The cost per GB is also dropping steadily so this clearly becomes and more attractive solution in time. When coupled with codecs that have open source implementations it seems to be maintenance free future proof archival solution. No proprietary codec head aches, no dye deterioration, and no HD motor / lubrication problems.
just do what linus does. make the digital movie freely available and let internet maintain your backups...
Baboons are cute.
Your mod file example is great. It's a now archaic format which is no longer in vogue.
Fortunately the LPT port nonsense was a hardware specific nonsense completely independent of the format, and open source code which can reproduce the music on any modern platform is readily available. http://mikmod.raphnet.net/ http://www.modplug.com/ (sourcecode for modplug is availble, believe it or not)
There are also closed solutions: http://www.un4seen.com/
And there are industry standard sound libraries that do the job fine: http://www.fmod.org/
So, it seems that these antiquated technologies (mod dates to 1987) tend to get supported just fine.
-josh
They haven't been forthcoming either.
Can I borrow your crystal ball?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
In the initial editing, they need to dispose of obvious over-runs. Then a copy goes on fault-tolerant servers. The servers need to be mirrored around the world as well. Codecs are included on the servers. Amazon could do this for them today. Google could really set them up -- and make a backup copy of their own. G-)
...so, how about removing ALL digital rights management from the materials, and putting them up on the web? Suddenly, *someone* will have a copy of every movie, every nuance, every little clipped edit (there are fanbois for everything) FOREVER. Cost? Nothing.
(And yes, I know that some catastrophe could happen to our civilization, in which the internet would indeed go dark, like, say, a giant jet of relativistic particles from a nearby black hole. But in this case, all of humanity would be extinguished thus the loss of "Ice Pirates" and "The Muppet Movie" would perhaps not be such a big deal.)
-Styopa
Clearly, these guys are taking one film, and saying all the costs of storing that film, including technology changes, are attributed to the cost of storing that film.
Anyone serious about storing the film would give it to someone who stores a LOT of films.
Yes, storing it on redundant arrays in multiple locations in an uncompressed format is expensive. You have to buy the arrays, pay the rent, and pay some guy to make sure the arrays aren't going sown, and replace hard drives. But that's not the cost of storing a film. That's the cost of storing a BUNCH of them! An uncompressed film is 140gig. A several terrabyte array is $15k. Three of those plus rent, plus computers ($6000 for the three) and you're good for five years, at least. And that hold 15 films or so. I make the price of hardware $1k per year on hardware. Labor is almost nothing, since that laborer will be taken as just a few hours a week out of someone doing something else.
And as space scales up, the cost of doing this gets absurdly small.
Dumb study.
The young people here don't understand what the old fogeys know.
That box of family photos you haul out once or twice a year to share with others around the settee? Cost is one cardboard box and some space in the back of the closet. Brew a pot of coffee, place ladyfingers on some small plates, open the box and pass around the memories. Instant gratification, if you used instant coffee. And the photos look just as good, if not better, 30 years down the pike. Can't find that photo you remember, just dig down deeper in the box, you'll find it quickly.
Those photo collections you digitized and put on your hard disk, or uploaded to flickr, or left in your camera? Gotta run the electric. Gotta keep upgrading your PC because of planned obsolescence built into the software and OS. Can't easily share the pix around the settee, and - don't get ladyfinger crumbs in the keyboard, Uncle Fred! - there are no notes written on the pix so you're not certain when and where and who, and you can't find the photo you are looking for? Tough for you--all those sequentially numbered file names make no sense.
And the technique for cutting out that rat bastard who divorced your sister is more pleasing when you can snip him away with shears, rather than trying to photoshop him out of your collection.
So the family box of photos is the more pleasing and cost-effective way of storing and sharing photos.
All the motion image archivists I talk to prefer digital tape currently because of the long history and understanding of archiving analog tape that can be applied to digital tape (a 50+ year history now). None of the archivists I've talked to trust any of the optical media yet, but time may change this.
LTO is currently the preferred archival tape format because it is open, multi-vendor, and has a fairly predictable migration path to higher densities over time.
Just put it up on p2p. As long as someone is seeding/uploading, it doesn't matter if you lose part of the data.