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
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.
/. 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!
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.
Back to analog, everyone.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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.
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.
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.
$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!!"