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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."
It seems Slashdot could teach them.
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.
Yeah, it costs a ton of money in disk space, mirroring, bandwidth, and power bills to maintain all those duplicates of the original.
/. 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.
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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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How about they just shitcan everything and spare us another needless re-release?
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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.
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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.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
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.
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.
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.