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.
Yeah, it costs a ton of money in disk space, mirroring, bandwidth, and power bills to maintain all those duplicates of the original.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
How about they just shitcan everything and spare us another needless re-release?
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The cost is really ridiculous, releasing the master on bittorrent would be so much cheaper.
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Coming up next "Ow! My Balls!" on the Violence Channel.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
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.