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The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Dec 26, 2007 01:46 PM
from the new-zombie-films dept.
from the new-zombie-films dept.
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."
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Perhaps they need to learning about DUPLICATION? (Score:5, Funny)
It's just a format refresh (Score:3, Funny)
You know... (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:You know... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
time (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Because at the rate we're going in terms of quality (vs. quantity), the "Dukes of Hazzard" may represent a pinnacle of entertainment achievement. A scary thought, but look at what's on the tube today and run that out for a couple of more decades....
Re:Not really (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not really (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what kind of data volume we are talking about, but for the $1059/year that it costs to store a film print, Amazon's S3 will store over 588 GB worth of data. For the $12,514 quoted in the article, they could sto
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 ro
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's where OSS comes in. Give it time.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your error-correcting codes do their job and correct the error. They also gives you a tangible warning sign for when it's time to refresh the media: when you no longer get 100% reads (or when the error% exceeds some acceptable threshold that happens to be well below the ecc's max error rate), you move to new media.
And you do ridiculous amounts of parity bits, like O(size of the data) amounts of parity.
If you're really concerned about fut
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This "study" is probably from a manager barking off orders to a bean counter:
1. determine how much HD space we need per movie
2. figure out the cost
3. multiply that by a format refresh every 2 years
4. come up with an absurd guess on how expensive it will be to maintain codecs and compatible systems
5. act like this system will have no business utility other than storing archived movies
6. add it all up
7. divide by number of movies sold so we can figure out how much to raise prices, then multiply that n
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Not really (Score:4, Informative)
The article is very clear that digital film production creates much more data!
Directors no longer need to husband expensive film stock so they often leave camera rolling while they work out scenes. This is not necessarily garbage footage that can be discarded. Some of this material will be valuable to film historians and also financially valuable as it can be filler for the "extras" that are now included on DVDs.
Digital production creates a much larger set of data that needs to be preserved and updated.
Parent
dupe (Score:2, Funny)
Not dupe, rerun. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Expensive Duplicates (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it costs a ton of money in disk space, mirroring, bandwidth, and power bills to maintain all those duplicates of the original [slashdot.org].
Re:Expensive Duplicates (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Expensive Duplicates (Score:4, Funny)
By 2015, you'll have "Deluxe Duke Spiderman 3 Power Gold Director's Cut Nukem Forever".
And you will like it.
Parent
Re:Expensive Duplicates (Score:5, Funny)
I think you misspelled "Blade Runner, The Final Cut"
Parent
I must be missing something here... (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone care to explain why it costs so much to buy a few hard drives?
Re: (Score:2)
It is not just buying another drive. Other costs include:
- power for the drive(s)
- power for the server(s) using the drive(s)
- costs of the backup architecture for DR
- costs of cooling the datacenter housing all of the above
- maintenance agreement costs for all of the above
- costs related to the admins who manage all of the above (salary, benefits, etc.)
I am missing quite a few things in there as well, such as off-siting DR copie
Re:I must be missing something here... (Score:4, Interesting)
$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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If your business machine depends guaranteed access to millions of $$ of digital IP, are you going to rely on "minimum-wage drive jockeys" swapping out cheap disks to archive your data?
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 "
Re:I must be missing something here... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
I have dozens of 20+ year old CD's (Score:2)
Just an observation.
unedumicated (Score:2, Insightful)
more people who don't know how to properly (Score:2)
Not a dupe! (Score:2, Funny)
Space Reduction? (Score:2)
CelluLOSE in humans is fat?
CelluLOID in film is SLIM
ANY ideas for product names (other than CompressFAST)?
Re: (Score:2)
Another Idea (Score:5, Funny)
My God! We've done it all wrong! (Score:3, Funny)
Someone needs to come up with a new method (Score:4, Interesting)
Thank God (Score:4, Funny)
WTF?? (Score:3, Insightful)
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!!"
Re: (Score:2)
Read the previous /. story (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:... what? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent