Afterlife Will Be Costly For Digital Films

Andy Updegrove writes "For a few years now we've been reading about the urgency of adopting open document formats to preserve written records. Now, a 74-page report from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences warns that digital films are as vulnerable to loss as digitized documents, but vastly more expensive to preserve — as much as $208,569 per year. The reasons are the same for video as for documents: magnetic media degrade quickly, and formats continue to be created and abandoned. If this sounds familiar and worrisome, it should. We are rushing pell-mell into a future where we only focus on the exciting benefits of new technologies without considering the qualities of older technologies that are equally important — such as ease of preservation — that may be lost or fatally compromised when we migrate to a new whiz-bang technology." Here's a registration-free link for the NYTimes article cited in Andy's post.

Linus has already solved this problem

[Anonymous Coward]

"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."

- L. Torvalds

Re:Why not just...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm doing my part to back up as much of what hollywood puts out as I can. I'm not a pirate - I'm actually saving them money!

Re:$208,569

[thegnu]

They had to hire an MSCE to migrate the data from proprietary Windows Long-Term Archival Backup Media Video format (.wltabmv) to the new, safer (from pirates and such, arrr) long-term Windows Long-Term Protected Archival Backup System Against Pirates And Intellectual Property Theft Format Media Video (.wltpabsapaiptfmv)

And some, god help them, migrated to Apple's Almost Better Than The Competition So You Can Feel Better About Using A Proprietary Format For Only Three Dollars a Pop Codec (.aabttcsycfbauapffotdapc). Those Apple Engineers cost bocoup bucks.

Re:$208,569

[omeomi]

I'd try flash memory or maybe even a punch-card-type system with machine readable data printed/stamped/cut on paper.

Yes, a punch-card system is perfect...until somebody drops the deck...

Re:$208,569

[Spudtrooper]

A game of 52 Million Card Pickup, anyone?

Re:Just imagine.

[CastrTroy]

See, we don't need to archive the old ones, we can just make a new version of the old movies.

Re:$208,569

[Yvan256]

How the hell they came up with $208k

Their system is for three backups with a cost of only 2666.67$ per backup, but since their two other backups are illegal copies of the first one, they added a 100 000$ fine on each of them.