Afterlife Will Be Costly For Digital Films 395
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.
how much? (Score:4, Informative)
I cant help but relate some personal experience here. I know its not production quality, or lots of information, but I recently pulled out my Apple IIe from storage. It included the original 5 1/4 floppy disks and drives.
There was also a cardboard box with ~150 floppy disks, some as old as 20+ years. NOT A SINGLE ONE WAS BAD. Yes, "Zork" still works!
Could it possibly be that the quality of media just isn't up to the demands of a longer life of storage anymore? We all know how Cadillac runs that racket, as in sell the crappy car, and make the money off replacement parts. Has media storage gone the same way? As in 'sell the media, but just good enough to work for x years' before being replaced. And with the demands to increase revenue year over year for public companies, perhaps that time-frame has become shorter and shorter over the years to keep the money flowing in.
Or am I just being too cynical? But you know, a world where such works as "Zork" can survive and "Legally Blonde" can not, on their respective media, might not be that bad.
Re:Well mosty of it is crap anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Also, the line in the article regarding digital editing is incorrect. Films are edited in digital form on the computer, but the edit decision list is given to a negative cutter who cuts the negative. There is no loss of quality editing digitally.
Hard drives don't "degrade" (Score:5, Informative)
The reasons are the same for video as for documents: magnetic media degrade quickly,
The myth of bit rot on hard drives is just that- a myth. It's been perpetuated for two decades by the idiot Steve Gibson, selling his own snake oil (Spinrite), and unfortunately, not enough people are calling him on it [radsoft.net]. I thought it actually did something too, until I read that post from someone who actually knows how modern drives work. As the author points out, there's a track that can only be written at the factory, and if what Gibson claimed were true, ALL drives would be dying left and right after a few years. Funny how I've found drives made almost a decade ago working just fine now...
The problem hasn't changed; it's mostly obsolescence in drive interfaces, and the drives themselves (for tapes.) PATA is common these days, but everything is going towards SATA, for example.
Both DAT and 8mm were in common use as little as 6-7 years ago...but you'd be fairly hard pressed to find a place to but either now save eBay. And...do YOU want to entrust a backup to an ebay drive?
Re:They are not crooks, they are fools? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the damage to Metropolis is due in large part to editing rather than damage of the film stock. Metropolis was edited early and often; the only time the whole, original film was viewed was during its original (and brief) German first-run. Subsequent German, US, and other world-wide releases contained major deletions, reordering of scenes, and other changes which significantly changed the storyline of the film. The only reason that we now know the original order the scenes were meant to go in, and just how much has been lost, is due to the discovery of the original score and title cards.
nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
The consumer format wars between Microsoft, Apple, Sony, and other companies have no influence on this.
Re:Is it really that hard to solve? (Score:5, Informative)
Beyond that, single-bit errors in encoded data streams (e.g. MPEG2, AVC, MP3, AC3) can lead to large distortions in the decoded data. You really have to store everything raw in order to reduce the chances of severe corruption and increase the chances of recovery.
Print to film is probably a good fallback plan (Score:2, Informative)
If the major studios demand it and are willing to pay higher prices for low manufacturing runs, film manufacturers will still make the film. I predict this will happen for the forseeable future.
By the way, nothing but cost says you can't take each element in a digital scene and print it out to its own frame in addition to or instead of printing out the movie frame-by-frame. Also, nothing says you have to use 35 or 70mm format: If your original digital image has more resolution than you can store on 70mm film you can use a larger format.
You can also use microfilm techniques to print technical information such as the descriptions of camera angles and even computer data files and computer code in human-readable, hex, or some other form to film for archiving, along with the computer code for the programs and enough information to build a virtual computer to interpret that code. Sure, it's a lot of information but remember, the goal is to put all of the information in a storage box and be able to retrieve it in 100 years and make use of it.
If they had done this level of preservation with old NASA computer data and data-descriptions we wouldn't have some of the problems we are having today with un-interpretable data.
Re:Linus has already solved this problem (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who#Missing_episodes [wikipedia.org]
Re:So pretty much ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Print to film is probably a good fallback plan (Score:3, Informative)
For any given resolution, there is a size of film that beats that resolution. Figure on about 100 line-pairs per millimeter of film for still frames, less for movie frames, and you'll be in good shape. If you want a nice margin of error, quadruple the size or resolution of whatever you are copying to in each direction. If your film hits the silver screen at 4,096 pixels in the vertical dimension, this is roughly 2000 line pairs or 20 millimeters of film, well within the bounds of standard movie film. Quadruple that and you've got 80mm. Granted that isn't a standard movie-film size but it's technically doable.
Color gamut may be an issue in edge cases, particularly if the digital color has a higher dynamic range than color film will support. Black and white film used for certain archival purposes has a dynamic range big enough to hold the 12-bits-per-color that digital cinemas use. Color film may be a problem though - either the dymanic range will have to be flattened a bit or the highlights or shadows sacrificed. Printing the film multiple times with different settings should preserve all the color information.
References: Digital Cinema [wikipedia.org].
When you watch a film-print movie you are not watching an original anyways. You are usually watching copy or even an nth-generation copy. Plus, if you watch any print played more than a few dozen times, the copy you are watching has scratches and other damage not intended by the artists.
Re:yes and whocares - now for the cost (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm not sure I'd call it "open sourcing" but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is it really that hard to solve? (Score:3, Informative)
A: That's an enormous load of bull. The average visual impact of a single block error on uncompressed video compared to theoretical 10x lossless compression would be effectively nil even before you take into account that the increased data loss from an error is canceled out by the increased likelihood of errors when you archive a larger amount of data.
B: Even if you don't compress it, that kind of data can be archived indefinitely (including making new copies every few years) for prices in the sub-$5000 range. sub-$10000/year, it could be continuously and readily accessible on a mid-range SAN storage device including electricity.
Even without lossless compression, the numbers you describe simply don't add up to very much data in today's terms. (310MB/sec * 3600 (seconds in an hour) * 3 (hours in a long movie) / 1024 (megabytes in a gigabyte) = 3270 / 1024 (gigabytes in a terabyte) = 3.2TB) A 6TB mid-tier (EMC Clariion, for example) SAN array will run you in the $8000 range after discounts. Archival storage only gets cheaper than that.
This is just another bullshit number Hollywood can spit out to include in the shady math it does to tell everybody they're not making any profit on their $300million blockbuster.
Re:$208,569 (Score:2, Informative)
mod it 'informative', mes petits.