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.
Just imagine. (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's to hoping for a brighter future... for our children.
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well mosty of it is crap anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Preservation was a lot easier when the media lasted longer but by far the largest problem is the increase in the amount of data.
What is interesting is that old analog film & tape also degrades, but does so more gracefully. They also get degraded by reading, not just by storage. Archives of old footage etc have largely been converted to digital to allow older signals to be accessed without damaging the originals.
Re:That sounds high (Score:2, Insightful)
That's silly. I'm pretty sure some "Consultant" came up with that figure.
Why not just... (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who forget history... (Score:5, Insightful)
> Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it
Yes, and those who do study history are doomed to watch in frustration
as it is unwittingly repeated by those who do not
Re:Just imagine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, IF the older films are an authentic art that deserves preservation, the why is most of it scrapped on the cutting room floor? why are all the really old films sitting still on their Nitrate Stock in archives in hollywood slowly turing from film to dust?
AS others point out, released to the Net a movie is saved in various codecs, on various media (hard drive, tape CDR DVDR laserdisc even film FOR FREE just like music and most other data is. Horrible thought that; information in the hands of the people.... unsupervised, heck UN TAXED!
In the 15th century the Church tried desperately to put an end to this new Printing Press because it was putting their scribes out of work. They even excommunicated printers. Now we do the same only we use Lawyers.
I await the next turn of the wheel to see what damn foolishness humans are yet capable of..
Re:$208,569 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So pretty much ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is simple, copy it over frequently.
Yeah, from the article, are several silly things are going on here:
My favorite part: (Score:5, Insightful)
Leaving out the humongous math error, why can't you just store the digital fucking media in the same salt mine? The things that damage analog film are the same things that damage digital media.
Is it any wonder we have the expression "lies, damned lies, and statistics"? This article is all three, with some incompetency thrown in.
The answer is clear (Score:2, Insightful)
2/ Devise an obscure religion based on your film, spread it to as many people as possible.
3/ Wait.
As nearly as I can tell, the whole concept of recorded history probably ended when we developed means to record reality directly, rather than transcribing it to clay slabs, stone, and paper.
Capitalism to the rescue. (Score:2, Insightful)
Computing power used to be awfully expensive, too. Now we've got desktops that are capable of scientific computing sitting around at 99% idle all day. If it weren't for Vista, we wouldn't even be using a tenth of the memory built into them (sorry, had to stick a dig in there somewhere).
My point is that as the market demands new capabilities, technologies emerge that satisfy those needs. As time goes on, the efficiency of these technologies increases while costs decrease. It's just how things work. Today's data retention problems for studios will contribute to tomorrow's advances in long-term storage technology.
I can think of at least a couple of major companies that also have a vested interest in long term archival... Google... cough... Google...
Stupid article and stupider people (Score:5, Insightful)
Who gives a rats ass if a given copy of a film will degrade in 10 years. I can make a 100% perfect copy of the thing in minutes. Copy the data every year. Hell copy it 100 times. Copying also makes the obsolescence of formats meaningless.
I still have emails and RTF documents written in 1994. These are 100% perfect copies of the original data. Is that somehow to be interpreted by brain-dead fear-mongers that any day now my data will be "obsolete" since the obviously 15-year old media is almost degraded beyond recognition? Or are people a bit more intelligent and realize I have already copied this from hard drive to disc and back about 30 different times?
Re:Linus has already solved this problem (Score:5, Insightful)
- L. Torvalds
Re:Why not just... (Score:4, Insightful)
If just a DVD-quality copy of the final cut, then it's certainly not a problem.
If you are aiming at preserving the final cut in its glourious uber-HD, lightly compressed form, things get a bit trickier.
If you want it all - all the shots, the various data (textures, models, etc) used in digital production in their raw, original form, well, in that case we are speaking of storage space well beyond what you found even in a heavy torrent user's computer.
Re:Is it really that hard to solve? (Score:3, Insightful)
Type "dvd glass master" in Google's search box and you'll find out.
Not a new problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, I just heard that the studio that produced Aerosmith's first album has lost the masters, so they're going to re-record it.
This kind of problem isn't new, and blaming it on electronic media is silly.
Yes, you do have to take steps to ensure the availability of it in the future - but the same is true of analog versions too. If you don't have a good filing system, or your 'vault' is the backseat of a car in southern California, the reels are going to get damaged/destroyed/lost, too.
I was on a railroad photographers' list for a while, and I remember the digital/analog debate came up one time. Someone said, "I'll be laughing when you lose all your files because your hard drive crashed and don't have pictures any more!" Obviously he never considered he could easily lose his negatives/slides, or have them damaged in a flood or fire. Analog media has different risks and storage requirements, but they BOTH require proper storage. (And, frankly, digital has the additional advantage that it can be easily backed up at multiple sites with no loss in quality.)
Re:how much? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, higher density = shorter shelf life. I've tried to read in some 10 year old DAT tapes, and no luck at all (not that I needed the data, just to see if it would work).
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
> a reel with analog information, printed on some soon-to-be-brittle plastic?
> I'm very sure the latter will decay in a quicker fashion.
Someone can throw the latter through the window from the fifth floor in case of fire and hope it will survive, while I had a HD worth tens of movies (just worth... cough, cough) that died from a 1,5 m fall. Plus, I can explain anyone how to take care of a reel (keep on a safely closed place, out of humidity, direct sunlight, check it periodically and don't torch it).
You take money for a two hours course on how to take care of the place for six caretakers, salaries for three shifts a day with two caretakers at a time, payment for yearly visits of a security expert, investments in some fire prevention, security and environment monitoring material every five years, yearly bonuses, "update courses" and raises, good retirement plans and you can keep thousands of reels safe for decades at a relatively low cost.
Re:Well mosty of it is crap anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So pretty much ... (Score:5, Insightful)
In all seriousness, the biggest obstacle to preserving a history of our culture is copyright. If the owner of the copyright doesn't care to preserve the piece of our history that they have their monopoly on, the information will simply deteriorate and there is nothing legally that can be done about it. We can only hope that the evil dirty thieving pirates save our history for future generations.
yes and whocares - now for the cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes - You don't need to have 5.25" drive now to read back data that you stored onto an 'old' IDE drive 2 years ago. And that's a bad example because you can still get 5.25" drives. 200 years from now when we're working with crystalline storage methods, we won't have to read back from HDD platters.. just from the holographic storage drives that things were transferred to with the last generation of storage devices.
Will we still have film projectors 200 years from now? Possibly not.
Whocares - because the formats used to store digital film aren't exactly H.264 or whatever fancyschmancy codec the copyright-infringent care about; google 'digital intermediate'. And yes, those formats do tend to change, but they all remain lossless and, again, things can be transferred with each generation.
Will we still know what to do with film 200 years from now? Ahhh.. there's the kicker.. probably, yes.
This is also where the cost comes in - you have to keep upgrading to the latest formats and the latest storage devices to ensure that there will be no 'digital divide', so to speak.
With film, you don't incur this cost. It's lossy in an analog sense, but if somebody looks at a film reel 2,000 years from now - and we assume to still have the same visual system in our watersacks - it will be trivial for them to see, literally, that it is a series of pictures which, in succession, appear to animate. Even if there's no device to play them back then, it would be trivial to build one from scratch using very rudimentary knowledge.
With digital, even if you have the latest format and the latest hardware to read the device it's stored on, it is non-trivial for the layman to read this file and be able to put it back into a picture; in fact, it tends to take people with intricate knowledge of the device and the storage format.
Personally I'm all for doing both, costs be damned, if the material is important enough. That said, do we really need to hold on to all material forevermore? Like a history book, it should be enough to retain the highlights (be they positive or negative), and not cling onto minutiae, as a society. Similarly, like family archives, those who believe something to be well worth the preservation for future generations (either within the family or civilization as a whole), will - or at least should - do so on their own and have history prove them right, or wrong.
Re:How about a digital storage format... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:$208,569 (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not sure I'd call it "open sourcing" but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't call it "open sourcing" exactly, but let's just say that films won't soon go extinct [thepiratebay.com], at least as long as there are people willing to copy them.
Actually, that's how books survived. The only ancient books we have now are the ones people thought were important enough to copy regularly, plus a few random things that survived for a ridiculously long time.
Re:Linus has already solved this problem (Score:3, Insightful)
This comment really hits the nail on the head. Even worse is that it only favors what is popular at a given moment. What is popular today might not be as popular tomorrow, and what is popular after that could be different still. If we relied on the interest of individuals to preserve content, then all it takes is one uninterested generation for valuable content to be lost forever. It doesn't matter if people for the next thousand years would love to have that content, since once it is gone it is gone forever.
Systematic and planned archives are a way of normalizing out these sorts of temporary trends. When we take care to preserve the past, then we are making sure that future generations have the opportunity to decide what is and is not worth paying attention to.
Analog still not dead (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, digital archival of data, which can offer incredible clarity and potentially 1:1 accuracy in restoration often becomes an all-or-nothing proposition if even a tiny bit of the data is lost or altered. Even with file formats/codecs that offer some form of error correction or redundancy, the final result we may end up seeing could be little more than randomized shifts between a blank screen and a perfect image... all of which are swapped in and out so quickly, we may not see the recoverable parts long enough to identify any usable pattern.
For example, try comparing something like the "scrambled" channels (mostly the porn channels) on cable television back in the early to mid 90s to something like DirecTV during a heavy rain storm. Even though the cable stuff was typically visible warped and uncomfortable to look at, you at least had a good idea of exactly what was going on behind the scrambling, even without the audio channels. But, try watching a DirecTV signal under less than ideal weather conditions, and the best you get is a bounce between a random mosiac and pitch black, combined with severely degraded audio pops here and there. You're luck if you can even get a useful picture of anything on the screen, let alone being able to comprehend what is going on in the show itself.
That said, how difficult would it be to create a micro-film drive (photosensitive analog scanner/burner) that could not only store any document on a computer in an analog form, but do so in a format that could be interpreted entirely by the human eye using a proper magnifying device. For that matter, why not create a hybrid device that would store both an easily visible analog form of a document as a high-resolution thumbnail, along with a digital version using pattern of dots similar to how data would be stored on an optical disc. This way, no matter what device you use to extract the information, you'd always have the means to access the data you need.
Re:$208,569 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:yes and whocares - now for the cost (Score:2, Insightful)
So yeah, we need to save every single thing that we possibly can.