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Television Media

NHK Plans 50-Year Digital Archive 65

Posted by timothy from the tetsujin.org-is-neat-too dept.
Tetsujin28 writes: "The Japan Times Online reports that NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.) is planning a digital video archive for all film and video footage from the company's 50 years in broadcasting. Construction of a new building to house the archive is to begin in January 2001, with completion expected in 2003."

"Programs from the archive will be accessible via personal computers in NHK's Tokyo broadcasting center, which will be linked to the archive via fiber optic lines. An NHK official also said that the company plans to make the archive accessible to outside users some time in the future. So, anyone have a list of good old-school anime this archive will contain?"

This is truly an ambitious project -- I wonder how many terabytes it will take to digitize that many years worth of film and TV. On the other hand, it seems to be inevitable, so it's only sensible to start now -- storage techniques and prices are sure to improve over the course of the project. I just hope they make the films available under reasonable terms. Note, this article was first posted to tetsujin.org, which is worth checking out for you Japanophiles.
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NHK Plans 50-Year Digital Archive More

NHK Plans 50-Year Digital Archive

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  • I appreciate this has some merit, I mean history is great and all.

    But is this really worth the amount of money that's being spent on it? I'm sure there are better things to do with that money, even if it would be to buy a new chair for everyone in the office.

    I suppose if i were going to be even more paranoid, this is complete BS, designed just to make themselves look better, and generate more income for themselves, completely apart from any merit that it may have. More media getting everyone to trust them, feed them their opinions.

    I can't see how anyone could approve of this, much less endorse it as people here seem to be doing.
  • Well, if it's high enough bitrate, MPEG is far better than film. After all, that's all DVD-Video is.

    I'd guess they'd archive a perfect-quality copy, and allow remote access to a toned down version.
    ---
  • Wow, it's encouraging to hear that. I don't have any first hand experience with it, I based my statements on things I've read, such interviews with film restorers like Robert A. Harris. People like him always talk gravely about what appallingly bad condition old movies are usually in. I suppose things must have gotten better, or perhaps they only take good care of the new stuff, and "old" films are left to rot. Dunno. Interesting info, though. Thanks for posting that.
  • 50 years?

    Ok, so she's born - I assume you don't want "pr0n" of NP until she's 16, so you want to see NP "pr0n" from ages 16-66 - 66 year old woman pr0n?

    Oh, wait; I forget. Multiple cameras. You could get her in her prime, for ten years with five cameras. So forget all that, keh?

  • I'm in shock at the schooling kids get today.

    Film is analog, it's "format" (har har) is created by actual light rays -> when you convert to digital you lose detail, always.

    Now there would be a school of thought that says that as analog deteriorates over time a digital copy is better in the long term. But in no way is digital as good "if it's a high enough bitrate".

  • Well, CD's have pleanty of bandwith to accuratly reproduce sound with a high dynamic range, low noise floor, and wider then necessary headroom.
    DVD's don't have any of this. They are nice enough to make a TV screen look good, but compared to the original (which could be a D1 (digital) tape or 35mm film) they suck.
    (ot- the main reason records have a reputation of good sounds is the fact that most recent CD's have virtually no dynamic range.. The audio signal is compressed(meaning dynamic range is reduced) and the volume is pushed to maximum to make the sound seem louder. Records typically don't have this done to them as much. Find some good Classical music CD's from the 80's, and listen for the huge difference in dynamic range we should be taking advantage of now...)
  • The heavily compressed (gotta love those MPEG2 artifacts, they really heighten the experience!), 720x480 images on DVDs are no match for even 16mm film, let alone 35mm.

    Amen, brother!

    As someone who every single week watches a strip of film that has been running for five years (replacing another copy that had been running for over a decade), I can tell you that the detail of the 35mm version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show exceeds *tremendously* the (very well produced) DVD. The scratches on the film are filtered out by your brain, while the fringe on the lamp in Columbia's bedroom is sharp in the film version, only hinted at on the DVD, and a blur of color when shown on a S-VHS connected televsion. While that's a small detail, things like expressions on the actor's faces when they are across the room come through on the film, while they don't on the DVD.

    Hell, I'm really pissed at the fact that DVDs will be the 8-track of the video world. They are better than VHS, but with HDTV on the horizon, they are also very much in danger of dying off quickly. It's almost a shame they came out - will the public (who just started buying into DVDs) go to a new format to support the new digital and High Definition televisions?

    I have a 5.1 DTS full digital setup, and the nicest thing about DVD is the sound. The video quite frankly stinks. Artifacts are substantially more annoying (IMHO) than a lesser quality signal. The only thing that really is bad when it comes to 35mm is the low framerate on a large screen causes "mental flicker" when panning or during a very active scene... the frames don't blend into a stream.

    BTW - if you want to see a very nicely produced DVD, check out the 25th Anniversary Rocky Horror Picture Show. I can strip out images and zoom in way past the limit of NTSC -- but the 35mm film is still much better. My votes for worst DVDs go to Metropolis or Neon Genesis Evangelion, Volume 1 (animation in general is encoded poorly with MPEG2). I was waiting for the DVDs of Eva to come out before collecting them. I may very well get the series on VHS instead (the production company changed after volume 1, so I'll give it another chance).

    Factoid - Of all the existing Star Trek series, which will look best in 2020? The original series... it was shot in 35mm, and the masters are still in archive, while the rest were shot to analog videotape. It's also a popular enough series to be remastered to whatever high definition format is available then.

    --
    Evan

  • Does this mean streaming video of Iron Chef will be available 24x7? I may never leave my computer again (not that i do very often anyway).
    ^. .^
  • Um, no.

    The King of the World likes digital formats, and prefers them. But they're not as good as the original 35mil, if you can get it, which you never can. Really though, I wasn't stating opinion and just fact - you loose a huge amount of detail when going digital. If you were to screen a theatre-sized image the affects of digital vs analog would be clear - digital sucks when it comes to archives.

    The King of the World needs to go over there now.

  • You can't watch film from the original archive streamed for two very good reasons -- it is very very difficult to stream and it ruins the film. Furthermore, just because it is archived, why does it have to be for public consumption? They're not exactly public records. They are private property, for the studios to use or abuse as they please, and I for one think it's great that they want to archive them for the future, regardless of the motive behind it. Perhaps this is some extension of the bullshit "free as in speech" nonsense pitched by the Open Source fools?

    What is with this whole "free as in speech" metaphor anyway? If I say something that does not inherently give you the right to use my speech in any way you see fit, especially not the right to reuse my speech as your own. This "free as in speech" nonsense has got to go. Pick a different metaphor that actually makes sense, instead of one designed to garner sympathy for your cause from people who haven't actually thought about what it means.

    Sorry.

    I get a little worked up sometimes when I hear the insane ravings of the "information wants to be free" crowd (arrrrggh! Another nasty one)

    I'll go back to bed now.
  • THE HELL With MPEG2/DVD !!!

    MPEG4 -> DivX ;-) [www.divx.st] is the way !

    --

  • The Inatheque http://inatheque.ina.fr/ [inatheque.ina.fr] (in french) records since 1995 all french radio and TV broadcasts. Everything is stored in a bunker-like complex and they have a high-speed network that the journalists use to access the archives. I was working at Andersen Consulting when they participated in the specifications for the project, and what I saw was quite impressive, especially the hardware involved.
  • Good point. Although I would imagine things like that are already pretty well taken care of by the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the various presidential libraries, etc.
  • I think you need to get a life if those are the best movies you can come up with. Fight Club absolutely kicked ass on DVD for instance. Never saw Rocky Horror Picture Show. I heard it was full of faggots.

    Actually, the same group who encoded and packaged Fight Club also did the Rocky Horror DVD. Both have the same better than NTSC quality tracks. In addition, the packaging for both were very similar. AFAIK, these are the only two DVDs so far put out by Pox's new premium DVD studio.

    Oh, and both featured Meat Loaf, although he didn't have women's breasts in Rocky.

    --
    Evan

  • I wonder (Score:3)

    by dragonfly_blue ( 101697 ) on Saturday October 21, 2000 @08:54PM (#685998) Homepage
    I wonder what the rates will be to access the information in the library? Does this remind anyone else of Stephenson's Snow Crash, when everything the gargoyles (people who document their surrounding digitally) record is uploaded to the Library of Congress, and the gargoyles receive royalties contingent on the material's popularity? Between this and the newly announced implantable GPS system [theregister.co.uk], the future is looking even more science fiction-y...
  • After the impending nuclear halocaust, I hate to think the only survivors will be Cockroaches, Pokemon and the Power Puff Girls....damn.

    I just hope for humanity's sake, they don't archive Star Trek Voyager!

    Someone better slip they guys at the network a fifty to make sure Babylon 5 is preserved for all time. (Along with visual records of Natalie Portman, Mel C, Alison Hannigan and Sarah Polley) ;-)
  • Hardware prices will always drop, but you can't just put things off forever.
  • As well as converting to digital, they are also putting all the data on smaller cassetes. As http://www.strl.nhk.or.jp/open99/co-4/shosai-e.htm l [nhk.or.jp] explains, the data/cassete volume ratio increases by 20 times(the small cassetes hold the same amount of data as D-3 cassetes but have a much smaller volume)
  • Sure they can do it, hell they can do anything they want, of course it may not be legal....

    but since its not going outside their corporate boundries in the first incarnation, i doubt it would have any legal problems....

    perhaps there will be legal problems if/when they open it up to outsiders, but i wouldn't be able to do anything but speculate if they were in america, and they're not so i have absolutely no idea of the legalities
  • I am sure NHK has a lot of influence, right? The people in charge must have some really "high-up" connections, right?

    So why don't they have the Japanese government ask the aliens to send a giant (but thanks to advanced alien technology, inexpensive) radio reflector into space so that after a few decades, our signals will come right back to us! Then we can have them received by a hyper-accurate radio telescope/transmitter on Earth that will send them back out again! No one will ever know! (As opposed to some radical new storage technology suddenly appearing on Earth!)

    The process could continue until we can invent a cheap archiving process capable of permanently storing all of our valuable data.

    If planetary disaster were to strike, I'd hate to think that the only remaining A/V content would be a few burned out Napster servers with nothing but Britney Spears / Limp Bizkit tracks, and a couple of hard drives containing Cartman's mom in a German schisse video.
  • and it shows [conhugeco.org]
    GORE LIEBERMAN 2000 MILITIA
  • What's with all this anti-Japanese bullcrap?

    OK, first of all, this sailor-suit and tentacle-porn stuff is not indicative of Japanese popular culture, or anything Japanese for that matter. They're spin-offs of Japanese pop culture popularized by...... AMERICANS! (much like Pokemon.)

    I'm Japanese and have lived in Japan all my life, and I have yet to see any of this "hentai" porn. It's probably more popular in the US than here.

    Also, there is no pornography whatsoever on mainstream Japanese TV. (Pornography laws are strict, even hardcore porno stuff is all censored)

    NHK (Nippon Housou Kyoukai) is a non-commercial channel, so you get stuff like news, documentaries, informative stuff. No commercials. Better than the "appeal-to-the-lowest-common-denominator" crap you get elsewhere.

  • I hope it becomes avaliable.. Anybody remember Time Gang Tuesday? I would love to get copies of that show. I only have 2 aging videotape episodes.
  • Theoretically, digital data lasts forever. Practically, it doesn't.

    Sure, you may make a few dozen copies, keep them in a controlled temp vault, etc, and ensure that at a minimum 2 copies are readable (and make more as necessary), but, ... technology *CHANGES*.

    MPEG is accessible now. Will it be accessible 10 years in the future? Likely, yes. 20 years? Uh... about the only things we can read from 20 years back now is ASCII data and programs that use a well-defined fileformat (like the z-machine). Other proprietary fileformats have to keep getting refreshed to the latest and greatest, a monumental task in itself. 30 years from now, MPEG might just be a distant memory, with few, if any, computers even able to play back the streams (and also, find a reader for the media it is on).

    So perhaps NHK would be copying the film onto archival film (film, vinyl (LP) and paper are one of the few mediums available that store data for a long time), and at the same time digitizing it. The digital copy is to be *searched* and *retrieved* quickly and easily, while the film is kept in enviromentally controlled vaults. Less wear and tear on the film, and the data is accessible in a more "today-ish" (i.e., in the next 10 years or so) format.

    Analog media: format doesn't 'wear out', but the media does.

    Digital media: media doesn't 'wear out' (easy to recopy data elsewhere), but the format does.

    If you want to store stuff for archiving in digital form, make sure you include a complete computer, reader, schematics and mechanical diagrams, technical documents on how to read the media and how it is encoded, gas generator, enough gas to extract all data to 'modernize' it as well as chemical breakdowns... just to keep a few movies in MPEG.
  • This is NHK, non-commercial, government funded TV. It'll be 50 years of period dramas (Jidai Geki, from whence came Lucas' Jedi), boring news programs and some REALLY, REALLY good (although occasionally faked) documentaries.
  • How much Japanese programming have you REALLY seen? This is NHK, remember. Publicly-funded, non-commercial television. Educational and occasionally odd but really funny anime, great documentaries, historical dramas, news.

    We used to watch TV all the time in Japan. When we moved to Canada we watched North-American programming for the two weeks we were staying in a hotel then made the conscious decision not to receive any broadcast TV at home. 60+ channels of 95% crap.
  • You forgot Nintama Rantaro! :-)

    Anime, educational and funny as hell!
  • NHK I believe is the largest Japanese Television company (comparable to FOX? CBS?) and has an enormous impact on Japanese society (and with the increasing popularity of Japanese animation and film here in the US, need I say more?). We already have a good idea about just how important Japan is to us and the rest of the world. NHK has now embarked upon an ambitious project that will most likely be of great benefit to the world. How is this not important news? Do you mean to tell me that if it isn't happening in America, it isn't important? So if it isn't about Microsoft, Intel, or O.J. Simpson, it isn't news? Most of the media in the US is already so ratings driven that we hardly get any real news to speak of from major new sources such as TV and newspapers. In giving us news we would never have heard of from other sources, news that come from outside the small world we live in. Slashdot is doing us a service. Particularly when they are telling us of a possible future news source (NHK archive). I find it incredible that people complain about the relevance of this article.
  • I personally think it would be much more entertaining, amazing, and useful if someone were to succeed in archiving all of the web-page content, links, information, and summaries, that make up the browsable portion of the Internet.

    I'd be even neater if it could be maintained. Jeez...just think: The world's largest, most diverse information source...akin to Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica. (never done)
  • It's probably NHK putting their own material into the archive. There is a heck of a lot of it.

    Disclaimer:
    I'm working on a similar project for a major US Network, and have actually demo'd my project for the guys from NHK.

  • Copyright issues? (Score:4)

    by D_Gr8_BoB ( 136268 ) on Saturday October 21, 2000 @07:48PM (#686014)
    I'm not entirely sure how this would work, but I can't help but think that television stations shouldn't have full rights to all of their content. In order to be able to offer public access to any of its content at any time, one would think the station would have to do quite a bit of renegotiation with the owners of said content. Normally, money exchanges hands each time something is broadcast, but this idea wouldn't work quite the same way with digital content. Does anyone have any more details or speculation on how this might be accomplished?
  • Imagine the possibilities, an archive storing every pr0n video made in the last 50 years! Not to mention Natalie Portman :)
  • I do agree that this sort of project is almost inevitable, but isn't it a little too early in tech-time to tackle these kinds of challenges?

    As the body of this posting states, prices in hardware will drop. These kinds of drops are cause for changes of plans. The bureaucracy involved in this sort of matter is high and can only slow down or kill the project all together.

    This kind of advancement also implies freedom of information (which I'm completely for), but there will always be men in suits that will have agendas to slow down the project.

  • Well, if it's high enough bitrate, MPEG is far better than film. After all, that's all DVD-Video is.

    Are you saying you think DVD-Video is better than 35mm film?

  • Why haven't US broadcasters done this? (Score:3)

    by ASCIIMan ( 47627 ) on Saturday October 21, 2000 @07:58PM (#686018)
    I mean, how about a Beowulf cluster of these!

    Wait! Before I get moderated down, think: How many times have you wished you had taped something because a few years later, you finally realized it was insanely funny/cool/etc. OR think about the other possibilities: no need for TIVO/Replay because you can get all the previously broadcast videos on your computer from the archive site? Granted, this will take alot of bandwidth, but isn't this what the Internet2 is supposed to be experimenting with: real-time or high-bandwidth applications with next-generation fibre backbones and faster routing architectures? (Wow, that was a lot of buzzwords)

    Anyways, I'm sure that if a service like this was set up, and advertized well, by any of the major networks today (maybe not CBS... j/k) they could create a large profit stream from all the people willing to put up with banner ads, or perhaps even short commercials at the beginning or end of downloaded archive video.

    Anyways, I really don't see why any of the media giants hasn't created somthing like this yet.

    BTW: If someone patents this in the US, consider this prior art.

  • Doesn't digital take less space? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Construction of an 11,000 sq.-meter, eight-story archive building will commence in January in Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture. It is expected to be completed in February 2003.

    After that...

    • They convert all the films/videotapes to digital format.
    • They put all the digital media inside the new building.
    • They trash all the old films/videotapes.
    • They wonder what to do with the 88,000 sq.-meter, twenty-story building that had all the films/videotapes.

  • Re:This is cool, but... (Score:4)

    by Apotsy ( 84148 ) on Saturday October 21, 2000 @09:57PM (#686020)
    The article doesn't specify, but I would imagine that for archival quality they would be using an uncompressed format (or lossless compression). I doubt anyone who knew what they were doing would allow lossy compression for a permanent archive.

    Decay of digital media can of course be overcome by simply making a new copy, but you have to be careful. Failure of digital media is usually a catastrophic failure; i.e., you lose everything all at once. With film, if it fades, you still get an image, just a faded one. With digital media, it's all or nothing. One day, poof! The disk is unreadable. You have to make sure and create a new copy often enough so that there is no danger of that happening.

    The thing is, film can be an archival-quality medium. With things like dye-transfer prints and silver-based separations, the image can last a long time with no degradation -- thousands of years in theory. Too bad major movie studios don't care about that. Many films have been lost permanently due to improper storage. Ironic that they lobby Congress for more protections for their "valuable property" while said property is rotting in a vault due to negligence. Does anybody wanna bet they're going to be just as sloppy with digital media? "Oops, we waited too long between making fresh copies, and the media it was stored on has become unreadable -- it's gone forever. Oh, well."

  • The internet2 was created by a bunch of univeresities just so that it wouldn't be burdened down by people doing things like this. The whole idea is that it not be used for commercial traffic, and will therefor remain generally uncongested and available for research.
  • I, for one, think this is a great idea. For those who doubt the usefulness of this, think of it in terms of original sources. In other words, most of the history we read is - to varying extents - revisionary. Having access to the immediate reactions of folks at the time would do a lot to minimize the impact of this. While you would still have to deal with the immediate revisionism inserted by the respective news agency(ies), this becomes less important as other news sources undertake the same project.

    For example, consider the Vietnam conflict. Much has been written about this episode in US history, and much of what's been written reflects the author's personal or institutional agenda. What if we had access not only to the original Walter Cronkite newscasts, but also to BBC, French, Chinese, and Vietnamese daily television broadcasts for the same period? Or even an open-source archive of reporting from individuals (something like that described in "Mother of Storms" by John Barnes [barnesandnoble.com]) I think something like this is a good first step towards removing the (often-unwanted) mediation that is so prevalent in modern culture.

    Someone else mentioned the Gargoyles in Stephenson's "Snow Crash" who constantly uploaded everything to the Library of Congress and were paid by access. I say this is an excellent proposition, but privatize it and make a million. As television and video become part of the historical record, it's high time we stopped seeing these records as ephemera and begin giving them the respect they deserve. Even if they are stilted and mediated, they reflect current viewpoints and attitudes, just as blackface minstrels did in just over a century ago.

  • Hardware prices will always drop, but there is a point where projects become economically viable (for whatever reason) - in their case, perhaps this is now.
  • I'm pretty sure Japan's actor guild (or equivalent) works on an entirely non-royalty based scheme (similar to the system that the Actor's guild are striking against). Hence, no need to exchange money each time something is broadcast.
  • Why just films, what about news stories from the war, JFK's asasination, moon landings.

  • what does geekswithguns.com have to do with pr0n? Who started this rumor. Xlogan, is that you? Head Geek in Charge geekswithguns.com
  • I was under the impression that Internet2 will be opened eventually, and the Universities will move on to Internet3, and so on. Or is it the Next Generation Internet, which is a different thing from Internet2, that is going to be opened?
  • Oh, they are, trust me!

    I'm one of the programming leads on a system to do this for one of the major networks. It's close to happening

    Disclaimer: I'm not speaking for my bosses, or offically
  • First off, I partially agree with you. However, i can tell you from personal experience that 50 year old 16mm unless stored in rigidly optimal conditions will look awful. (Have a look at the Star Wars special edition if you don't believe me, the stock was f**ked after 20 years, let alone 50). My main beef with digital is the format incompatibility you mention, and the eisk of EM damage......
  • MPEG quality doesn't really cut it (AKA DVD quality isn't broadcast quality).

    Most people think DVDs look good. If you ever get to a TV studio, ask to see some original footage - it blows DVD away. Your just used to looking at noisy signal.

    The technical problem is exactly that, and is actually more political than technical. What format(s) do you save the data in? It looks like the networks will continue to store the actual tapes for a long time, but they want to be able to do "Non Linear Editing" on line too. So, do you store broadcast quality video, or do you store a low res proxy? How about both, but then scrub the high res version after a time (Remember, the tape is still around)

    A lot of the reson for thsi kind of stuff is this. Researchers want to know what they have. Let's say they are doing a story on "Foo". They will look up every tape they have on "Foo", and order all 50 tapes, to see what the footage is. Most of these tapes are A)One of a kind, and B)Have to be shipped. If they had a way to show what was on the tape to the researcher, so the tape didn't have to be handled, things would be a lot easier. The thing is, how good does the proxy have to be?

    Base your answer on the fact that these archives can have on the order of 5 million hours tape in them, and grow by the order of 100-200 hours/week
  • yeah, I don't like anime. I must hate the Japanese.

    I also don't like Italian food. I must hate Italians too.

    Your logic is infallible.
  • It depends! It can run up to $300/second if you intend to rebroadcast it (Not kidding)

  • Well, can you name an old film that's worth saving!?

    Feed the trolls...

    While not all over 35 yeas old, here is my list (in no particular order -- it also doubles as a film recommendation list, BTW):

    • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
    • Doctor Zhivago
    • The Bridge on the River Kwai
    • How Green Was My Valley
    • Friendly Persuasion
    • The Manchurian Candidate
    • Citizen Kane
    • All Quiet on the Western Front
    • Twelve O'Clock High
    • Das Boot
    • Lawrence of Arabia
    • The Producers
    • The Sting

    Animal House, The Blues Brothers and Terminator pale in comparison.

    --

  • Hopefully you will see this late comment.

    I'm happy to see that there is at least one person left in the world with two working eyeball in his head who can see the difference between film and video.

    By the way, if you plan on running your brand-new print of Rocky Horror as long as your previous one (over a decade, whew!) you might want to consider using FilmGuard. It's a non-evaporative cleaner that is applied using rollerpads. You can learn more about it by going to Film-Tech.com [film-tech.com] and clicking on the "cleaning" link in the bottom browser frame. Film-Tech also has some nice weblog-like forums where projectionists from all over the world share tips and advice.

  • how? (Score:1)

    by Phawx ( 216550 )
    50 years of video is alot, wouldn't alot of the footage be lost among itself? I mean, so what if they archive it... Who's going to find it all and what kind of data access system would hold it all and be able to access it fast enough for 1000's of people to watch it at the same time, terabytes of raid on fiber? sounds extreamly expensive.
  • Digital only takes less space if it's just sitting there on a shelf (i.e. data tapes), but not by much (unless the data's compressed).

    Now, if you include the hardware that makes it all instantly and automagically accessable, there's no way it's going to take up less space (unless it's compressed - see above).

    In other words, if they're really intending on using this video library to store all their archives for easier accessibility and preserving the original quality to protect from deterioration of analog data over time, then I would expect that it is bigger than their old analog storage facility, especially if they built it big enough to hold future (still-to-be-produced) video.

  • A lot of film people are very uncomfortable with the quality of mpegs.

    It would be a shame to see the quality of film sacrificed for the sake of easy access.

    The other side of the coin, though...film degrades over time, while digital appears to be forever.

    I say "forver", cuz people used to say CDs would last "hundreds" of years, but many think the metallic substrates will decay enough to be unrecoverable after only 20 years or so.

    Well, I'm no video archiving guru, so if someone wants to comment on mpeg quality or long term data stability, I'd like to hear it.
  • DVD sure as hell beats the scratched up, been played 100 times 35mm I usually see in theaters.

    I don't know where people like you go to see movies. I hardly ever see problems at the theater I usually go to [centurytheaters.com]. I keep hearing about these "dirty, scratched up" film presentations, but I never see them. I guess I'm just spoiled. If the theater you go to does such a sloppy job, why don't you complain? Or try a different theater?

    The heavily compressed (gotta love those MPEG2 artifacts, they really heighten the experience!), 720x480 images on DVDs are no match for even 16mm film, let alone 35mm. Hell, 35mm has higher resolution than even HDTV. Have a look at this resolution chart [cinesite.com] for movie special effects. The effective resolution of film is about 4000x3000 for a full-frame image. You really prefer 720x480 DVDs to that?

    That's not even getting into the issues of color [earthlink.net] and brightness [dv.com] ranges, both of which are much greater on film than on video.

    I've no doubt that digital video will eventually replace film, but it's not good enough yet. Those people who go around saying it's already better have probably just never seen (or don't want to see) a really high-quality film presentation. Properly done, film still provides much greater image quality than any currently existing video system. (Not to say that video won't eventually catch up, but it's got a ways to go yet.)

  • Don't forget Giant Siezure Robot, and Mr. Sparkle! [tripod.com]

  • The theater you "usually go to" lists all of its shows as digital. Duh.

  • One of the great boons of this archiving will be the ability to look back on how people viewed the world--how they predicted the future and so on. Many of these predictions are available in print or online, but video is a quick dosage most of the time. As a resident of another nation, I'd be interested to see the perceptions of the world through the slant of television.

    I wonder if this opens up a world of lawsuits based on false coverage.
  • Too bad major movie studios don't care about that.

    I beg to differ. I spent some time as an intern at Warner Bros. TV animation, and I watched someone do editing for Powerpuff Girls. He would make his edits on the Avid, then go over to the other desk and make the same edits on film. He explained to me that they archive everything on film, because nobody really knows what will happen to digital media in 20 years or more, but film they know will last several lifetimes. So if they care enough to archive a children's cartoon to film, you'd better believe they keep good archives of their motion pictures, etc. They just may not have them publically accessable, and understanably so, so that you really wouldn't know if they did have good archives.
  • The theater you "usually go to" lists all of its shows as digital. Duh.

    Uh, they're talking about the sound not the image. Duh.

  • The official site with more information is available at:
    NHK Digital [nhk.or.jp]
    or NHK Digital(English translation) [nhk.or.jp]
  • i doubt that they would have broadcast demon tentacle hentai on the air. unless....

    anyway, this kinda stuff might be useful in an archive to future generations in case the world WERE to be merging with a dimension of tentacled monsters... yanno, as reference materials.
  • Just think... decades' worth of Doctor Who. (Not to mention The Goodies.)
  • but it should always be noted that when the cd starts to degrade, you can duplicate it without any quality loss... so the cd still has the POSSIBILITY at least of being eternal, whereass the film has absolutely no chance...
  • Anime! Anime! Anime! *droooooool*

    But seriously, I have to echo several others: can they do this? Aren't there copyright issues at stake?
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