The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies

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."

Perhaps they need to learning about DUPLICATION?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems Slashdot could teach them.

It's just a format refresh

[davidwr]

/. is refreshing their file-storage format to avoid obsolescence. This thread is in the new format. The one from two days ago is in the old format.

You know...

[Omeger]

DUPLICATION is a lot easier with digital forms of media. I mean, holy crap /., this is probably one of the fastest dupes in the same field of interest I've ever seen.

Re:

[Marcos Eliziario]

Look at the firehose...

Re:You know...

[sm62704]

DUPLICATION is a lot easier with digital forms of media. I mean, holy crap /., this is probably one of the fastest dupes in the same field of interest I've ever seen.

time

[Lord Ender]

This may be true, but the cost of preserving digital content is halving every year, and can digital content can persist indefinitely; while the cost of preserving film is generally going up, and film can not be preserved forever.

Not really

[ArchieBunker]

Its all about the storage medium used. You're telling me you want to rely on a hard drive thats been sitting in storage for half a century or film? Film can be restored and if the picture degrades then you stil have something to work with. What happens when you lose bytes here or there in your digital film? Pixelation or loss of a frame all together. Then comes the problem of codecs? Will anyone be able to play a VC-1 file 50 or 100 years from now?

Re:Not really

[orclevegam]

Then comes the problem of codecs? Will anyone be able to play a VC-1 file 50 or 100 years from now?

They will if you also store the algorithm the codec uses. You can always re-write a codec in the future, so long as you know how it's algorithm and data structures work.

Re:Not really

[PopeRatzo]

It appears to have finally happened: the ever-shrinking distance between now and nostalgia has finally reached its zero-state. We are now nostalgic for our present.

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.

Re:

[ColdWetDog]

Why should we spend any money storing the Dukes of Hazzard movie for 100 years ...

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

[orclevegam]

Coming up next "Ow! My Balls!" on the Violence Channel.

Re:

[AJWM]

It appears to have finally happened: the ever-shrinking distance between now and nostalgia has finally reached its zero-state. We are now nostalgic for our present.

Heck, I've been nostalgic for the future for a while now. It's almost 2008, where are our flying cars and cities on the Moon [dvdbeaver.com]?

Re:

[MightyYar]

You can't even tell ITS from IT'S right now!

You know, a real grammar Nazi would have put "it's" and "its" in quotes instead of simply capitalizing them.

Re:

[xSauronx]

so he's just a grammar socialist then?

Re:

[uradu]

I assume those ridiculous costs include periodic refreshing of all the data onto new media, and not just the physical cubbyhole to store the drives in. In that case your objection is moot. The great advantage digital storage has is that given proper media maintenance and periodic replication you will have pristine copies indefinitely, something that simply cannot be said of any analog technologies. Given the right equipment, this refreshing and replication process can be automated to such a high degree that

Re:Not really

[paulatz]

The cost is really ridiculous, releasing the master on bittorrent would be so much cheaper.

Re:

[CyberLord Seven]

Your are neglecting the cost of replication. That is one of the factors in the article.

This is not trivial. Codecs and hardware change. To preserve a digital copy of a film requires a paid employee to watch for changes in codecs and hardware. Then the production company must purchase a copy of the license to any new codecs. Then someone has to go back into the ever-growing vault of films with many multiples of data larger than film stock (that's also in the article) and basically re-create the Y2K fix

Re:

[MightyYar]

Couldn't you set up a giant datacenter that does nothing but store data in a safe way? The copying would come automatically as you upgrade the datacenter with more storage, and I doubt that the cost would increase too much over time since data constantly becomes more inexpensive to store.

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:

[MightyYar]

I think that you could probably safely compress all of the "extra" footage that you don't know whether it is worth keeping or not. Maybe hundreds of hours of the crew talking to one another while re-doing scenes will be interesting to someone down the line, but probably not. And I doubt that they will need the original quality to be intact in any event.

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:

[Captain Splendid]

What happens when a company goes bust and their codecs are not updated?

That's where OSS comes in. Give it time.

Re:

[TedTschopp]

I recommend that you try a different datacenter design. My point is that we are not talking about storing a file on a hard drive we are talking about storing a movie in a storage system. Just abstract the file system away from the physical hardware and the movie away from the file, and you solve this problem. These layers of abstraction, including with the codec, are all very easy, and very old, problems to solve in enterprise computing.

Re:

[encoderer]

exactly.

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 Whore]

You keep saying "store the codecs" which means you're not thinking about this problem in a sane fashion. You don't compress. At all. That's the point of archival. It's not a matter of some geek boy lossfully reencoding his porn collection to fit on CD. It's a matter of keeping the original source material forever. There's no codec here. Just store the data flat with as many bits of precision as you have in your source material. End of story. The only real question is do you store this on spinning disks or stopped disks. Put it on a bunch of hard drives with some parity and error correction codes. Then shut them all down along with the entire infrastructure needed to read the data. Periodically fire it back up to verify that any bit rot that has come along can be corrected and then shut it down again. Every ten years or so, migrate the whole thing to whatever is new in storage. But don't ever compress this shit.

Re:Not really

[CyberLord Seven]

It's not that simple.

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.

Re:

[ArsonSmith]

So you're saying that it's going to cost more to store more?

wow big surprise there.

Re:

[tm2b]

You're telling me you want to rely on a hard drive thats been sitting in storage for half a century

Absolutely, if that content is raw, uncompressed DV and the "hard drive" is a network of NAS systems duplicated across several storage depots across the world. It's not like we're talking about home hobbyists here.

Re:

[zippthorne]

"What happens when you lose bytes here or there in your digital film?"

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

dupe

[Lars T.]

Dupe [slashdot.org]

Not dupe, rerun.

[JamesTRexx]

Looks like /. has also been affected by the screenwriters strike. o.O;

Re:

[cgenman]

It's just their way of preserving the story.

Expensive Duplicates

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

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

[Falladir]

Because nobody wants to expend more than a few dozen gigabytes (at the MOST) on a movie for personal viewing purposes. The task here is to preserve the "originals," the full-resolution, lossless cuts that were filmed on the set. I think I read that the footage that actually appears in Spiderman 3 constitutes 4 TB of information. Consider that a bunch of un-used footage also needs to be saved, and you'll agree that only a few insane enthusiasts would ever be willing to download and preserve that amount of information (at least with technology as it is now).

Re:Expensive Duplicates

[smittyoneeach]

The obvious way to capitalize on the 4TB of data is to sell a new version every year with slightly lengthened scenes, out-takes, alternate endings, tie-ins, and boxed sets containing the previous and subsequent installments.
By 2015, you'll have "Deluxe Duke Spiderman 3 Power Gold Director's Cut Nukem Forever".
And you will like it.

Re:Expensive Duplicates

[TooMuchToDo]

By 2015, you'll have "Deluxe Duke Spiderman 3 Power Gold Director's Cut Nukem Forever".

I think you misspelled "Blade Runner, The Final Cut"

Re:

[ArsonSmith]

see right below the store for the little section that reads

> stuff,stuff,stuff,stuff (tagging beta)

and ad which ever you want. Instant editor moderation.

I must be missing something here...

[Pojut]

How does it cost more to store a bunch of files on a few duplicate hard drives than it does to maintain the facility AND personnel required to keep film negatives in excellent condition? I mean, isn't that one of the advantages to an all-digital film? Everything gets stored as a 0 and a 1, and can easily be duplicated however many times you want with no loss or degradation to the original source?

Someone care to explain why it costs so much to buy a few hard drives?

Re:

[Tsunayoshi]

Just a complete WAG here by someone who has no knowledge of the exact process:

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:

[ILuvRamen]

what the hell are you talking about? Put the video on a high capacity plastic storage medium like HD DVDs or holographic disks (yes they exist) and stick em in the cold storage. How fucking hard is that? Plus, can't hard drives sit there and keep their data unpowered, out of a server, out of a datacenter, in the regrigerator for a long time too? Surely not as long as plastic but why would you even say that they'd be constantly live and powered in a server? There's absolutely no point to that

Re:

[Tsunayoshi]

I said it was a WAG, for all I know they do store the stuff on plastic. However, the summary mentioned that costs skyrocket when storing the data from a 100% all-digital, so to me that implies a system that meets the needs from filming to production to editing to distribution to storage.

I'll agree that once a film has finished its useful life, it would probably be archived onto some sort of cold storage (plastic, or spun-down drives on 2nd/3rd tier storage), but during its active money-producing life, what

Re:

[Tsunayoshi]

Karma bonus?

OK, just take this little scenario: someone else posted about Spiderman 3 having 4TB of raw digital data, how would you store that data in such a way that the next time you need to access it you are guaranteed no degradation?

Re:I must be missing something here...

[pla]

It is not just buying another drive
$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.

Re:

[Tsunayoshi]

As I responded to someone else who mitigated costs in the same manner:

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:

[TooMuchToDo]

They should outsource the job to Google. They've built an entire distributed architecture to deal with the processing and storage of Massive amounts of data. And Google has tons of techs who aren't paid squat to replace components/systems in their clusters. The cluster is built to handle the redundancy, so you can have "minimum-wage drive jockeys" doing the monkey work.

Re:

[Tsunayoshi]

Then that goes back to my original point that is it more than just buying a disk and having a monkey copying data onto it.

I'm sure Google's clusters are a little more sophisticated than that, and that they would still charge a pretty penny to provided long term archival storage of hundreds of TB of data that required 100% data guarantee.

Re:

[Tsunayoshi]

I agree that you could mitigate a lot of the costs, but as a film company if my reason for existence is to make money from billions of dollars in films, I am going to have a system in place to damn well make sure I NEVER lose a single bit of data from all that money making IP. And that costs $$$.

Re:

[Falladir]

The article talks about the reasons that storing a digital movie is expensive, but it doesn't break things down or give us any hard facts. The one truly important question that any reader should be asking (if he's a computer user) is "how many Gigabytes or Terabytes are we talking, here." I think the answer is in this case a few dozen terabytes, and while the cost of storing that much information is kind of meaningful now, it's decreasing continuously. That the article ignores this trend is a serious lap

Re:

[Pojut]

I actually did read the whole article, and nowhere within that article (which the AC above me already stated) did it mention how much is being stored, what medium they are using to store it, where in the world they are storing it (cooler ambient temp means less cooling needed for the racks) etc. No details. Just that it costs an exorbitant amount more to store films digitally than it does to store them on film.

By the way, people might take you more seriously if you didn't toss out insults like some five y

Re:

[Smidge204]

I'm going to take a huge stab in the dark here regarding how much data they're storing...

Hi-Def 1080p is 1,920x1,080 resolution, 29.97 FPS, 32-bits per pixel. That's about 14GB per minute uncompressed, say 15GB/min with audio to make the math easier.

If a 100 min movie represents, say, a quarter of what was actually filmed and needs to be archived. 400min * 15GB/min = 6000GB or about 6TB of data *uncompressed*

1TB hard drives are available now for about $350 or so and I'm sure you can get bulk discounts.

Any a

Re:

[dtolman]

Congratulations - you just stored the master film copy. Multiply your guestimate by a factor of 2, and thats what hollywood says it costs.

You blew the second part though. What you see isn't even 1% of the original footage. Maybe 50 years ago the stuff on film was 25% of what was filmed. Now you have to archive 1000's of hours of raw footage and special effects data for just a single movie. In multiple locations.

And Hollywood has to do it for every film, because you never know when some young extra is go

Re:

[Smidge204]

More like they never know when they'll have to whip out a "director's cut" or "digitally remastered" version to prop up sluggish sales. Oh wait! You can't digitally remaster something that's already digital, can you? Hmm...

As I said, it was a stab in the dark. It's also uncompressed, and halving that (at least) without loss would be a simple task. It still blows half the article's arguments clean away: When you're paying under 30 cents per gigabyte media costs becomes much less of a problem.

If you have any

Re:

[dtolman]

Your numbers are way off. Actual filming tends to last around 6-10 weeks. But during that time they are filming 10-12 hours per day, with multiple film crews, each with multiple cameras.

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:

[rk]

Your points are well-taken, but the increased cost argument is somewhat lessened by the idea that with these increased costs comes also increased utility (your hot new star's early movie supporting role being an excellent example). That they are storing things now that never got stored at all before makes a direct cost comparison a dicey proposition.

If data volume increases greatly because of technological breakthroughs and how they are used, it stands to reason that archiving that data will become a mor

Re:

[Cromac]

These dumbasses are probably burning everything to CD-Rs or something.

Hey, all those cheap CompUSA disks have to be used somewhere now that the stores are closed...

Re:

[Firethorn]

Someone might say that hard drives are not an acceptable form of storage for long term-

Agree. Hard Drives are designed for active access, not creating archives.

A few hard drives replaced on a yearly basis could be under $1K. With the right machinery to do the copying, you might not even need much of a staff.

Adds up quick if you consider that if each movie takes up 4TB(using another poster's number for spiderman) - that's a minimum of 4 drives, more likely 5 or more for RAID 5 or even a RAID 6(able to recov

Re:I must be missing something here...

[Cromac]

It's to bad there isn't any warning when a drive interface is going to be retired, also to bad it happens so often people can hardly keep up...oh wait...

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.

I have dozens of 20+ year old CD's

[gatkinso]

that still play just fine.

Just an observation.

Re:

[oneiros27]

Pressed or burned CDs? Pressed tend to have a much longer shelf life, but they're significantly more expensive to master, as they expect to make up for having cheaper per-copy costs.

And how many 20+ yr old CDs do you have that _don't_ play just fine? If you have 24 ("dozens") that are fine, but 200 that aren't, then it's not particularly good for archiving. Even if you only lost 1%, someone has to determine at what point they need to do a media refresh so they don't lose the 1% and/or how many copies the

unedumicated

[peas_n_carrots]

This story must have been written by a journalist clueless in the ways of technology. How does storing a hard drive in a salt mine any more costly than storing a film version? Where does the extra electricity come in? Have one primary version, make a backup (or 2 or 3) and put them in storage. If you're paranoid, verify and/or re-duplicate every few years. The cost of verifying regularly vs reconstructing degraded film should be a wash at worst. It should easily favor the digital versions.

Re:uneducated

[CodeShark]

Guess who's uneducated here, and not counting the fact that film is still considered superior in terms of contrast ranges compared to digital...?

It has only been in the last 5-7 years that professional photographers have started to consider '35mm' format digital cameras as production ready for still photography, i.e. close enough to equaling film to make it worth their time. It is commonly accepted that a high-quality 35mm full frame color image contains about 20-25 megapixels of color and luminance data.

Re:

[orkysoft]

You could store it as a big stack of DVDs, but how about a few 500-1000GB hard drives?

Re:

[Belial6]

Or even a RAID, so you actually have to have degradation on 2 drives in the same place to lose any information.

Re:

[CodeShark]

Well, ya could do that. Hoping of course that there's no electromagnetic pulse, that the hard drives are accessible in 50 years, etc., that the data error rate and file structures don't get scrambled at all.

Or ya could store it in film in the can-- seems like the rate of decay for Kodachrome was supposed to be about 180 years before Kodak pulled it [due to Fuji's competitive product Velvia making the K-14 process obsolete, by the way], and scan it into whatever digital format you need in 50 or 100 years..

more people who don't know how to properly

[geekoid]

calculate computer costs.

Not a dupe!

[MiniMike]

This is just Slashdot's method for reducing storage costs!

Space Reduction?

[davidsyes]

Sounds like they need Slimfast or Sego....

CelluLOSE in humans is fat?

CelluLOID in film is SLIM

ANY ideas for product names (other than CompressFAST)?

Re:

[avandesande]

Cellulose is also a name for the fibers found in wood. Film stocks were originally made from cellulose nitrate and then cellulose acetate (much safer).

Another Idea

[avandesande]

How about they just shitcan everything and spare us another needless re-release?

My God! We've done it all wrong!

[PHAEDRU5]

Back to analog, everyone.

the preservation is better, though

[Trepidity]

Even when film is "preserved", it degrades significantly over time. There are a lot of older films where copies exist but are nearly unwatchable. The more expensive digital preservation has the extra benefit of actually preserving the film intact.

duped because _SLASHDOT DOES NOT GET IT_

[dtolman]

If all they stored was the finished film, then 90% of the commments in the original article would be applicable. But read the article - thats only a factor of 10 more expensive - not a big deal. The real problem is that they aren't storing the finished film. They are storing EVERYTHING. Every shot from every camera used during production (and because digital is "cheap", that means that a film can have 1000's of hours of footage, that now needs to be stored in lossless high definition format). Not to mentio

Re:

[avandesande]

They need to store all the props and sets too. Another good idea would be to freeze the actors in liquid nitrogen, maybe one day we could revive them for a second take.

Re:

[boyko.at.netqos]

Well, this is a simple problem with a simple solution: Don't save it in lossless high def!

One of my plans is to archive every shot from the documentary I'm currently making, shot in 1080/24f progressive. Of course, the files are going to be huge, but with H.264 compression at 10Mbps, you can archive -great- quality material, and still store 60 minutes of data on one 4.5GB disc. To me, that's one disc per tape; tedious work, but for educational purposes.

Of course, if I had Spiderman's budget...

Re:

[dtolman]

Thats great for personal storage, but what is a film company going to do with useless low def footage in 20 years when they want to rerelease SpiderMan in IMAX 3D at 10000x7000 resolution? Plus you need new extra's, maybe a new director's cut - maybe emphasize that young actor in the background who became the new Samuel L Jackson, etc...

Course we could all solve this problem by going back to reading or whatever. Then the studio's won't have to worry about archiving new films.

Come up with something.

[Lord Apathy]

Shit these fuckers talking about conventional technology. If current technology doesn't cut it, make something that will. Don't just sit around and whine about it.

Original Article - it's about IP rights

[argent]

The original article, The Digital Dilemma [nap.edu], is all about licensing, redistribution rights, things like whether reformatting to avoid obsolescence is equivalent to making a derived work and thus require license fees and royalties (an issue even for the studios, depending on the artist's contracts). I've only briefly browsed it, but given that background I suspect that they're factoring guesstimates of this kind of thing into the costs... at any rate, it's more information to argue about.

Someone needs to come up with a new method

[Mike Buddha]

Someone who cares ought to come up with a method of transferring digital information to celluloid so that it can be stored with the cheaper storage costs. I'm not talking about a print, but storing binary files on film. A 70mm reel ought to hold a ton of properly formatted digital data and error correction.

Cleaning and restoring film costs loads

[gilesjuk]

Not to mention the digitising process that starts it all off. Few people use analog media for watching films these days.

I know people worked hard on this stuff...

[Chysn]

...but most of it isn't worth archiving anyway. Keeping everything because it might be culturally enlightening someday is "hoarding." It's a mental disorder. Seriously: make your money on it, get your screen credit, release it on DVD, and then just stow it somewhere. If the original footage of Waterboy doesn't last 100 years, my great grandchildren will be none the worse off. The good stuff will stand the test of time due to continual reformatting as time goes by. We're not obligated to make things ea

Repeats

[fred fleenblat]

Must be the writer's strike.

Are we supposed to...

[cyber-dragon.net]

feel sorry for them that the codec and format changes they are implementing to try and get us to buy three copies of the same movie are costing them money? Awww... poor MPAA. I will shed a tear for you next time I think about paying $10 to see a movie while eating my $30 popcorn.

This looks familiar

[Tim C]

Ah yes, here it is [slashdot.org]. I don't usually complain about dupes, but 30 seconds with the site search turned that up - and it only took that long because the search was so slow.

Easy way to lower storage costs

[Maxo-Texas]

Once you reach a point you are going to drop the film; post a copy of the data for download by whoever wants it.
You are the only person who can sell it; but lots of people will keep your data for you for free. And even offer it up for others to save for you as well.

The lost profits are probably less than the cost of archiving the material in 95% of the cases.

Sounds Great To Me!!!

[Jane Q. Public]

I think I would like to go into the storage business. If this is even halfway true, then it looks like very little real cost, and boatloads of profit...

Thank God

[edwardpickman]

That's a relief it's a dupe. For a second there I thought I'd zoned out and it was still two days until Christmas.

WTF??

[IchBinEinPenguin]

$200K to keep a few bits from rotting?

...just as Hollywood's writers began their walkout.

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:

[GregPK]

I could see the cost exploding if they keep the data in a data wharehouse so that they can actively access it at any given time. However, if they were to put it on laser disc, blue ray, dvd, HDDVD and a hard drive. Then, leave it sitting in a vault they wouldn't have to worry about it. The hard part is still having ready easy access to the original file.

Re:

[Wildfire Darkstar]

This is not the first time this story I've seen people comment on how digital footage can be archived by storing it on DVD.

This is, in a word, ridiculous. MPEG-2 is a lossy format. The quality is good, of course, and perfectly acceptable to most audiences, but it's entirely unacceptable for an archival copy, which should ideally be stored in whatever format it was recorded in (which is typically lossless).

Ultimately, that's the difference between preserving analog and digital video: it's fairly cheap and ea

Re:

[GregPK]

I didn't know if it was lossy or not. That's why I advocated copying it onto multiple formats. Also, I never said you should shrink it out of it's original format. If I was to backup onto a dual layer dvd I'd keep it in it's original lossless format and just burn the data. It might take a 50 pack or so. But, in storage on high quality DVD's I'm willing to bet it'll last a while.

Read the previous /. story

[davidwr]

Most of the points worth discussing were brought up there.

Re:

[gurps_npc]

I work with DVDs and storage.

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:

[orclevegam]

Are you talking DVD-Rs, or pressed DVDs, and what sorts of storage conditions? I would think a pressed DVD inside a nitrogen filled hermetically-sealed safe should be good for a very long time indeed.

Re:... what?

[Chrisje]

You are obviously not an electronic mass storage professional, because your answer could not possibly be further from the truth. The fact that it got modded 2, Interesting) is interesting in that it proves that people on /. haven't got a clue either.

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 .mod file I could play out of my LPT-port-sound-contraption 18 years ago is now useless because mod players and those devices are far from ubiquitous (I found the .mod format converter, but can't find any schematics for that capacitor-LPT-sound-thingy I put together back in the day).

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.

Re:

[orclevegam]

Ok, so HD is out (didn't know about the lubrication, thanks for the info). What breakdown process is involved with the CD/DVD? I know the -R format of both of those suffers from dye breakdown, but I thought the only danger pressed optical media faced was oxidation which should be possible to avoid by storing it in Nitrogen. Is there some other process that degrades pressed media I'm not aware of? Also for the HDD/data center solution, shouldn't you be able to reduce the overhead by just using mirroring hot-

Re:

[UncleTogie]

Obviously, the physical survival of the media is not the only worry, we're also aware of the fact that the .mod file I could play out of my LPT-port-sound-contraption 18 years ago is now useless because mod players and those devices are far from ubiquitous (I found the .mod format converter, but can't find any schematics for that capacitor-LPT-sound-thingy I put together back in the day).

Wow. I'd almost forgotten 'bout that player. Good thing I found your schematic here. [awe.com]

Just download the v1.12 and read the included file, Mp112.doc. Look for the section headed "How to make a D/A converter for five pounds" and you'll be in business!

Re:

[MagikSlinger]

... better yet, plain old HDs and stick them in a hermetically sealed safe.

From TFA:

"If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years."

Re:

[orclevegam]

Actually I said DVD or HD. There are also 2 different kinds of DVD, pressed DVD, and DVD-R. DVD-R do have problems with breakdown, but as far as I know the only problem with pressed DVDs is oxidation. In a pure Nitrogen environment, oxidation shouldn't be possible, so I see no reason why a pressed DVD in nitrogen would suffer any sort of degradation.

Re:

[sm62704]

An obvious solution would be to release these old films into the public domain

Change the copyright laws back to what they were in 1900 and every movie, TV show, LP, CD, and tape made before 1987 will be in the public domain.

-mcgrew

Re:

[geminidomino]

I'm not so sure. I was present at a mass sponge migration!

Re:

[petrus4]

I remember the saying from my IRC days.

"The Warez must flow." ;-)

Re:

[Firethorn]

You'd be correct here, but storing a codec, heck entire computers and operating systems, isn't that big of a deal here.

This data is probably being stored in the studio quality MPEG standard I read about - it's like keeping a JPG of each frame, instead of deltas and occasional keyframes.

Increases the storage needs tremendously, but is less lossy than most formats, while still keeping storage needs to something sorta sane. That shouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon. Worst case, somebody should be able to