Academy warns that movies shot or finished digitally face short lifespan

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Dark Side of the Camera
Sci-Tech report spotlights short lifespan of non-film formats

On the day that Sundance kicked off and Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy, the Motion Picture Academy threw a bucket of ice water on the digital filmmaking revolution.

Preserving movies is an ongoing issue for the entire industry, but a new report from the Acad warns that movies shot or finished digitally face a lifespan so short they can be lost even before they get distribution. Worse, indie and docu filmmakers, whose work is most vulnerable to this risk, seem oblivious to the danger.Those grim conclusions, found in the long-awaited Part Two of the Acad's Science & Technology Council "Digital Dilemma" report on the problems of digital preservation, will likely make for some somber chatter in Park City.
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whole article: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118048861?refcatid=1009
 
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This is the main reason I was so shocked at how quickly Hollywood seemed to give up on film.

It is just so easy for something to go wrong with a digital file, and then you lose everything, no chance at getting it back. It doesn't even have to involve physical damage to the drive. A file can go corrupt just like that, let alone considering how the materials involved in creating drives, optical media and tape don't last anywhere near as long as film.

Short of constantly backing up your data to multiple sources in multiple locations, which ultimately will probably cost more than storing a film reel, your content is at risk.

Somebody could take a knife to the entire length of a film reel, and with the enough care it could probably be put back together. Even if it had a seem running down the middle of the footage, whatever content was not destroyed by the physical damage would still be intact.

Yeah, a fire might destroy your film, but that same fire would destroy your hard-drives as well.
 
This is just sad. The "old school" grasping at any straws that justify their use of an environmentally irresponsible, antiquated technology. Back up your footage on numerous hard drives and keep them at your friends' houses if you're that paranoid about losing it. Good riddance to film.
 
Digital storage hasn't been around long enough for us to be absolutely sure it will or will not last under any circumstances. Are there any sources that state what people thought the lifespan of film would be when it was in it's infant stage in the late 1800s? Film used to be highly combustible and plenty of that type of film was destroyed in an instant.
 
I have a 10 year old G4 that has all of my music (my compositions from 2002 to 2011) and my early video work on it. In my arrogance I backed up the files on another harddrive, kept it redundant, and believed that I was untouchable. Last week, I tried to boot it up and got a invalid key length error. There are only a few things that I can do to salvage the machine, but the programs that were on it, running on OSX Tiger, are lost because I can't even download the programs that I paid for anymore and the copies I made don't seem to work, they are completely unsupported in every way shape and form. The guy from AVID told me to just pay for the newer versions, "cause they're just better anyway," and to stop worrying about the outdated version of the software I paid for, that was download only, and now is just an expired link.

However...

My buddy still has 1/4" tape from his father's composition work, and 8mm and 16mm film from back in the 60's and 70's...

All I'm saying is that there might be something to this...
 
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As is frequently the problem...

If you approach digital storage and acquisition from exactly the same perspective as film things look grim.

Digital is not film, and film is not digital. This has already been realized and dealt with in successfully and realistically in many places - for example, on set to editing. Copies are made things are backed up, and when a sensible digital workflow is built, data stays safe. It's when people try to use digital media in a film workflow that problems arise. If data doesn't make it to distribution because it got lost or destroyed, somebody somewhere messed up big time. And it was probably someone pretty high up the chain of things who decided - in keeping with a film workflow - that one copy of the data was enough.

There's more to storing digital data over long periods of time than just making a copy and sticking it on a shelf next to the original. Think about it - if you are worried that the first copy won't be viable in 10 years, why would you feel any safer with two copies of the exact same age stored on the exact same medium under the exact same conditions? That's like thinking "This loaf of bread looks like it'll go bad in a couple of days...I'd better buy two." And then walking into the cupboard and being shocked that - surprise! - both loaves are stale. Of course they are!

This is, of course, not to say that a mixture of digital and analog storage might be the best way forward. Digital makes a great working medium, but for long time storage it might not be a bad idea to maintain a digital copy as well as an analog for posterity.

And I'm happy to read in the article linked that this isn't a rallying cry for film - it's a warning for people to be seriously conscious about their data and an attempt to work with major resources (Library of Congress) to develop resilient and universal data storage systems.
 
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The archiving of digitally sourced material is a very broad issue that is worrisome across many fields. Banks and financial institutions are concerned about their record keeping, as are hospitals and libraries. Historians and archaeologists are concerned because digital files haven't proved to be worthy of the passage of time. Would we have the Dead Sea Scrolls if they had been saved on an SD card? We can take a look at accounting ledgers from the time of Hammurabi, but I can't get my Billy Joel concert bootleg CDs to read, even though they are less than a decade old.

Acetate stock is finicky and brittle, but the stuff they have stored right can still be "accessed."

This is a society-wide problem that doesn't appear to have any easy answers.
 
I probably should have read the article first but wouldn't saving to optical media be roughly equivalent to film? Maybe there's some irrefutable evidence that proves otherwise . . . That film will outlast optical media.

I do know that it's hard to rent a DVD now days without having the film restoration project advertising on it . . . Along with the statement that more than half the films ever made are gone forever.
 
I always back up my important material to two different physical locations and I use a RAID and keep spare drives incase something goes wrong. I've got files as old as 17 years old that are just as good today. Even if a file becomes corrupting, depending on how important it is, you can extract information from it. There is also a lot of software that can be used to extract files on drives that aren't working well like "Data Rescue" and "Disk Warrior" both of which I have used successfully.

The biggest thing is save your files in a non-proprietary format. My music, I save the stems as WAV or AIFF printed from the DAW when the project is done. Safest thing to do.

It's all about good protocols for working/archiving. Redundancy is a must.
 
Personally, I think this is a lot less of a concern than the article suggests. You don't just store a Blu-ray like a reel of film as the sole original source and leave it at that. In fact I think digital is safer and better. There are concerns about storing an original reel of film... fire, earthquake, sealing from elements, aging, losing it, mis-filing, theft, etc., etc. You can store digital copies at the same quality as the original and treat it like you would your investment portfolio... diversify. Online storage, hard drives, solid state drives of choice, etc., all in various locations. Those aren't necessarily expensive. As far as different formats becoming obsolete, I'd think the studios (and serious indies) would make sure their offerings are available for purchase as formats change over time.

As for the Dead Sea Scrolls, would we have those if they were shot in 35mm film and stored in a cave? I don't tink so. Not sure even film can last a couple thousand years. If they were stored on SD cards and CF cards and disks and harddrives and backed up to various locations throughout the world and managed accordingly, of course we'd still have them.

I don't come from any perspective of expertise here, but it seems like a common sense thing.
 
What about physically pressed optical media like CD/DVD/Blu-ray or the new M-Disc. I'm not talking about burned media you produce from home, but factory pressed discs that have physical pitts that are etched in the media. How can these go corrupt? Sure they can still be susceptible to environmental/weather damage like corrosion, but so is film; It's just a matter of storing it properly and having redundancy.

http://millenniata.com/m-disc/
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/92286-m-disc-is-a-dvd-made-out-of-stone-that-lasts-1000-years

Sure it's only the capacity of a DVD right now, but isn't technology there and just has to be scaled up?
 
Well I don't know but I've still got Kodachromes from the late '60s that are just as good (Or bad) as when I took them.

And a few years ago now a collegue asked me to print some glass negatives that she found when clearing a house. My guess (From the fashions) is that they were over 100 years old then, and most were easily printable, even the ones that were clearly wrecked had enough image for me to make a guess as to the period. By the looks of things they had been in a fire and got soaked putting it out. Not sure if my hard drives would survive that.

When it comes to archivality, Platinum Prints on meauseum paper are reconned to be the ultimate, but as we're talking film, not entierly OT.

The thing that nags me is, when our civilisation falls (As fall it will eventually), how much will future archeologists be able to know about us? I have a gut feeling they may know more about ancient egypt than about us, we may just be a mysterious lacuna in history.
 
daveswan said:
how much will future archeologists be able to know about us? I have a gut feeling they may know more about ancient egypt than about us, we may just be a mysterious lacuna in history.
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They may find some of those M-Discs intact, but have no player.
Or they also find a player, but USB and SATA extincted several hundred years ago.

Or they find that M-Disk and assume it must be the breast plate of
an ancient priest or some religious sun symbol used in a primitive cult.
(I wonder how much something like that happened to our archeologists today)

From the year 2000 till our downfall we will be a mysterious, dark and unknown culture to future scientists.
We will be an enigma.

I can hear them saying:
" We have all that stuff from WWI and WWII and all but around 2000 the suddenly where gone without leaving a further trace, probably some catastrophic event hit them and they all died. In some of the last documents we found they where talking about a thing called "Global Waring". They had a high priest named THE GORE and he waned them. They sacrificed money and probably even humans (hence the name Gore) but it didn't help"

So yeah, we will probably be the new Mayans.



Frank
 
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Well maybe by that time they'll be at USB2048 :) And hopefully it will be backwards compatible. But really, I'm not worried about it. I mean, if technology and invention continue in the future as they have from the past, those people in the future will laugh at our primitive technology! :)
 
digital is perfectly safe, you just have to think of new ways to make sure **** doesn't happen

for example: anything anybody ever uploaded to the ed2k or bittorrent network is still stored on somebody's computer - you couldn't delete that even if you hired thousands of lawyers and spent tens of millions per year trying

with digital, you can make as many copies as you want for relatively very low price - a program that has a few servers at each big university, connected to the web, storing all the important stuff you want to preserve, doesn't sound unreasonably expensive when compared with the current film-based systems

or, even better, make copyright last only five years (that's enough in my book), create a nice copyleft sharing system, and let people do that job for you
 
> This is just sad. The "old school" grasping at any straws that justify their use of an environmentally irresponsible,
> antiquated technology. Back up your footage on numerous hard drives and keep them at your friends' houses
> if you're that paranoid about losing it. Good riddance to film.

Nick Snow, if you are concerned about the environment, you should really look closer as to what is necessary to archive digital material - it's far more labor, energy and material intensive to archive digital data than film. Check in to it.

> or, even better, make copyright last only five years (that's enough in my book),
> create a nice copyleft sharing system, and let people do that job for you

Norman, If the copy right only lasts five years then who cares if the film is still around. Nothing will be saved. Who would invest in the resources to make it happen and why? Altruism? Can't count on that. Who decides what's important and what's not worthy? Putting it out to the cloud and "hoping" that somewhere out there someone has made a 4k uncompressed copy of your film and is going to spinning up the drives every month, parity checking the data, and backing that up those terabytes of data to a redundant hard drive every fives years is just wishful thinking. It'll get forgotten about and the data will become lost or corrupted and will disappear forever.
 
j said:
>
Who would invest in the resources to make it happen and why?
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consumers, because they want to use that data (i.e. listen to the music, watch the movies, see or print the pictures)
just give them free access to everything that's 5 years or older, and a perfectly legal P2P network with a distributed catalog, and everything will be safe as long as at least 3 people in the whole world are interested in it at every point in time
you can track the P2P network and add some public resources to make sure the least interesting things are not lost either, and even so it would end up really cheap

BTW, I'd be in favor of such short copyright model for other reasons too: I think it's a good balance between "we have to get our investment back" and "free access to culture will spring out a creative revolution you can't even dream about"
it can be a two-tier copyright: after 5 years, everybody can access and share freely, but only the copyright owner can use or distribute it for profit
 
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No way I want to have my years worth of work on one project be null in 5 years making it legal for the internet to take it and throw it around like worthless trash. And trust me I know all too well about the awesome people who STEAL movies via illegal digital download. This is IMHO, the single WORST THING that the indie film community faces today. Even if you make a project and it's good you still face the harsh reality that it will be STOLEN AND GIVEN AWAY FOR FREE BY THEIVES ON THE INTERNET. Sorry for the angry rant which is off topic, but both my features have been uploaded to the internet WITHIN LESS THAN A WEEK FROM THEIR NATIONAL RELEASE. If you support indie film making, if you want to see films with a truly independent and fresh take, THEN SUPPORT THE FILM MAKERS WHO MAKE THOSE MOVIES BY BUYING THEIR FILMS.
 
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If a movie is shot digitally and nobody likes it then yes it can get lost because no one is taking time to preserve it. But if a digitally shot movie is loved and cherished and is a masterpiece then the article they have written doesn't apply at all.
 
I think most of the comments here are based on relatively short timeframes. Sure you can put backups on hard drives and store them at the neighbors. But in the long term (to me long term is on the order of a century, but here we can use decades) you face a couple of hurdles. First is readability of the media. The media must survived in a readable form. The tape can't fall apart, the DVD dyes can't fail, the residual chemistry in the film can't destroy the image, etc. Second there must be a means of reading the media. It has been only a few short years since the 3.5" floppy disk. Who has a drive that can read one? As one technology fades to be replaced with another, the next hurdle is conversion. All of your archived media must be converted to the new storage medium. How much re-cataloguing might be implied? You must keep track of your assets. The current standard for long term data backups by businesses seems to be LTO tape, so the probability of having readable and accessible data over long time frames at this point appears to be with that media. It seems like the world is waiting for the development of a permanent archival solution and until that arrives we'll be either moving it or losing it.
 
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