Academy warns that movies shot or finished digitally face short lifespan

> consumers, because they want to use that data (i.e. listen to the music, watch the movies, see or print the pictures)

The problem with that theory is that the only items archived would be the current distributed version with the current distribution codec. As we all know, distribution codecs differ from acquisition and editing codecs - the short comings of this approach should be obvious. The second problem is that the current codec will not be the best codec for the next 5 years, or 10 or 20 or 30 or 50... Imagine shooting your awsomeness indie movie on an Epic and distributing it in 1080p but then what happens 20 years from now when 4k is the standard and the only copies are h.264 1080p (with distribution compression!)

> 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.

This is great if tastes do not change. Let's say someone is an obscure pioneer in their craft, under-appreciated in their time. Let's also say that tastes catch up with this person's pioneering aesthetic and they become wildly popular. That could never possibly happen right? Or let's say you are a couple of young film makers that make a very bad movie in an impossible to understand language that no one speaks but MUCH later in their careers they both become very notable artists and the once forgotten movie is rediscovered and brought back for distribution once again (William Shatner and Connie Hall anyone?) That could never happen, right?

The Academy report is not a rallying cry for film preservation - it's a wake up call for those relying on digital archive techniques and is worth considering.
 
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Buck Forester said:
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.
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We have the history of the past because the media was able to physically survive. Every single item you have mentioned for storage has MTBF (mean time before failure) rating. None of them are very long in any meaningful sense. Who in 100 years would be meaningfully "managing" archives of Beavis & Butthead, or even Nightline? It just isn't going to happen because the only interest will be academic interest.

But that is all just in the field of entertainment. Institutions like the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress are very concerned about this issue. Books with acidic paper are disintegrating on the shelves. Older microfiche materials are also problematic. There is so much information being generated right now in purely digital forms that will disappear within the next decade that it will make the mind boggle. What happens to the digital archives of a paper when it goes out of business? Have you ever tried a torrent search for a film that wasn't a huge hit that was released between 1995 and 2005? They are surprisingly difficult to find with reliable sources (and forget Netflix and Amazon, for that matter).

The fact is that only economically viable items will be preserved. While that is great, for those who are trying to learn about the past, it is a disaster in the digital making.
 
I'm a little amazed by all this. Didn't any of the writers of the article talk to somebody who knows anything at all about archiving digital content?

Florida state has approved R/W CD for archival storage for at least 20 years. And every year or two they increase that range. Other states may vary, but I think they all have similar rules. I'm not sure about federal rules.

Just because a disk is unreadable in a PC doesn't mean the data is gone. It just means you cannot read the content. Rest assured an expert with the right equipment can.

You can still buy a 3.5" floppy drive at Best Buy. I still have a working 5.25" floppy drive around here. The forensic labs, and computer recovery specialists have all the equipment to read any digital data that has ever been produced in any format ever invented. And that is not likely to change any day real soon. Or ever. (Even if all floppy drives disappears, we can just make a new one. The engineering specs are out there.)

Of course this is not free. Some money will have to be spent to preserve the digital copes, and to store them. But it's not like you can take that 100 year old film home and run it in your old projector. A little restoration work is required there too.

It seems to me that this is just sensationalism, and trying to create a problem where none actually exists. Saying things like "the movie could disappear before distribution is secured" sounds just stupid to me.

But as always;
Your mileage may vary, state and local taxes not included, some equipment optional, object may differ from illustration, optional equipment extra...
 
The thing about film is you don't have to decode it in order for it to be meaningfull, just hold it up to the light and LOOK.

Although acetate film base has a reletivly short life, estar is (If I remember correctly) archival to 500 year+, so for anything important a film out to RBG silver halide separations should do.

When people say that data on a DVD RW would be readable, that assumes that whoever is holding that disk A) knows what it is, B) has the technology to read it and C) has the technology and knowlege to decode it. None of these can be relied on.
 
OK, downloaded the full report. The issues they are talking about are a bit different from the article. But to be clear, archiving digital content is not a technical problem. It can be done, it can be managed, it can be kept in a readable format for all time. (I'm excluding the possibility that western civilization goes extinct, all humanity dies out, and some other civilization starts digging a couple of thousand years from now. They may have a problem reading our left over CDs. Although a good number of them will say AOL on the front, and have clues on how to use them printed on the label. I'm confident they'll figure it out.)

Now, to the problem in the report; keeping a single copy of your movie on a single Western Digital in your HP Proliant PC, kept in the corner of you spare bedroom, is probably not going to cut it for long term storage. And lacking the funds for forensic recovery once the hard drive dies means your movie is probably gone. That a number of film makers are unaware of this isn't really surprising either. They're film makers, not computer scientists. But this is an education problem and can be resolved with time and training. Or time and the school of hard knocks.

The other issue in the report is; what to archive and who should pay for it. With the current production level of digital content, and the current rate of increase in said production, this becomes a political issue. And as such is way above my pay grade. However; I don't think we should overlook the fact that a lot of the production is done by people "just pissing around with a camera" as our own Barry so eloquently put it in a different thread a while back. And as such is eminently forgettable. And I say that fully cognizant of the fact that my own productions - while of some value to myself and my immediate family - has little if any value to society and should not be preserved.

This of course does not negate the need for a solution to the archiving problem for the content deemed worthy. But this is not a new problem, nor a different one than what we have had to deal with since the beginning. Archiving costs money. Somebody has to pay for it. Nothing new here.
 
I wouls argue that 1-200 years from now, the most valued films will be "people just pissing around" ie, the much despised "home movie / video" because they provide more of an insight into the culture of the time than any number of "Hollywood Blockbusters" which are, frankly, here today, forgotten tomorrow"
 
Ancient artists used stone and clay not to create for eternity. There weren't any other materials. They always created for the here and now, for their own epoch. When they changed to canvas and paper simply because it was easier to work with. Same with digital media nowadays. It's easier to handle but we produce for the contemporary audience. So we shouldn't worry too much. At least I'm not one of those guys who want to cheat death with an eternal masterpiece.

But should we care a bit? Sure. Digital information will be more and more integrated into a digital cloud. Which could be a good thing because as a decentral system it is quite invulnerable to damage. At least while our digital civilization exists. Greek texts survived by an archaic cloud system: Monasteries all over the mediterranean were copying the works along the centuries. That system showed to be superior to centralized solutions like the library of Alexandria where many information got lost forever by fire, war, earthquakes and cultural changes.

I also think Industry and politics should agree on solid codecs for conservation, codecs that are guaranteed to be compatible "forever". For music it's certainly WAF, for photos TIFF could be supported and for movies Apple probably would like ProRes to be the choice... (The latter with tongue in cheek:laugh:)
 
daveswan said:
I wouls argue that 1-200 years from now, the most valued films will be "people just pissing around" ie, the much despised "home movie / video" because they provide more of an insight into the culture of the time than any number of "Hollywood Blockbusters" which are, frankly, here today, forgotten tomorrow"
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I think that's the only value any Hollywood film will have as well. When I'm watching a Hollywood movie on AMC that's decades old, I really don't enjoy them as entertainment. They seem like more of an anthropological study on how humans interacted with each other in that time period, and that's only in the last century. Alot of it is really quite alien viewed from this point in time. I can't imagine how any surviving media from our time would be viewed 200 or more years from now.
 
I'm surprised.

#1 I'm surprised the Academy is just now releasing a report on this (notice Part One, on the studios, was released in 2007???)

#2 I'm surprised that they feel so many indies are unprepared- I thought redundancy (and staggered redundancy) was commonplace.

#3 I'm surprised that so many feel files will be unplayable- yes, codecs will have to change (or who knows what kind of "player") as time passes, but it's not like it's an instant "Oh, we can't play this back!" moment.

There's plenty of Umatic and Betamax players available out there, and if you have material on those formats (I do), you should have transfered them a long time ago (I did, and will again).
 
As digital storage solutions get better and we're able to store more info in a smaller space, backing up will be easier. With Moore's law, stuff that seemed daunting to backup will seem like nothing in a couple of decades. Just twenty years ago, we were installing programs with floppies with a max capacity of 1.44 megabytes and which could be wiped out with a magnet. That's half an mp3. Now people can store their entire music collection in a 100 dollar hard drive the size of a couple deck of cards. Backing up the works of today will only become easier and cheaper. As long as people remotely care about saving their work, I don't think it should be a problem. Of course, this means that works deemed unimportant but later discovered to be genius may not make it (like with Van Gogh's). I guess it depends on how much the artist cares about his or her work.

The biggest risk seems to be family photos and videos. Unless there's the tech geek uncle making the memories, it doesn't seem like the average point and shooter will have the foresight to make proper backups.
 
There's also the occasional, by pure coincidence, accidentally saving and forgetting until later. Imagine how many digital files may be discovered, by the original owner, a decedent, or a complete stranger, when historically the owner did not intensionally preserve their information. There is also the obsessive owner who does everything in their ability to save everything, but also by pure coincidence, loses it all unexpectedly. Whether or not the original owner is or was aware of their preserved files is a mystery. Do the owners of the Dead Sea Scrolls know their ancient documents are still here, thousands of years later?
 
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Just wait until the future, when posthumanity is a reality, and everyone has the ability to upload their consciousness into a virtual world!
 
Mediums such as paper, film stone tablets etc. are just as likely to be wiped out as digital. All of those mediums erode and degrade over time unless stored properly. They are all just as susceptible to floods, earthquakes, rampaging armies and everything else you can think of.

I would bet that most of the content created since man was creating content is gone, lost to disaster, war, and normal environmental wear and tear. We have a very small sample of history to study. There is every reason to think that we are going to do a better job going forward than our ancestors did, because we are actually thinking about it.

But in the end it doesn't matter that much. Most of our content is not designed for long-term consumption. Future anthropologists aren't going to watch every movie or listen to every song ever made, and they don't need the source files.

They are going to watch a recovered Blu-Ray f "Soul Plane" and listen to "Together Forever" by Rick Astley and write their papers based on that!
 
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There's a lot of new backup solutions emerging today. Google/Facebook/Twitter/others have so much data it seems infinite compared to a movie. You could store your movie on amazon's S3, on both the East/West alone to ensure its safe, up until Amazon implodes or something. Other than that SSD are very archival if handled correctly (same as film). I don't really see a difference, especially since a digital film can be printed to film right and then create a reverse negative if needed for extra safety. But as said earlier the real threat is for indie filmmakers who have work that no one really cares about and have to rely on themselves to keep it safe (but now they can use the emerging technologies like S3 to store the data until is discovered). I think its even more threatening for amateurs shooting on film who have not choice but to put it in their refrig.
 
What a joke. First off, I'd like to remind the academy that every film now goes through the DI process. Thats how the vfx guys save your sorry asses every time the words, "we can fix it in post" are uttered on set.
So even if you aquire your footage on film it will be taking a stroll through the digital realm unless you are cutting on a movieola.

If the film manufacturers are trying to retain marketshare they can quit making up BS like this and use a simple 2 word marketing campaign: rolling shutter. Trust me thats plenty enough reason to use film...for now.
 
Rick Burnett said:
those people in the future will laugh at our primitive technology! :)
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Just like we laugh at the cave man and his hammer. We would be NOTHING without that genius and his mighty tool! just like future techno buffs won't be anything without us. :)
 
I haven't used any of these yet, but there are some companies producing gold based blu-ray discs with an archival rating of 200 years. ( accelerated aging tests, so who knows if they will actually last 200 years )

Blu-ray 200 Year Disc- 25pc Spindle : $280

I have some Kodak Gold CDs that I burned 20 years ago, that still look ( and function ) like new. ( made with the mighty $6,000 Philips 1x CD burner )
 
At work we have switched to archiving on duplicate SATA hard-drives ( it was cheap and fast to work with ), and on the first day of every new year I spin each drive up then turn Windows Indexing on and let it finish, then turn Windows Indexing off and let it finish. This forces the hard-drive to read every file on the drive and prevents demagnetization from taking place.

I also have every drive cataloged with a Windows app called SuperCat ( I've been using this software since the late 90's ), which creates a pseudo Windows Explorer image of each drive, which you can manually walk through just like Windows Explorer or you can search by name. ( makes it easy to know which archive drive to mount when you want to retrieve a project )
 
joe 1008 said:
Digital information will be more and more integrated into a digital cloud. Which could be a good thing because as a decentral system it is quite invulnerable to damage. At least while our digital civilization exists.
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Umm... that "at least" qualification is not a minor thing! The more connected electronic data become, the more vulnerable they might be to corruption, inadvertent or deliberate.

I'm quite surprised at the lack of perspective apparent in so many posts in this thread. A few posts back, Networker wrote: "You can still buy a 3.5" floppy drive at Best Buy. I still have a working 5.25" floppy drive around here. The forensic labs, and computer recovery specialists have all the equipment to read any digital data that has ever been produced in any format ever invented. And that is not likely to change any day real soon. Or ever. (Even if all floppy drives disappears, we can just make a new one. The engineering specs are out there.)" This is a rather naive view. As technologies proliferate and evolve, many of them become forgotten and for all practical purposes lost. The equipment and/or expertise needed to handle any particular format will become ever more scarce as time goes by, making it increasingly difficult--and eventually impossible--to access the data originally stored on the medium.
 
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