How long will our films survive?

[MojoTrancer]

While following the RED stuff going on today, I started to think about how the digital revolution will affect how movies are archived.

As more films are shot, edited, and shown digitally aren't we running the risk of losing almost an entire generation of films to obsolescence? New video technologies are constantly being rolled out. Old formats fall by the wayside. In 50 years what happens to a movie shot on DV, edited in quicktime, and then burned to DVD?

We can say what we want about the demise of film. And everyone sure has. No need to start that again. But the one great thing about film is its simplicity. If a roll of film is properly archived and cared for, then it can last for decades. And all you need to view it is the simplest of projectors.

Granted this isn't a problem that will plague Hollywood anytime soon. They will continue to make prints of their films for a long while to come. But I worry about small independents like us. There's a lot of quality work being put out by us little guys on our little cameras and we run the risk of it all just fading away because technology is always changing.

Just a thought.

 

[Greggl]

Same thing is risked by folks with digital still cameras. I've got family photos going
back 5 generations... post digital camera, I've got maybe 20 printed images, one set
of commercial family portraits and a ton of video. Luckily, I've got like 2000 feet
of super8 footage shot and some 35mm mopic footage.

All of us are going to have data archiving issues. My entire digital archive was
destroyed in hurricane wilma (word to the wise.. DVDs and CDs rust!) Only the
active items on the hard drive survived. CD/DVD is no where reliable as an
archive format.

Those film release prints and the post DI masters of major films wont be an issue.
Same goes for those shooting s16/16mm... we're the ones caught in an odd
situation. How to archive and how to 'future-proof' for playability in a decade/2
decades/5 decades. etc.

 

[Joe_Kras]

I've actually thought about this problem a lot, since receiving a few years ago several hundred feet of 16mm film home movies shot by my wife's family from 1927-1930. No question in my mind that they will outlast anything that I shoot in the present day on tape.

Digital technology is a two edged sword. The relative low cost allows us to shoot more than ever before. But the ever changing standards/storage solutions almost guarantee that every 15-20 years all kinds of great things will be lost forever.