Is digital going make film go extinct?

I agree film degrades but they are still restoring from negatives and prints that were done decades ago but digital storage can change with the blink of a service pack up-date?

I still have my father's colour slide archive from the 1960's and apart from the first film that was the cheapie that came with his kodak 127 camera all the rest are in pristine condition, I also have all my own archive on film but most of my digital photo's have been lost to system corruptions and hard disc failure over the years.

I don't shoot on film myself these days but accept that most of my media may be lost due to bad or un-workeable system management or future corruptions.
 
YEs digital storage can change in the blink of an eye.... I have files moved from 5.25 to 3.5 disks to hard drives... though the hard drives they are on are only 6 months old. The original ones have been replaced several times over. I have gone through TOS (Atari) Gem (Digitial Research) DOS, Win3.1, 95, 98, XP, 7 and Unix. the files are still exactly as the were when captured.

You mentioned digital corruption.... I do multiple backups. All it needs is a fire, flood etc.... just the same as for film. Though how do you back up a film? You can't?

You have to take care storing digital data as much as you would film. the threats are different. But I can back up my entire digital collection to the other side of the world in about 40 minutes. It also costs less than trying to store boxes of film in idea storage (temperature and humidity)

As all the digital file formats have been recorded, hacked and are available if the original SW or the 3rd party SW is not available to read them it is not impossible to write your own (or more likely find some one else who as done it). In another place people were yelling about obsolete file formats and within seconds we could find multiple file readers and converters for digital image formats that were proprietary and went obsolete over 15 years ago. Most of them free or inexpensive...

So when the last slide or film projector or scanner goes obsolete how are you going to build your own? Most will be museum peices or collectors items with a price tag to match.

As I said digital imaging (still or moving) separates the content from the medium.

For film you will always need mechanical devices which you may not be able to find or make. For digital all you need is a computer (laptop, desktop, tablet or what ever) and a SW development package for it. OK so it is a LOT easier for stills than movies but you only have to look at the Sw that is out there to see it won't be a problem. there will always be at least one geek who will do/has done it.
 
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Digital storage has the distinct advantage of keeping an exact image. While copying a film always introduces some noise in the result, digital copies are pure clones.
The thing is all the standards, formats, workflows, etc (and their obsoletion) in the past have created a twisted image of digital as unreliable and unpredictable. Add to this the natural suspicion of oldschool guys to newer tech, and you can see why many consider film the only reliable long term storage medium.
But it is, of course, a simple matter of time. All that's needed is the adoption of high capacity digital storage with no moving parts and long term stability, which will need less frequent backup.

As for the filming side, if you aren't Spielberg or anyone who can afford buying a film factory, you WILL be shooting digital only very soon.
Stills is another matter. There is a much larger niche. There are more manufacturers of film for stills. And film following is still quite strong, especially for b&w photography. And shooting stills (especially as a hobby) puts less pressure on the shooter than shooting moving images commercially. I still shoot a roll or two occasionally just for the heck of it, and for the joy of the process, but I will no way shoot all my stills on film, neither would I bother shooting moving pictures on film.
 
The thing with film storage is you have full 4K resolution (if you need it) and still you could pick up a preserved film from the 20s and watch it, project it, even digitise it.

The same can't be said for digital. I have HDDs that are less than two years old that are losing data. LTO is only backwards compatible by two versions, meaning you're consistently forced to re-copy, re-transfer. All the time, whenever something new comes out. You're looking at new codecs - who's to say that in 20 years .mov is going to be any kind of standard wrapper? Who's to say that in 20 years any flavour of .mov (be it H264, ProRes or otherwise) will even be playable? Who's to say in 20 years that DPX or DCP will even be playable? As the technology moves on, you're constantly having to transcode, re-encode, re-copy, re-transfer. This costs time, at the very least and time is money.

In 50 years, as long as there's still one film projector in the world, you'll still be able to take films from 1920 and watch them. Can't say the same for digital, no matter how they're stored.

Also, from the point of view of 'labs closing down' - yes, there are some. Here in Australia, 2 of our 3 major labs closed down. The remaining one shut down all but one of their processing machines. They then admitted that they couldn't keep up with the demand.
The labs in LA seem to be running fine.

Also, 4k and 6k is great - but as has been said in the past, 4k and even 6k on a RED or similar is an amalgamation of the Red, Green, and Blue channels. On 35mm film you get somewhere between 4k and 6k of each channel. 65mm is 6k+
As well, the picture out of a RED hardly rivals 35mm, it still tends to have that real video look about it. I'll be interested to see what Arri come out with.
 
Re mov or any other format no problem.... you simply write a codec or converter to use it on a current system. THIS WILL HAPPEN as long as there are computers. the file formats for all the digital files are known. Ask any geek. What is more they will be able to write one for the CURRENT computers. I have FREE compilers for MAC, PC, Linux and Unix. There will ALWAYS bee a geek around who will write a converter (if they haven't already).

EVERY TIME some one brings up the spectre of obsolete file formats a quite google usually brings up multiple converters. It is not and never will be a problem.

If you have HDD's that are less then 2 years old and loosing data you are doing something very wrong or using inferior HDD's they same can be said for improperly storing film. The problem with film is once it's gone it's gone. With Digital it is very easy to make multiple backups. I have three copies locally and 2 remotely. How many copies do you have of your master film archives?

I have data that is fine after 20 years! What is more it started life on a completely different platform to now... ie not even a PC orMAC (a 68K Atari running TOS)

You said "In 50 years, as long as there's still one film projector in the world," and if there isn't? How are you going to get some one to build you a film projector? They ARE going obsolete faster than old computers are.

More to the point where are you going to get the obsolete bulbs from for the projectors? Not only will they stop making them they have a limited life in use.

Objectively, as much as you and the rest of us like film it is going to be obsolete in a year or three. Some people will keep the obsolete kit but in 25-50 years most will get scrapped.
 
jax_rox said:
Film is still alive and well as we speak. Numerous productions are currently shooting on it, both high and low-end. Just looking at some of the higher profile film releases from the past few months:
Argo
Django Unchained
Les Miserables
Anna Karenina
The Master
Samsara
Lincoln
Moonrise Kingdom
Beasts of the Southern Wild

Even The Dark Knight Rises

I was speaking to the people over at Kodak in about July last year and whilst they were struggling comparitively to when film was the only capture medium available, they actually mentioned a pickup in sales, especially of S16mm, particularly in the lower budget films.
Now, film certainly isn't as numerous as it used to be, but it's not dead yet, and I don't think it's going away for a while.
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Which enforces what I said, film becoming a niche, nostaglic choice, or gimmick. In this case, the niche is big-budget productions who don't care about the increased production costs associated with film. For the other 99% of filmmakers, it makes little-to-no sense to choose film over digital especially these days where film has little tangible benefit over digital, and digital's benefits are much more significant.

Film died last year when the major players stopped making the medium or the cameras to shoot on them. Will you still be able to find some and use it? Sure, but I can still take photos with my Canon AE-1 if I really wanted to also. That doesn't mean that it's still "alive and well". As we get further away from 2012, we will see less and less features using film as many of the ones you listed were already in production prior to 2012.
 
jagraphics said:
You said "In 50 years, as long as there's still one film projector in the world," and if there isn't? How are you going to get some one to build you a film projector? They ARE going obsolete faster than old computers are.
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There have been several threads on the topic of the restoration of the 1899 'color' movies that Edward Raymond Turner made. He used a non-standard, even by his contemporary standards, film gauge and sprocketing. The short clip indicates that in the restoration process only 25 frames an hour could be transferred due to the use of a special film holder designed for the sprocket holes.

On the other hand... I don't know if having the entire set of clips on Youtube copied in perpetuity... is a good thing...

While some great things have been lost to time... a incredibly larger collection of 'ungreat things' have been dispatched to eternal forgetfulness...
 
j1clark@ucsd.edu said:
While some great things have been lost to time... a incredibly larger collection of 'ungreat things' have been dispatched to eternal forgetfulness...
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Andy Warhol said, "90% of everything is junk." It took 40 years and the invention of YouTube to prove him wrong ... the correct value is more like 99.8%. But to be fair, there are some real gems among the 0.2% that a lot of us would never have seen without the online media to provide fast, cheap and wide distribution and promotion. I wouldn't want to be the one to judge which works should be preserved and which forgotten.

- Greg
 
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