preserving movies originated on digital

I recently finished an article about film preservation, focusing on both restoration and archiving of product. Gotta say, the archiving issues are positively frightening. I was going to post this in the moviemaking sub-forum, but I didn't see that around anymore, so I guess this goes here.

Point being, you guys who are shooting stuff now are all shooting digital ... and you've got to really cover your ass at least two or three ways from Sunday if you want to be able to look at these things when you want in the future. But there doesn't seem to be any safe long-term digital storage. The cases tapes are kept in crack and make the tape unplayable, storing it on servers means you really need to keep the things turning and then you need to migrate the data every couple of years or risk degradation and/or the fact that the media marches on to the next format and the next, and you are suddenly like NASA, with decades worth of data and no means to access it.

Everybody I spoke with has a degree of optimism about a true digital solution emerging in the next decade or two ... but as far as what happens between now and then, there's a lot of worry. Most folks who shoot digital don't make a safety copy onto 35mm film (plenty because they think they can't afford it, others because they don't see the purpose, the future is digital, right?), but there's a possibility that with practically all TV having gone digital acquisition in the last decade, there aren't film copies on anything.

Kodak just came out with a cheap longterm filmstock -- right after my article went to press, damnit -- that is supposed to be aimed precisely at this low-end market and letting them preserve their stuff for the future ... my thought is that this may by itself allow Kodak to float along another decade to (not that there's anything wrong with that from where I stand.)

It's really hard to get into this stuff without going into a lot of detail, but you can look up some stuff under headings like "digital dilemma" and "digital dilemma 2" to get some idea if you're concerned/interested. (my biggest problem with the story was that I had to do an article under 2000 words when I had material enough to turn it into a monthly column that would have run till Thanksgiving 2013.)

trevanian wrote:

I recently finished an article about film preservation, focusing on both restoration and archiving of product. Gotta say, the archiving issues are positively frightening. I was going to post this in the moviemaking sub-forum, but I didn't see that around anymore, so I guess this goes here.

You're right. I don't know what happened.

As for the other stuff. I don't shoot anything yet, but I'll keep it in mind!

Should have mentioned the story about how Pixar accidently erased almost all of TOY STORY 2.



All it takes is some guy pressing the wrong button and whole movies can be erased in an instant

Are there not save things on DVD, BD, VHS or Video2000.

Toy Story is released on VHS, DVD and BD so there is always a back up.

But you can not always make backup, moost Mi6forums 9 years of messages are gone..

A Blu Ray has about half of the detail of a 35mm negative and a tenth of the color information and that's before you factor in compression. It's like calling an MP3 an archival copy.