What happened to the "1000 year DVD?"[1] MDisc sells ceramic DVD blanks and a drive that can write them. Blanks are about $2 each, and the drive is under $100. Many newer drives can write them.[2] Any drive that can read the format can read them. Capacities to 100GB. A U.S. Navy test says it works, while all the other "archival" disks didn't survive.[3]
Facebook and a few other people are working on BluRay based cold storage robots[1]. Simply having the media survive isn't enough. Just ask the BBC's Domesday Project[2].
Archivists are in the business of preserving the past and like most people, they tend to overvalue what they are familiar with. But most old art, like all art, is mediocre and very much of its time. After that, it quickly loses its value. And therefore preserving old art is only somewhat useful. Some works are good enough to stand the test of time, but those are in no danger of disappearing, because continuing interest means that natural commercial forces keep producing copies from generation to generation.
Even if all the archivists of the world lost their minds for a generation, we would be in no danger of losing the works of the Beatles, Hemingway, and Scorsese. What we might lose are large numbers of works by their less accomplished contemporaries. Would that be a real loss? Yes. A big one? No. And that's why it's simply not that important that the archivists succeed in preserving everything.
Hollywood archivists must be pretty bad at their jobs then. The data they archive, if digital, has a fixed size. Cost per byte to store digital data goes only one direction, far, far down. Thus, cost to store digital data which is fixed in size, goes only down.
Exception may be film where you may want to scan with better scanners every once in a while to extract more detail. Even in this case, storage cost goes down faster than scanning technology increases in resolution.
12TB 255MB/S read/write 3.5" drive is $700 currently. (HGST HE12) That's currently state of the spinning disc art.
backblaze.com is storing over 250 million GB currently.
Thus, regardless of the complications of redundancy and detecting bitrot, Storage shall always outpace archival for all things digital. For one's getting cheaper every day, and the other is fixed in size.
You could open source it and run a torrent seed, I bet the world would be more than happy to help store, remix, improve what you've archived. minus those pricey software editing tools of course, because the studio may not own those.
> He quickly realized, though, that film “didn’t have the sensitivity to capture the scenes we were trying to shoot, especially the things we shot at dawn and dusk,” as he told an interviewer.
Sounds like he simply didn't have the right cameras. As far as I remember Barry Lyndon was shot without electric light; but Kubrick had to use some rather special lenses (ex-NASA i think).
The problem with the "fast" lens approach used in Barry Lyndon is there's a tradeoff between how much light you let in and how much of the scene is in focus (keyword: "depth of field"). If that works for whatever mood you're trying to create, great. But that's not always what a director is going for. You can mitigate this by letting less light in and using more sensitive film or overdeveloping ("pushing" is the term people use) your film to compensate, but that might lead to more film grain than you'd like.
You can use "fast" lenses on digital cameras, too. The benefit is that if you're using increased sensitivity on a modern digital sensor, the noise you get is usually less noticeable than you'd get with film.
>Sounds like he simply didn't have the right cameras.
This isn't really fair. There were 10 of the 50mm f0.7 lenses ever made. And they were very difficult to use because of the narrow depth of field. I'm not sure snowy wilderness is as suitable an environment as languid candlelit for very precise blocking.
Correct. There were Carl-Zeiss 50mm and 35mm f/0.7 lenses that were built for NASA and which Kubrick modified to fit on a Mitchell BNC camera. These let him shoot by candlelight (albeit specially-made candles designed to burn brighter than normal).
The aspect that comes to mind is the archiving of assets that go beyond simple frame output, a bit further up the workflow—project files, renderers, effects processing plug-ins, etc.
For example, the article mentions the issues that Pixar ran into reconstructing Finding Nemo. I can imagine a studio saving a movie's project file, and then discovering that no software can use it in 20 years. Even if ecosystem standards like OMFI prove to have staying power, details like color timing might not be able to be perfectly reproduced even if the project file is openable.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-1000-year-dvd-is-here/ [2] http://www.mdisc.com/m-ready/ [3] http://site.produplicator.com/downloads/Manuals/China_Lake_F...
[+] [-] baylisscg|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/meetings/documents/storag... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservat...
[+] [-] johan_larson|9 years ago|reply
Even if all the archivists of the world lost their minds for a generation, we would be in no danger of losing the works of the Beatles, Hemingway, and Scorsese. What we might lose are large numbers of works by their less accomplished contemporaries. Would that be a real loss? Yes. A big one? No. And that's why it's simply not that important that the archivists succeed in preserving everything.
[+] [-] jamiek88|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RichardHeart|9 years ago|reply
Exception may be film where you may want to scan with better scanners every once in a while to extract more detail. Even in this case, storage cost goes down faster than scanning technology increases in resolution.
12TB 255MB/S read/write 3.5" drive is $700 currently. (HGST HE12) That's currently state of the spinning disc art.
backblaze.com is storing over 250 million GB currently.
Thus, regardless of the complications of redundancy and detecting bitrot, Storage shall always outpace archival for all things digital. For one's getting cheaper every day, and the other is fixed in size.
You could open source it and run a torrent seed, I bet the world would be more than happy to help store, remix, improve what you've archived. minus those pricey software editing tools of course, because the studio may not own those.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|9 years ago|reply
Sounds like he simply didn't have the right cameras. As far as I remember Barry Lyndon was shot without electric light; but Kubrick had to use some rather special lenses (ex-NASA i think).
[+] [-] wl|9 years ago|reply
You can use "fast" lenses on digital cameras, too. The benefit is that if you're using increased sensitivity on a modern digital sensor, the noise you get is usually less noticeable than you'd get with film.
[+] [-] ghaff|9 years ago|reply
This isn't really fair. There were 10 of the 50mm f0.7 lenses ever made. And they were very difficult to use because of the narrow depth of field. I'm not sure snowy wilderness is as suitable an environment as languid candlelit for very precise blocking.
[+] [-] ghaff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Buge|9 years ago|reply
That's clearly wrong because JPEG 2000 is a compression format. They must mean lossless, not uncompressed.
[+] [-] jessriedel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CharlesW|9 years ago|reply
For example, the article mentions the issues that Pixar ran into reconstructing Finding Nemo. I can imagine a studio saving a movie's project file, and then discovering that no software can use it in 20 years. Even if ecosystem standards like OMFI prove to have staying power, details like color timing might not be able to be perfectly reproduced even if the project file is openable.