http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business...ref=todayspaper

The above link is to an article in the Sunday Business section of today's New York Times (Sun. Dec. 23, 2007) called, "Th Afterlife is Expensive for Digital Movies," by Michael Cieply. It points out that preservation of digital originals as well as outtakes and such is far more expensive than simply storing 35mm film materials in vaults. The need to upgrade or transfer to new formats can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per film. The article is based on the release of a report by the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences after a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business.

Here's an excerpt:

"Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.

"Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault."

Here's another:

"If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries."

Skepticism about the shelf life of DVDs has been expressed on this board in the past. Well, here it is in black-and-white in The New York Times. Finally.

I've been saying for years that the switchover of so much of our media to digital in the last decade or so will mean the loss to future generations of pretty much everything created in the post-analog era. They'll be able to see and recover films, recordings and photos made a century ago, but not the stuff we're writing, recording and filming today. Think about that before you throw out your films, photographic negatives and analog videotapes and audiotapes.

What bothers me is that an article of this import is placed in a section of the paper that many film buffs might never bother to open.

"Thus, NASA scientists found in 1999 that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975; the format had long been obsolete."

Wow!

Thanks for the link Brian.

That's why I like the idea of holographic data storage. Think of the crystals used in SUPERMAN(1978). It's very feasible and research is going on, as we speak.

Btw, I suspect that those cost figures may be a bit overinflated.

I found the bit about NASA to be interesting, so I found another article with a bit more info:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/200...c-unf072701.php
"It took a number of calls—and a good four months—to uncover what Miller was looking for. And when NASA found it, there was a problem. "The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died," Miller said.

Eventually, NASA was able to recover the data from printouts"

However, the obsolescence of a data format is all relative. PCM was first used in 1943, yet as an audio format has existed on CD, LD, DVD, and now BD and HD DVD. The Viking data encoding likely fell into obsolescence because nobody had needed to access it for 30 years. Movie studios are likely going to be wanted to access their digital film data at least a few times a year, even the potentially old stuff.

As for the lifespan of DVDs, the article doesn't specify whether it's talking about pressed DVDs or recordable DVDs. I think pressed DVDs hold up quite a bit longer, but wouldn't be applicable in this case where the studios are making a handful of copies of the original digital data.

Finally, looking back, almost every new storage format has life-expectancy issues in the beginning. Paper was originally very fragile, as was film. For digital date, I don't think longevity of storage has been a serious consideration until recently. It's likely that certain pressures will either cause current storage technology to become more reliable over the long-term, or will cause newer, more reliable storage technologies to emerge.

Well, I can't comment on the shelf life of pressed DVD films, but I still have CDs I bought in the early 80s i.e. well over 20 years old.

You know what? They still play fine. However, the cost of storage to keep them in playable condition is another issue: it's a massive wallet-busting $0.00 per month.

Now, let's just check that RABID DOGS disc I bought nearly 10 years ago (in fact the first DVD I ever bought). Damn it! It still works and the transfer is still as ropey as it was all those years ago...

Someone's either telling porkies or just cashing in here...

. . . yes, it does seem hard to fathom that a bit of news such as half your DVD collection will be unable to play fifteen years after purchase would break nationally with a one line mention in the middle of an article about film preservation on page whatever of the TIMES Business Section . . . while I have no idea of the accuracy of this article/report, or exactly what the reporter is talking about with his reference, hopefully, we will read a little more to expand upon this sentence in articles of the future . . . well, on the other hand, since I just turned 64, at least I might not need to agonize over the fate of my DVD collection after I go . . .

Now, I know it's more complicated than this in many ways, but if you owned the definitive digital restoration of, say, The Godfather, how hard would it really be to back it up regularly?

I think there's a lot to be said for digital restoration still not being the definitive answer to restoration, at least not yet, but still... Even if I were arguing that a proper restoration needed to be done to the film itself, it seems like storing a version as well as a back-up and regularly checking and backing up the versions one has would be reasonably simple and cost effective, in the end.

I'm sorry, that sounds entirely too reasonable. Don't you know we're in a panic here?

I think the point is, WILL the data be backed up regularly? Or will the newly restored, pristine 4K digital files be backed up once, then vaulted and forgotten? After all, this has happened many times with black-and-white separation masters on film, which were supposed to be able to accurately recreate the color record of the original negatives, but alas, nobody factored into it the possibility that some color records might shrink, thus making perfect optical registration at a later date impossible, or at the very least an extremely difficult and time (and thus money) consuming task...

The difference of course is that, even with uneven shrinkage of separation masters on film, a semblance of the original image can still be reprinted- flawed for sure, but there will still be a recognizable image there- whereas when it comes to arcane digital data stored in formats that are no longer the "standard"- well, how the hell are you ever going to read that data or interpret it? This is the beauty of analog film- even with all its flaws, if you hold it up to a light guess what? You can still see an image. Try doing that with a piece of digital tape.

Vincent

I'm not too worried about The Godfather, but what about lesser-known movies? Will studios take the same care, and spend precious restoration budget dollars, on films that are rarely shown?

Similarly, my first cds from the late '80s and my first dvds from the late '90s seem to play fine.

Be that as it may, the soundtrack on side 1 of my LOST HIGHWAY laserdisc is almost completely inaudible due to degradation. A similar affliction has crept up on my SHALLOW GRAVE laserdisc towards the end of side 1.

I do understand that laserdisc was a more cumbersome medium and that cheaply produced laserdiscs would be more prone to deterioration than factory-pressed dvds and cds, but I also suspect that there may actually be cause for concern here.

Let's see how our dvds and cds play in 2017.

It's been pretty well-established that most laser rot is traceable to contaminated or defective adhesives used in the laserdisc manufacturing process to glue the "sandwich" of acrylic and aluminum together, eventually resulting in oxidation of the aluminum layer and data loss. "Cheaply produced", I don't know - LDs were considerably more expensive to produce than either CDs or DVDs, and the most notorious rotters generally came out of the Sony DADC pressing plant; up to then Sony wasn't really a manufacturer known for cutting corners.

In theory any optical disc using a metallic substrate for a data carrier could be susceptible to oxidation/"rot", unless you use a metal that is immune to oxidation, like gold, and there are both pressed and recordable gold CDs that can be expected to be the closest thing to archival quality that you can get in the format.

I certainly wouldn't hold Wikipedia up as an absolute authority on anything, but there are external links to several interesting articles here:

CD Rot