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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Kodak going broke?

yeah, I wouldn't object to a return to caddies (like minidisc) for high-value discs.

cac_cd_caddy.jpg


And to those who pre-empt with "But what will we plug in our USB/DVD/BluRay in 30 years?" I follow up with the far more difficult question "Where are you going to find a high-end 4k film scanner with proper registration and calibration in 30 years?". There are still 5.25" floppy drives everywhere and they're 35 years old.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
And to those who pre-empt with "But what will we plug in our USB/DVD/BluRay in 30 years?" I follow up with the far more difficult question "Where are you going to find a high-end 4k film scanner with proper registration and calibration in 30 years?". There are still 5.25" floppy drives everywhere and they're 35 years old.
Click to expand...

So what you're saying is 35 years from now no one could possibly dream of making a film scanner? DI and visual effects are not the only reasons to scan a film, there are any number of films waiting in storage to be restored, remastered or scanner for blu-ray release or future 4k formats.
 
So no one has promoted digital more than me ... BUT

Kodak gave us
- years and years of valuable film making tools
- support to make great films
- Cineon digital files (Cineon/DPX has been the file format for a generation now)
- one of, if not the first , digital sensors for digital cameras
- Cinesite LA then London
- Film scanners
- vast patents and the innovations they represent.
etc etc

Now have the done a great job in managing the move to digital - well clearly not, clearly it has been horrible - but lets not make that their legacy. Kodak's staff have contributed huge HUGE amounts to the industry, especially away from the retail market - in the film making features/TVC arena.
I just think it is sad that this appears to be the beginning of the final chapter... and I just dont see any point in kicking a guy when he is down.

Mike
 
Craig W. Bickerstaff said:
So what you're saying is 35 years from now no one could possibly dream of making a film scanner? DI and visual effects are not the only reasons to scan a film, there are any number of films waiting in storage to be restored, remastered or scanner for blu-ray release or future 4k formats.
Click to expand...
In 35 years the best and brightest will no longer be flocking to film scanners. The economic incentive to develop new scanners is already evaporating. This all happened once before and it'll undoubtedly happen again. It's getting harder and harder in just the last few years to find a good film processor for stills without sending it away and waiting days to get it back.

I love film. I love the texture. I love the color. But, I hate the physical limitations of film itself and the infrastructure for shooting is evaporating making it more and more difficult to work with. Film for the motion picture industry has always been a bit of a niche market so I think it'll go unaffected for longer than stills (it already has) but in the not at all distant future all of the talent is going to move on to new things. Good luck finding a really talented up and coming editor who can operate a moviola for instance. If something hasn't been archived and scanned to digital in 35 years... it's probably not going to be.
 
Talk to me in 110 years about who will be left standing in the imaging business. Kodak had a top .00001% run and we should all be greatful for the 100's of innovations they provided us all to be here today.
 
Kodak's technology will not die. . . it will simply become a super high-end product used only by artists. Take The Impossible Project remaking Polaroid film, for example. (Or Ilford.) Granted, Impossible hasn't reached the quality levels of Polaroid yet, but they are changing the chemistry in ways to make it more environmentally responsible. If they are able to get the chemistry right, they will be able to live a very long life as a niche product. The rest of the world will always be digital from this point forward.

Stephen
 
Second that...

Mike Seymour said:
So no one has promoted digital more than me ... BUT

Kodak gave us
- years and years of valuable film making tools
- support to make great films
- Cineon digital files (Cineon/DPX has been the file format for a generation now)
- one of, if not the first , digital sensors for digital cameras
- Cinesite LA then London
- Film scanners
- vast patents and the innovations they represent.
etc etc

Now have the done a great job in managing the move to digital - well clearly not, clearly it has been horrible - but lets not make that their legacy. Kodak's staff have contributed huge HUGE amounts to the industry, especially away from the retail market - in the film making features/TVC arena.
I just think it is sad that this appears to be the beginning of the final chapter... and I just dont see any point in kicking a guy when he is down.

Mike
Click to expand...
 
Let's not turn this into some sort of moral issue, as if observations made about Kodak's current position were an evil desire. Who needs reminding of what Kodak has done? Polaroid?
They have our respect, we are grateful, and there was never disdain for film, only a love of the art, and that means embracing what is best for it in the long run.

Stephen, you might be right about the polaroid type resurrection, but I'm not so sure - Polaroid has a very different aesthetic than film.
Cinema is such a different beast and its relationship with film hinged on a very fragile thing. And as Digital's look continues to mirror film's there will be
little to sustain the emulsion making business and its peripherals. It might not go away entirely but ..... ?????

After thirty years of intensive darkroom work I'm sure I have enough of Kodak's chemicals in my body to process a couple of rolls of Tri X ( :
 
You can't judge an archival technology based solely on the media the data resides on. You have to future proof the extraction and re-constitution of the data. LTO and optical discs require readers and players with such high tolerance moving parts and precise extraction schemes and no industrial lubricants will outlive the media. The future has no moving parts.

The ideal archival technology is human readable and capable of being reconstituted using more than one base technology - as it stands now, nothing surpasses CYM separations for stability, longevity and the ability to re-constitute. .. and they're human readable, you just hold it up to the light-- Want to put back into the computer?- scan it or shoot it again.

"Archival" Discs and tapes will accrue in such abundance that they will wear out the very machines needed to read them. There will be tens of thousands of tapes or discs for every one of the readers or decks that survive. You won't even be able to build custom versions of such reader units, because the cost will be prohibitive. You won't even know whats on the tapes or discs until they're read back- so you'll pay to find out you don't have the right version. Do people seriously think they're going to spin up a capstan dependent drive and extract magnetic or optically stored bits of data in 20 years? It will cost a huge amount of money to do that. It will be akin to the forensic data recovery fees now. And how many formats will come and go between now and then? Images should be stored as images. Low tech protecting High Tech.

Why not use a very thin film (or a like substrate), with a single layer of 8K laser-etched silver halide - no exotic emulsions or dyes. Very cheap, human readable, environmentally and thermally stable. Who cares if the machines that "write" this format survive or not. When you have the reels, you have the data and everything you need to completely re-constitute the content using the tech du jour. And the physical size of this "archival master" is a couple of pizza boxes for a finished feature because the film will be much thinner and the resolution could be much higher - so we're not talking about a 35mm reel necessarily. Every post house can author the format and send it off to the salt mines.
 
David Battistella said:
Justin.

You should grab your epic and make a film about your hometown.

When torontos kodak plant closed it marked the end of an era. I knew some photographers and film makers who went in there to grab as much processing chemical as possible.

You've already got a title:

KODAK MOMENT

I'm sure growing up there you could offer a great perspective.

David
Click to expand...

That's a great idea, David. I'm looking into it. It helps I've had a few relatives work at the Kodak plant too....Hmmm, very great idea.
 
Jeff,

You are hitting on a very important thing here. Hard disks are not reliable storage devices. I was holding out great hope for CF cards because non moving media, eventual low cost and long term storage would ahve made it a great thing for r3d data. If costs had fallen low enough then back ups (three backups and long term plans) would have been less needed.

The digital world needs a simple organic technology like paper.

Paper lasts. Paper survives a lot of variable conditions. Ink can last a long time on it to. If you compare a 600 year old book and the data that is written onto it's pages to a Lacie hard drive, then you can see the clear cut winner is the book.

What we need is a low cost, energy efficient way to store massive amounts of digital data.

I think that is what you are talking about here.

Take away electricity for a couple of years and chances are we loose all of our digital data. Not good in an archival sense.

David
 
Jeff Coatney said:
Do people seriously think they're going to spin up a capstan dependent drive and extract magnetic or optically stored bits of data in 20 years? It will cost a huge amount of money to do that. It will be akin to the forensic data recovery fees now.
Click to expand...

I don't know how old or young you are, but 20 years is not very long, and today's tech won't be lost in that amount of time. Let's review: 20 years ago was 1991. Do you really think that Digital Betacam tapes - introduced right around that time - can't be easily played in almost any major market today? Or even that Betacam SP - introduced at least 5 years before that - can't easily be played? Or that 3 1/2 inch floppy discs - introduced almost 30 years ago, in 1984 or so (and used on the original Macintosh) - can't be read? Frankly, I have some VHS tapes that were recorded in 1981 - 30 years ago - that I was able to play less than 2 years ago when I decided to see if they had survived. They had. I agree that the problem you're trying to illustrate is real. Your time frame, however, is a bit unrealistic.


Why not use a very thin film (or a like substrate), with a single layer of 8K laser-etched silver halide - no exotic emulsions or dyes. Very cheap, human readable, environmentally and thermally stable. Who cares if the machines that "write" this format survive or not. When you have the reels, you have the data and everything you need to completely re-constitute the content using the tech du jour. And the physical size of this "archival master" is a couple of pizza boxes for a finished feature because the film will be much thinner and the resolution could be much higher - so we're not talking about a 35mm reel necessarily. Every post house can author the format and send it off to the salt mines.
Click to expand...

That has been designed and proposed for years now. Kodak showed two different "data on film" systems as far back as the early 1990s. One involved a magnetic coating on the base side that would carry frame specific data, and another was exactly what you're proposing, using the film as an optical recorder for digital data. Tests were created and shown, but neither proposal went anywhere because the market was just not interested. They saw (and still see) photographic film as a carrier of photographic images that exist in visible form on that film. Any other use of the technology has largely been rejected by the marketplace, regardless of its ultimate usefulness.
 
Ultimately periodic data migration and redundant copies are the only thing that make sense for digital archiving -- those techniques have the advantage of being less dependent on the physical properties of the storage medium. The main issue is how often and who pays for it. The other challenge are proprietary codecs, etc. and whether they will still be decodable in fifty years or more. I'd also feel safer if the archived material were RGB as well as RAW in case the RAW material is harder to debayer in the future for some reason.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Ultimately periodic data migration and redundant copies are the only thing that make sense for digital archiving -- those techniques have the advantage of being less dependent on the physical properties of the storage medium. The main issue is how often and who pays for it. The other challenge are proprietary codecs, etc. and whether they will still be decodable in fifty years or more. I'd also feel safer if the archived material were RGB as well as RAW in case the RAW material is harder to debayer in the future for some reason.
Click to expand...

You've either unintentionally or intentionally hit on the primary reason that Warner Bros. has us create 4K DPX archives (on LTO tape) for any shows shot on Red. Those archive files are made without color grading and in log format for exactly the reasons you stated.
 
I agree fellas.

If there is a RED roadmap for R3D as a go forward archive medium I'd love to hear it.

I'd be willing to form a committee on this an author a report to RED if that would be of any help. RED would also have to be interested in this. If they really want to replace film then a long term archive plan has to be part of their service to the community.

These thousands of petabytes being captured need a future roadmap.

Somebody should take me up on this offer.

This might be a great project to do with Ted.

David
 
Well, in some ways the archived digital format has to be somewhat universal, it can't be a solution unique to Red, Sony, or anyone else. I don't think Red really has to "solve" the problem for their customers other than participate in any sort of industry-wide discussion about a universal non-proprietary storage format for resolution, luminance, color information, etc. I guess 4K (or higher) RGB DPX using ACES color space is something along those lines, though it maybe should be more like 16-bit linear rather than 10-bit Log for digital material recorded RAW.

As for a physical low-cost medium to archive digital files onto that lasts much longer than LTO tape and is less susceptible to corruption, I'm all for anyone developing such a product.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Ultimately periodic data migration and redundant copies are the only thing that make sense for digital archiving -- those techniques have the advantage of being less dependent on the physical properties of the storage medium. The main issue is how often and who pays for it. The other challenge are proprietary codecs, etc. and whether they will still be decodable in fifty years or more. I'd also feel safer if the archived material were RGB as well as RAW in case the RAW material is harder to debayer in the future for some reason.
Click to expand...

This is the current strategy, but its too easy for the data to become corrupted through read/write errors or concatenation. I agree that in addition to the format I proposed ( From Kodak, etc.) that we employ this method as well, I just don't think that we should put all our eggs in the digital basket and assume that will be enough. And Mike, as for my 20 year time frame, I offer up the examples of SyQuest & Zip. They were never meant to be archival, but the danger remains that when you have magnetic or optical media, you risk the reader/player not surviving the required storage time frame or being able to interface with contemporary technology even if it does.

I know that the best archiving scheme must face market forces, but the right system will have no problem gaining market share if it fulfills the requirements I have proposed earlier. I don't care what form it takes, as long as it solves the problem. I can see a very simple / low cost authoring system that can be had for around $5K in quantity and that has media costs of pennies per linear foot. Its a ripe market opportunity but it needs to be aggressively priced for rapid market saturation and capitalized by someone with a long term view. Someone like Kodak could make it happen. But it must take the form of an appliance that can be acquired by a post house or service bureau and the company should count on the bulk of their margins coming from the media and a one-time storage fee. If a low margin, high volume model could be developed, its feasable that such a system could be cost-effective enough to archive all the production assets, not just the finished version.
 
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