Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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?

Jeff you're talking hypotheticals and I'm talking practicals. I could find you a small mountain of functioning 5 1/4 drives that depend on "industrial lubricants" and belts etc that you are suggesting are impossible. Sure maybe 70% of them have failed but 30% of 10,000,000 is 3,000,000 functioning drives.

And this notion that we need electricity is stupid. Sure you could I guess kind of hypothetically setup a mechanical playback system for a 3 strip film... but are you going to bother when the roving bands of mole people are trying to steal your torch? If civilization regresses to the point where we lose electrcity we're so thoroughly fucked that no backup system will be sufficient and I again I would rather there be 100 copies in small boxes scattered all over the globe when we take back the surface from the mole people than one or two prints of fragile film that needs to be stored in an environmentally controlled warehouse (which depends on electricity).

The best survivors in nature are cockroaches. They're a model by which we should aspire.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
And this notion that we need electricity is stupid.
Click to expand...

Imagine every book ever written was stored on a kindle. Now fast forward. Sx seven hundred years. You tell me I am going to access that data the same way I can access ink on paper.

We are talking about stable mediums that last. That is the discussion. The fact is I can lift a roll of film I shot fifteen years ago hold it up to light and see the data that was recorded. All I could do with a zip drive is read the word ZIP100 and never be able to know or see what is inside. When you deal with archival mediums you have to consider everything.

The city of Florence for example lost much of it's archive because of a freak flood in 1966. Everyone thought, just store the books in church basments, one flood took care of that. I think it knocked electricity out for about a week. This things are not certain, they are fragile.

There is no real solution for long term (beyond 30 years) of digital data storage.

David
 
Where are all the Cassette Tapes? Those used film and are... all... gone.

At least in current releases of audio media.
 
I have some work fine for me(just found some of my old mix tapes from nearly 20 years ago), gotta love having a father who keeps well everything, lots of old equipment handed down... mostly junk but fun to have players for a vast array of media new and old, mostly old.
 
The real solution is not to rely on one solution, but to use the twin concepts of strong data (the film-like solutions, robust optical formats) and distribution (digital with many multiple copies, if one is lost of corrupt there will be others).

Graeme
 
Graeme Nattress said:
The real solution is not to rely on one solution, but to use the twin concepts of strong data (the film-like solutions, robust optical formats) and distribution (digital with many multiple copies, if one is lost of corrupt there will be others).

Graeme
Click to expand...

A very sensible proposition.
 
Graeme Nattress said:
The real solution is not to rely on one solution, but to use the twin concepts of strong data (the film-like solutions, robust optical formats) and distribution (digital with many multiple copies, if one is lost of corrupt there will be others).
Click to expand...

Sounds to me like you favor cloud storage, with many servers in many locations housing redundant data. That's one view, but there are many who don't really want third parties having custody of their data, and/or many copies floating around, each of which is open to copying, piracy, and what-have-you.

I don't have an answer either, other than to offer that one technical solution used alone is probably a mistake. That's why I advised Tom Lowe to consider a combination of LTO tape for off site, "passive" storage, and Raid arrays for quicker data recovery and redundancy. Optical storage is another option, but not very practical today due to capacity limitations compared to the other technologies.
 
Well Mike, I know with some archive TV, it's only through multiple copies being sent around the world to other TV stations that any copy at all was found. If prints had not been struck for that purpose, copies would not exist at all. For good backup you always need multiple copies in multiple locations. If you want to control things to such an extent that you don't allow 3rd parties to have your data, you're limiting your backup options. Again, in the archive TV world, some episodes only exist through "pirate" copies being stolen from archives (or borrowed), or made from off-air broadcasts, or umatic or VHS copies made from archive originals before they were lost of destroyed. Although I understand the desire not to allow copying of copyright material, sometimes it has only been those copies that remain....

Agreed on multiple solutions. I don't think relying on any one solution or type of solution is at all wise and in that respect I think your advice to Tom is sound.

Graeme
 
Graeme Nattress said:
Well Mike, I know with some archive TV, it's only through multiple copies being sent around the world to other TV stations that any copy at all was found. If prints had not been struck for that purpose, copies would not exist at all. For good backup you always need multiple copies in multiple locations. If you want to control things to such an extent that you don't allow 3rd parties to have your data, you're limiting your backup options.
Click to expand...

I agree with that in principle, but there's a practical difference between storing physical materials in a secure vault somewhere in the Kansas salt mines, and having digital data on multiple servers, each of which is accessible by a smart hacker anywhere in the world, without having to take a trip to Kansas. Not that I have anything against Kansas, of course (my best friend lives there...).

The promise of digital archiving is that it will minimize the need for discovering physical copies that have been stored in someone's basement for 40 years. The reality is that it's inherently much more susceptible to piracy, and there's no real solution to the problem of permanent digital storage technology at this point in time. Whether people here want to admit it or not, the best archival element today remains separation masters on film, at least for features. For television, well, I don't have a great answer to that other than to say that at this point in time, SR videotape is probably the most popular format out there....
 
Patrick OMara said:
fyi, enterprise online backup is encrypted. (just adding to squash that FUD).
Click to expand...

So are a lot of other things. Nearly every method of encryption has eventually been cracked.

The problem is wide access, not the level of protection afforded by encryption methods. Physical assets are somewhat protected by the very nature of their being physical. Data on a cloud server is not, regardless of the level of system security. Obviously, none of this really matters for a personal or very low budget project that isn't going into thousands of venues worldwide. But it matters quite a bit when you're talking about major studio assets.
 
Who cares if you lose electricity for a week. How are you going to run a film scanner without electricity? You know how else you can label what is "Star Wars" and what is "Casablanca"? Put a label on it. I would sincerely hope people aren't opening and tampering with film archives to see what they are.

My dad has been shooting film for most of his life. His house burned down this last year and thankfully almost all of the slides survived--but they very easily could have all been consumed. The price of backing up 5TB to 3-4 portable HDDs and an online data-service is minuscule compared to making even 1 extra copy of that to more slides (and even then you have an extra generational loss in quality).

A flood which loses its archives is the perfect example of why you want your duplicates to be as small as possible and as cheap as possible so that you can spread them across the 4 corners of the earth. All of my data is on at least 3 copies at all times and in two separate areas of the city. If Seattle were nuked I would lose it but then I've got bigger things to worry about than my old artwork.

In 30 years you'll be able to store every film ever made on a single drive. Like Graeme was saying, the most effective archival system we've ever had is just mass duplication. You make 100 copies of something and you're pretty likely to have a copy in 100 years. Make 2 copies and even the best archival medium in the world is susceptible to being discarded or damaged in a freak accident.

You want another copy of a 3 strip film? That'll be another $10k. You want another copy of a drive? $200. Guess which one is more likely to have multiple copies in multiple locations? In 30 years you can pay an archivalist to consolidate all of that data.

We're also getting to the point where film simply can't have the same resolution. What do you do with 8k footage? Archive it all to IMAX 3 strip? What about Stereo? What about the 7.1 Audio mix?

Physical archival is a nightmare. If we're really worried about not having a DVD-Drive in 100 years then include a physical schematic on how to build a new one after the nuclear apocalypse. Or have a government vault full of LTO drives. ;) Easier to store 1,000 LTO drives in an environmentally controlled vault than thousands of films.
 
You are missing the point. I am not arguing for film. I am arguing fir something effective as film, with the shelf life of film and easily read and accessible data.

You are turning this into a film vs. Digital thing whereas I am contemplating what can store digital data with the positive aspects to film like longevity and data that is accessible without to much stress.

There us no need to get hung up or turn thus into this vs. That or right vs. wrong. That's not the level of conversation I'm interested in.

I'm interested in understanding what system will replace film AND include some of the major plusses film offers.

Film is not perfect but it's a complete system that has served an industry and community well. I don't see any of that kind od complete strategy in digital options (tape maybe, but who wants tape).

So maybe just leave the this vs. That part out and contemplate what great solutions would look like.

You think electricity doesn't matter. Great. I'm trying to think of how images shot on a digital camera might last as long as a painting.

We're not thinking on the same plane here. And that is fine.

David
 
Tom Lowe said:
Not faster than I thought.
Click to expand...

Agreed. About 4 years ago I was speaking to "a somebody" at a major VFX studio about future hardware concerns and the need to go up to native 4k playback studio wide. I mentioned that by 2012 "Super35 film would be a real trouble" through out the industry and 2k will no longer be what filmmakers were after. A similar line to Red's beliefs, but the writing was on the wall with consumer HD cameras becoming available and 1080p becoming the household screen size. 4k and beyond provides a reason for people to go sit down in a theater and submerge themselves into a motion picture in a way that they won't be able to inexpensively achieve at home to for some time to come.

I think some in the industry want 3D to be that thing, but I'm more on the side of that being a different medium; no matter the resolution. The quality and experience is where the game has always been at.

To note, this year, I've only worked on one motion picture shot on actual film. Everything else has been shot on Red or the "blue camera". I've been in studios where their film scanners lay idle for months at a time now.
 
The problem is you're proposing a system:

1) Uses no electricity (so not digital)
2) Can be visually read (so not digital)
3) Is on a storage medium which itself lasts hundreds of years (mostly not digital)
4) Requires no playback device (so not digital)

The advantage of film is that it's archaic and primitive so a caveman could understand it.
The disadvantage of film is that it's archaic and primitive so it's limited to what a caveman could undestand.

Any system which can store a film in a small space and can be readily duplicated is going to be a digital solution. The problem is the advantages of film can't be carried over into a digital system. But the disadvantages of digital (Requires playback device, electricity, etc..) are only problems after a nuclear holocaust when all of human knowledge is somehow lost in the long term.

The solution isn't to find a backup solution that has all of the advantages of film it's to start with the superior archival system and find ways of eliminating its weaknesses. Which in digital is: survivability of media and automated migration. Survivability of media is mostly already taken care of with LTO and new long term archival discs. Automated migration is simply a question of policy.

I don't think we need to limit our archival policies to the assumption that we'll regress into a pre-technological society. ;)
 
Yeah, lemmie know when blowfish 448 bit encryption has been cracked. :)

..because it's not going to happen.
 
History says that Graeme is right - commercial imperatives be damned.

Here's a practical example - recently New Zealand Archives have been restoring a bunch of nitrate films that was kept by a projectionist in New Zealand.

He kept the film, because New Zealand was the last stop for the prints (literally being at the ends of the Earth), and because it was expensive to store and even more expensive to ship the footage back to then store it was ordered destroyed. But the projectionist disobeyed his instructions and kept it at home.

Recently, the first film Hitchcock worked on was recovered from this archive, and played for the first time in who knows how long on September 22 (article here: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/08/hitchcock.html )

So while I appreciate the commercial imperative of archiving footage in secure conditions on behalf of studios, ultimately REAL archival, the sort that the digital restoration experts of the future will be seeking to restore things, may well be people digging up hard drives or LTO tapes where people have gotten around such commercial measures and short term piracy protection (which isn't really going to prevent the piracy element anyway), because at some point the actual cultural value that data represents is underestimated by companies only looking at it's immediate commercial values, and the 'proper' archives of these seemingly less important works will be lost in the name of financial savings.

Many copies in many places is, indeed, the practical answer to REAL LONG TERM archival. A properly run archive helps in the medium or short term, but there have been enough studio fires and other catastrophic disasters that if you are worried about where your film will be in a hundred years, you want to have dubs to as many mediums (digital and physical) as possible sent off to as many different places as practically possible, labelled with a good label that will hopefully still be readable in 100 years.
 
What gets me is that you guys are debating what type of backup will survive and worldwide catastrophic event. Such an event would eliminate most of the population and the foundation behind it. I am sure the world would have a lot more important things to worry about than some tv show or movie.

Also, we are creating about 2 zetabytes of information per year. it's not like you can print that out and store it in a cave. haha. There's over a million new books published each year, are we going t store those in a cave too? What about the blue prints of every single thing that has ever been made. STORE IT IN A CAVE! YouTube content should not be lost because it it an accurate representation of the common human in the year 2011, STORE IT IN A CAVE.




You just have to store it in any wyas, and hope for the best, and hope that someone cares.
 
I agree with the last point you make.

For the record. I was pointing out that all of the things film can do that digital can not, (no electricity, visual archive) not advocating that the new solution be all of these things.

Bringing this full circle and comparing film to and R3D or digital file. I think the single most important thing is longevity and ultimately not having the migration of data be "the solution". As we move into digital acquisition and storage large questions remain as to how , as a complete archival system, it replaces film. Or what standard, beyond LTO 5 replaces an existing effective standard.

David
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top