Kodak going broke?

[Rudi Herbert]

It would be a very, very, very sad event if Kodak disappeared,

As happens frequently on this forum, this thread has gone the way of the merits and impact of film vs. digital and blah, blah, blah, but Kodak is one of the most venerable, if not the most, names in our industry. They have been enabling the creation of stories told through moving pictures for over 120 years, and in a way, it is thanks to the ingenuity and perseverance of companies like Kodak that we have what we call a "film industry". Kodak has not been solely about making money, they have been one of the most creative companies ever to grace a particular business landscape, boldly pushing forward and inventing and reinventing what is not the most expansive and encompassing of fields. They have become synonym with taking and printing photos, and though the times have changed, their impact and contribution should not. If somebody deserves to come out of this hard times alive at the other end it is them, God knows they've been around for double or triple the time that most of the "sacred" names in our industry have been. Oddly enough, they own more patents dealing with digital imaging than anybody else, and important, game changing patents at that, but somehow have not managed to deal with the profound changes that have taken place at neck breaking pace these past decade. The fact that, soon enough film will die, does not mean that Kodak deserves the same fate, even if in the eyes of most, Kodak and film are one and the same thing.

 

[Kenneth Williams]

Kodak has been a great supporter of student and indie films. They gave me thousands of feet of 35mm film for my thesis. I only wish them the best.

 

[Rob Ruffo]

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

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.

I could even find 60 year old ticker tape reading devices if I looked for a few weeks. I know because Six Flags Montreal has a minirail system that operates on a punch-tape "computer" from Expo 67 - and they were able to replace units.

 

[Jeff Coatney]

I don't get it. You want Kodak to survive but you're adamantly against the one thing they do best to guarantee their survival. I haven't heard anyone suggest that all archival technologies should be one or the other. I want an analog film option to be a choice in the market. I would use it if it were cost effective and that is possible. I would also use a digital multi-clone scheme. Anyone with half a brain will want more than one system. I don't understand why some of you guys ( Gavin, Mike) want to kill a proven system like the film option. You don't want it? Don't use it. But the idea that you will be the only one scouring ebay for a working drive in 30 years? If that's your plan, then you don't have a truly archival system.

Archives must go beyond basic back up thinking. An "Archive" must cross an ocean of time independent of any crutch technology. Archiving doesn't mean that you include your outtakes or camera tests. Only the finished work should be archived. For a work to be truly archived, it will have an artistic, economic, historic or cultural significance of some sort- and that significance can reside solely in the mind of the author. I am adamantly opposed to relying solely on the LTO standard as the ark that sails off into the ages. I reject the assumption that it is possible to migrate and manage our way to an archive because at the rate at which data is created, eventually we will be doing more migrating and managing that we will creating new data.

The concept of encryption doesn't even enter into this discussion, because you never want an archive to be encrypted. The whole purpose of an archive is for it to be open and accessible to future generations without needless impediment. The two central criteria for resurrecting data should be:

1. The data must be Human-Readable. (film held up to light)

2. The data must be capable of being reconstituted using more than one technology. (Re photgraphed or Scanned or photo-chemically reprinted onto color stock)

Images stored as images. Audio stored as analog and digital magnetic master and analog and digital optical master.

Ink and Paper is the model. The folks at Point 360 are on the right track to offer a complement to the current LTO standard.

 

[M Most]

I don't understand why some of you guys ( Gavin, Mike) want to kill a proven system like the film option. You don't want it? Don't use it. But the idea that you will be the only one scouring ebay for a working drive in 30 years? If that's your plan, then you don't have a truly archival system.

Huh?? To quote myself in an earlier post:

Whether people here want to admit it or not, the best archival element today remains separation masters on film, at least for features.

Does that sound like I "want to kill a proven system like the film option?"

The concept of encryption doesn't even enter into this discussion, because you never want an archive to be encrypted. The whole purpose of an archive is for it to be open and accessible to future generations without needless impediment.

THAT I agree with. And so do the studio archivists who have given numerous presentations on the subject. Archives, by definition, are not compressed, and they are not encrypted. They are unaltered representations of the material they came from.

 

[Patrick OMara]

I think another aspect of this whole thing is that.. we've only scratched the surface of digital. It's going to go beyond anything that film could ever do. These formats will be digital and be impossible to store on film.

So to say that film is the best way to store your work may very well not be true in 5-10 years and will have become an old format that we have to "deal" with before it rots.

Archiving will be digital systems that are active, redundant, worldwide, fast, easy to use, and will be constantly updated, and maintained. Online space will be so cheap that your high res movies of today will only be an after thought in the mega amounts of space available to the common user in the future. I had a 20 meg hard drive for my computer, 20 megs. That's 1 RAW image these days. But now we have 16000 megs on something smaller than my thumbnail. Now my home computer has 5,662,310 megabytes.



Side Note: if you have some works that you want to have saved but don't want to invest any money you can try archive.org, it's free. I put some stuff there 6 years ago and it's still there...

 

[Bill Anderson]

There will be a hierarchy - money, physical space ... Hollywoods needs are not the CIA's needs, and so on.

Well processed ( and stored) film has an excellent life expectancy in the hundreds of years. But it is not so practical and affordable for much of what is being done
and worth saving, these days. A Sex and the City might afford to be f'n carved in stone while an important piece of the New Wave might not.
Obviously this is why the development of a robust digital solution is of great importance.

 

[Elsie N]

When we are talking about "archive" in this thread, are we talking about just the digital master of a movie or the footage shot to make the movie in its totality? For me personally, speaking as a low-budget Indie movie maker, I will archive a copy of my footage on HDDs and perhaps a couple of copies of my released movie. If the movie does well, I will continue to migrate my library footage onto next generation storage. If not, I will just leave it on the HDDs and if they survive... great. If not, so what? If I feel like the movie might speak to an audience at a later time, I will migrate the digital master to newer storage methods even if it isn't successful in first release. Otherwise, I will let the BD-R or DVD copies of the movie serve as the archive.

Just offering a low budget perspective.

 

[Jeff Coatney]

When we are talking about "archive" in this thread, are we talking about just the digital master of a movie or the footage shot to make the movie in its totality? For me personally, speaking as a low-budget Indie movie maker, I will archive a copy of my footage on HDDs and perhaps a couple of copies of my released movie. If the movie does well, I will continue to migrate my library footage onto next generation storage. If not, I will just leave it on the HDDs and if they survive... great. If not, so what? If I feel like the movie might speak to an audience at a later time, I will migrate the digital master to newer storage methods even if it isn't successful in first release. Otherwise, I will let the BD-R or DVD copies of the movie serve as the archive.

Just offering a low budget perspective.

From a purely historical perspective, its the low budget footage that will have the most value. Because it is most likely to contain documentary footage of how people and things actually looked - not a staged take on a big budget movie.

 

[Jeff Coatney]

I think another aspect of this whole thing is that.. we've only scratched the surface of digital. It's going to go beyond anything that film could ever do. These formats will be digital and be impossible to store on film.

So to say that film is the best way to store your work may very well not be true in 5-10 years and will have become an old format that we have to "deal" with before it rots.

Archiving will be digital systems that are active, redundant, worldwide, fast, easy to use, and will be constantly updated, and maintained. Online space will be so cheap that your high res movies of today will only be an after thought in the mega amounts of space available to the common user in the future. I had a 20 meg hard drive for my computer, 20 megs. That's 1 RAW image these days. But now we have 16000 megs on something smaller than my thumbnail. Now my home computer has 5,662,310 megabytes.



Side Note: if you have some works that you want to have saved but don't want to invest any money you can try archive.org, it's free. I put some stuff there 6 years ago and it's still there...

I think much of this is true and likely. And we'll need to continue developing the criteria of what constitutes an effective archive of advanced imaging data. The cloud promises us the idea that we could see data consolidation as a means of efficient storage. For example: There would in therory only need to be a single version of a song or movie that requires redundant storage, instead of there being a million copies of a song in various states of quality, there need only be one or two that require storage digitally and the whole world accesses that copy. Apple iTunes in the cloud is an example. With movies, where there is really only a few of them being made each year, there should never be a time when a movies is unavailable. If it exists, we should all have instant access to it at all times and forever.

Even Facebook looks poised to become the caretakers of our family photos, which have relevance to many people who would want to access them. Instead of the precious data residing solely in your home, there is no need for it to be replicated in every family member's home if its in the cloud. People tend to edit and cull the best photos for saving and that could be enough to limit the idea of a data deluge where we store bad shots, etc.

Holographic data storage could meet the criteria for archiving I mentioned and have the capacity to contain whatever future formats there are. In theory...

 

[Bill Anderson]

And yet the "big budget movies" are more likely to stimulate important research and provide for accessible methods. And I honestly don't see how an extensive document of these times,
particularly the more important events, will fail to exist in the future: holding documentation of how people and things actually looked is a far cry from preserving a high fidelity archive
of a piece of art, and so on. My paper and pigment ink combo is rated at a few hundred years before even a PERCEPTIBLE change will occur - that is archival quality.
Film is understood. Crack the digital time barrier.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

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.

And this is no longer the case for all WB productions

 

[M Most]

And this is no longer the case for all WB productions

There are very few WB series this season being shot on Red. So by definition, there are very few that would be candidates for 4K archives.

 

[Tom Lowe]

The bottom line is, Kodak failed because they did not have a visionary leader/CEO to transition the company. Do you think Steve Jobs would have let Kodak die a slow, painful death like this??

It's the same thing that happened to Blockbuster Video. They failed to adapt.

 

[Joe D'Arcy]

The bottom line is, Kodak failed because they did not have a visionary leader/CEO to transition the company. Do you think Steve Jobs would have let Kodak die a slow, painful death like this??

It's the same thing that happened to Blockbuster Video. They failed to adapt.

As a corporate entity, Kodak failed but as a film company they were highly successful over a long period of time. Kodak has survived for 79 years after the death of its founder. I love Steve Jobs and I love Apple and I hope Apple is able to maintain the longevity and integrity of Kodak for such a long period of time.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Saying that Kodak "failed" after being around for nearly a century is like saying that the Roman Empire or dinosaurs were failures because they are no longer with us today. Every thing ends someday.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Fair enough. Kodak is ending because they could not adapt. In a sense, it is similar to Blockbuster, just on a larger and longer-term scale.

But this was very easy to see coming. They literally had decades to make the transition, if continuing on as a company was important to any of them. I doubt that it was Mr. Kodak's dream to see his company go bankrupt and dissolve into nothing.

I remember sitting in an office in New York City in 2000. A friend of mine showed me Napster, and we instantly downloaded a few of my favorite songs. Within about 15 minutes of playing with this software, the one thing that really came to my mind was this: "I hope Blockbuster gets ahead of this, or they will be wiped out." A decade later, they were essentially wiped out.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

There was no way for Kodak to "adapt" and stay as successful as they were -- they had three times the marketshare of their nearest competitor in film technology, there was no way they could do the same thing against Sony, Panasonic, etc. in the digital realm. They were destined to go from Number One in one technology to Number Five, Seven, whatever, in digital technology. It's not as simple as replacing one product with another product, we are talking about a radical change in the creation and management of images where one company cannot dominate all aspects of digital image technology, from sensors to recorders to post-production software, unlike the photochemical process where one company could be the main provider of all products necessary. Saying that Kodak "failed" because they couldn't find a way to dominate sensor technology, recorder technology, camera technology, and post technology -- which is what they would have had to do in order to maintain their level of dominance in image-making, is basically unfair. Plus if they managed to do all of that, they would have killed the very technology that was providing the majority of their profits. In other words, they would have had to kill Kodak to save it. At that point, what's the point? It's just Kodak in name only. Let someone else be the new Kodak of the 21st Century... if they can.

 

[M Most]

Saying that Kodak "failed" because they couldn't find a way to dominate sensor technology, recorder technology, camera technology, and post technology -- which is what they would have had to do in order to maintain their level of dominance in image-making, is basically unfair.

It's especially unfair because Kodak did, in fact dominate sensor technology, recorder technology, and post technology for years in a very quiet way. The sensor in every Spirit Datacine is a Kodak product (the original Datacine was going to be manufactured as both the Philips Spirit and the Kodak Lightning). The Cineon Genesis scanner was dominant prior to Celco, Arri, and some other manufacturers entering into the scanner market. The Cineon workstation was the first, and for a while the only, high end pure digital compositing system.

The fact that they didn't always choose to manufacture full products around their technology doesn't mean they weren't the key player. Nearly all modern color science for feature DI's is based around Kodak's formats and color theory, not to mention its film chemistry. The company was destined to downsize, as nearly all American companies involved in manufacturing have, especially if their products have been supplanted by digital techniques. It's almost impossible to take a company the size of Eastman Kodak at its peak and move it into a digital world without a great deal of fallout, both in terms of physical plant and employees. And while I agree that some of Kodak's strategic decisions might have been a bit questionable, saying they didn't do things that they actually did is to not understand the history. Being first over the years has often meant producing products that are expensive to develop and manufacture - something not as true today in an age of multigigahertz processor speeds and where storage is measured in terabytes. One can smugly look at what's happening and say "see, I told you so." Or one can be a bit more realistic and understand that to be first in new technology offers no guarantee that you can continue to be the leader, especially when you're doing things that haven't been done before, and have to literally invent the devices to do it - not just write clever software and rely on processor manufacturers to do the heavy lifting. That's the position Kodak was in. It doesn't mean they were blind. It means they were first. That's not always a good thing in the long term.

 

[Tom Lowe]

There was no way for Kodak to "adapt" and stay as successful as they were -- they had three times the marketshare of their nearest competitor in film technology, there was no way they could do the same thing against Sony, Panasonic, etc. in the digital realm.

And yet, "a retired sunglasses salesman" did it.

All it takes is vision.