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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 :)

Paramount first studio to end distributing celluloid

Good. Haven't seen proper quality film print in years (maybe close to Hollywood and major networks prints still look stellar, dunno). 2K is not enough to replace 35mm film projection though. I for one welcome our new laser-based digital 4K overlords. Please arrive sooner, sincerely yours.
 
Vadim Bobkovsky said:
Good. Haven't seen proper quality film print in years (maybe close to Hollywood and major networks prints still look stellar, dunno). 2K is not enough to replace 35mm film projection though.
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You'd be surprised. SMPTE did a couple of days' worth of demos around 2001 showing 35mm film side-by-side with 2K digital at the Norris Theater, and even on a pin-registered projector with top-flight lenses -- which no film theater ever uses -- the digital looked better in some ways than the film. I think the color looked better on the film, but in many other ways, the digital image was superior even in 2K.

I think 4K is a theoretical peak for film prints, and you'll never get that if you go through the normal OCN -> IP -> IN -> release print stage. Four generations down, it's lost a lot of sharpness. If you get a Vision Premiere print struck right off the original negative, then you might get close to that... except again, the projector's unsteadiness becomes an issue.

KETCH ROSSi said:
Been saying it for years... Now is starting to sink in to the rest... The nostalgia will also not last long... ;)
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Yeah, well, bear in mind John Lennon's words: "You don't know what you got... until you lose it."
 
Marc Wielage said:
...

Yeah, well, bear in mind John Lennon's words: "You don't know what you got... until you lose it."
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Ha ha, good one Marc,

however I know exactly what I have lost, eve since i stopped using it... Yet I also know what is that I have found in it's place, and that to me is much more important in so many ways!!

But it is also important to acknowledge the achievements of Celluloid, and not to trash it's existence, yet very important and most important IMSO is to embrace progress and what it brings, especially when it is so much better in many terms and aspects, and while this can, has and will continue to be argued, Film is but gone, and Digital is here to stay, and it has now with Dragon (for me) gone if for avoiding argument sake, not gotten way better then film, it is at the very list, made it OBSOLETE in all fronts...

Then there is of course all the production and postproduction benefits, not just imagery, and to that I also trow in the benefits Nature, our ONLY environment will get form the elimination of Celluloid use and distribution!!
 
Film as an acquisition format still has a lot going for it in certain situations. (not that I will use it, but it is till not "dead")

As a distribution format, it has been a lesser choice for a while... Given that the cinemas are properly set up (which they often are not)
 
Gunleik Groven said:
Film as an acquisition format still has a lot going for it in certain situations. (not that I will use it, but it is till not "dead")

As a distribution format, it has been a lesser choice for a while... Given that the cinemas are properly set up (which they often are not)
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As an archival format it has yet to be equalled. That is the one area that digital formats have a very, very serious weakness.
 
M Most said:
As an archival format it has yet to be equalled. That is the one area that digital formats have a very, very serious weakness.
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I agree 100%

Digital archiving is still a pretty risky business despite the predictable degrading of analogue media.

I am sometimes playing head-games with what an archaeologist will do when he finds a CD, I know what they can deduct from a film-roll and an LP

That said, the largest volumes of art has always just faded.

Bach was not the Baroque period in music. He was a smalltime organist with a big family and a systematic mind. Mozart and Hayden were not the only "Classical" composers.

Time is a brutal editor of the past for us all.

On the same time, the majority of work (as in minutes made) is intended for consumption... :)

But it is an interesting thing.
 
M Most said:
As an archival format it has yet to be equalled. That is the one area that digital formats have a very, very serious weakness.
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Not only that. You can see what is on a role of film without the use of electricity. Just hold it up to the sun. No digital format will ever boast that. Given that and films lifespan (conservative (100 years) and not so conservative (500 years)) I think it could be a long time until we see a digital equivalent, until such time as we "invent" or discover something organic.

Still, with all the technology we preach about I have yet to see anything man has created with the technological potential of a simple appleseed. We are pretty much Neanderthals when it comes to "tech" even though we think we are the great and all. It was not that long ago we thought punch cards were "amazing technology".

On the film distribution side. Let's face it. A digital file lets you control the number of plays, film prints let exhibitors "rip off" an extra few unclaimed screenings with no way of the owner knowing. This digital decision is probably rooted in economics more than quality or ease or anything artists would consider important.

Cuts shipping costs, switches off after X number of plays, need a password to access, all attractive to the studios.

It aint about film or digital it's about dollars and cents.

Battistella
 
David Battistella said:
This digital decision is probably rooted in economics more than quality or ease or anything artists would consider important.

Cuts shipping costs, switches off after X number of plays, need a password to access, all attractive to the studios.

It aint about film or digital it's about dollars and cents.
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Absolutely true. Nearly all "technological advances", especially in the entertainment business, are rooted in economics. If there isn't an economic advantage it just doesn't happen. Quality is the extra added benefit and the convenient sociological explanation, but that's all it is. Economics is the driver.
 
Yep. It's all about the Benjamins. :)



M Most said:
Absolutely true. Nearly all "technological advances", especially in the entertainment business, are rooted in economics. If there isn't an economic advantage it just doesn't happen. Quality is the extra added benefit and the convenient sociological explanation, but that's all it is. Economics is the driver.
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M Most said:
As an archival format it has yet to be equalled. That is the one area that digital formats have a very, very serious weakness.
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I would still rather have 100 copies on HDDs for the price of one film print. I haven't lost a single bit to bit rot in 15 years. I've lost photos to fires and physical damage.

Cloud storage is now approximately $0.01 per GB per month. Average film master is let's just say 2TB. 2,000 * .01 = $20/month = $250 per year.

It costs (according to Kodak) $1,000 per year for film.

I could have one copy on Amazon, Google, in-house Backblaze Pod and Azure for that price. So I could either have my data distributed across multiple data centers and constantly monitored for integrity... or I could have one reel vulnerable to fire or flood.

Or I could take the $10,000 for a decade of film archival and buy 100 4TB external HDDs and save 200 copies of my film. Now certainly maybe 50 or 60 of those drives would die in 10 years (unlikely but I'll be super generous) however it's practically certain that at least 1 copy will be intact.

Alternatively with the $10,000 for a decade of film archival I could buy about 400 LTO tapes capable of storing the film. I would be shocked to discover that 400 LTO tapes are statistically more likely to all die than one film master in one vault.

Also if I ever want a copy of my archive I just have to open the sequence, I don't have to find a working clean and well operated film scanner in 10 years!
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
I would still rather have 100 copies on HDDs for the price of one film print. I haven't lost a single bit to bit rot in 15 years.
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Not yet, and not that you know of. And the drives can also burn up in fires and other natural disasters, particularly if the originals and backups are all in the same building.

I have mentioned many times on this forum that I worked on three major studio projects where data backup corruption threatened to derail the picture. In one case, it resulted in about $200,000' worth of redo's to satisfy the studio (over a six month period). In all cases, the data backups were less than 8 years old.

Read these tech papers to note how concerned the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is on the problem of longterm backups of digital motion pictures:

The Digital Dilemma Part 1

The Digital Dilemma Part 2

One hopes they're working on a Part 3 of the paper which will have some definitive answers, but so far, all we have is questions and no real long-term, proven solutions.
 
If the picture is in threat of being "derailed" it's not an archival problem that's a production problem that wouldn't have been fixed by going with an archival master when the film was done. And yes, if you put all 100 drives in one building then you're just asking for trouble. But you could put them in 100 bank safety deposit boxes for $10 a year each. In 100 cities.... or countries.

Cockroaches don't survive the apocalypse because they're tough, although they are, they survive because you can't ever kill all of them. As to the Digital Dilemma I have trouble taking a study seriously that believes that 30TBs costs $12k *per year* to maintain.

30TB / 2.5TB LTO tapes = 12 * $70 = $800 / 10 years = $80 / year + $30 in safe deposit boxes = $110 for the first line of defense per year.

StoragePod 3.0 = 30TB / $10k for 160TB = $1,875 / 10 years = $187 year + $240 for colocation = $427/ year We're up to $537 now per year.

We can also put it on Amazon which has a 99.9999999999% reliability guarantee for data. That's $10 per TB per month. So 9.4TB for one copy * $10 = $1,128 per year.

We now have 3 backups in active storage servers. 3 copies on magnetic tape. And one copy in the cloud and we're only up to $1,665 per year per film. And unlike film there won't be a $10k scanning and cleanup charge if you want to actually access the archive. If that somehow all was corrupted I would be positively flabbergasted. Now admittedly I'm not including labor costs into the first two, however I'm assuming a large studio archival system would benefit from economies of scale and/or in the case of storage Pods just work out a deal with Backblaze for bulk retention.

But seriously how do you end up spending $12k for 30TB of data per year? Sounds like someone went to IBM and said they were from Hollywood and some sales guy's eyes lit up and didn't actually evaluate the needs. If you want Apples to Apples you don't need a fiber channel SAN cluster to compete with film. If you wanted to go crazy for $12k a year for 10 years you could backup the film 460 times to LTO 6. That's a lot of copies. You could like pass them out as party gifts when you had executives over. "Hey take a few tapes and put htem in your closet!" :D
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
I would still rather have 100 copies on HDDs for the price of one film print. I haven't lost a single bit to bit rot in 15 years. I've lost photos to fires and physical damage.
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You're making a few assumptions here that are not things to be assumed in major studio (or even smaller studio) archival situations. You're assuming that the major problem is number of copies. That is not the case. You're also assuming that being able to physically recover those copies is the major problem. That is also not the case. And third, you're overlooking the need for safeguarding all of it in a secure manner.

Regarding the first issue, one of the major problems with digital storage formats is that they are formats, written invisibly to some form of magnetic or optical storage, that must be interpreted a specific way in order to reconstruct the assets they represent. The data itself is not the asset. What it creates when interpreted properly is. And since all digital file formats have their own specific patterns, that information must be stored with the data itself. In other words, a bunch of zeros and ones mean nothing if you don't have the instructions that let you create what they are intended to represent. Today, that's not so difficult because the formats are usually some kind of current standard. In the studios' case, they only use open standards precisely for that reason. But what they're written on has a format (LTO, optical storage, etc) and the files themselves have a format (DPX, EXR, even things like R3D that I wouldn't recommend for archival storage due to their proprietary and undocumented nature). I doubt that you're putting instructions as to how the data was written and how to interpret it on every one of those copies. And I doubt that the physical storage those copies are on has such information. That was the point I and others here were trying to make. Film always had the distinct advantage of being self documenting and requiring only a light source for data recovery. Digital formats present a much, much bigger challenge in that regard. Film also has the advantage of being a physical asset, which means that there are known methods for its physical preservation and the material itself can be physically located in a a secure environment.

I think your comments are based more on your own personal situation, and by that I mean they're tailored to an individual dealing with his own projects of a rather contained size, that they personally own and control. It also means the only one who needs to know where they are and how to get them is you. That's one set of circumstances. But it bears little resemblance to that of a studio, whose assets represent many many millions of dollars of investment and whose existence and quick recoverability is vital to that investment and its value in the future. Those assets are also constantly repurposed for new technologies (known and unknown) and sold worldwide in different physical and non-physical forms. Migration costs for data storage are much more elaborate than what you're describing, and are still unproven over the long term. I would agree with Marc and very strongly suggest you read "The Digital Dilemma" before forming your opinions and believing that they should apply to the much larger problems of major production studios.
 
M Most said:
As an archival format it has yet to be equalled. That is the one area that digital formats have a very, very serious weakness.
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Digital does indeed have plenty of weaknesses, but there are some things it can offer that film can't. Such as the ability to endlessly replicate without degradation or generational loss. Nothing lasts forever, even film… I think long-term archival is a problem yet to be solved by any medium and its a matter of serious importance, often treated with far less regard than it deserves.
 
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