Red vs Film

[Wesley Scoggins]

Always seemed very expensive when I've asked, to the point of wiping out any potential savings. In many ways it can be cheaper to shoot on whatever camera you already own. It's often cheaper for me to shoot 400' of 35mm than rent a RED package with DIT.

Seems like it would be way less expensive than professional film restoration.

 

[mike ogden]

Jeff said - "And what do you base this statement on, other than your own inexperience and fear of digital mediums?"

I have no fear of digital mediums. Many moons ago I was a programmer/operator in a bank data centre before I left a life of staring at boring screens to one of looking at more interesting ones. I've helped build and maintain some of the first NLE's and have been managing digital data since about 1984. All of this came in very handy when digibeta was launched and the world of TV and film went 'digital'. I was ahead of the game and it still serves me well.

Jeff also said "I've been managing data for over 20 years now. Why would 20 years from now be any different? Storing and managing data gets easier and more efficient every year. It is also quite cheap and secure if done properly."

It's quite cheap if your attitude is to shove it on a cheap drive and forget about it then hope it comes alive when you spin it back up.

Archiving what seems to be a flood of digitally acquired films IS going to be a problem because not everyone can do a film out which bothers film libraries immensely. The cost of maintaining that library will be much more complex and expensive year on year that new digital storage comes to market and they have to move it across.

I'm a big fan of digital, but I temper my enthusiasm with experience and a step back of perspective. I believe that Jim and his worker bees are doing amazing things at Red but it shouldn't stifle away or blinker a discussion on an important subject which is the history of what we do. Or maybe digital film making should just be as disposable as a lot of other digital products? Cheap dvd players, computers, TV's, you name it. It's all cheap and does amazing things compared to the tech of 10 years back. But it's all very disposable. Is this what we want our film making to become? But that's a different thread....

 

[mike ogden]

You'll probably find that film restoration will be quite automated in future. Everything that a place like Lowry Digital do now can be automated in future apart from the more esoteric step, like grading the picture and restoring really screwed up prints.

 

[Stephen Williams]

Seems like it would be way less expensive than professional film restoration.

Never needed to do that, I find the original neg and rescan, looks better than when I originally shot it. OK I am only talking 20 years, but as good as new.

 

[Wesley Scoggins]

Never needed to do that, I find the original neg and rescan, looks better than when I originally shot it. OK I am only talking 20 years, but as good as new.

I am just saying, store digital badly, or store film badly. It seems it would be far more difficult to restore film than it would digital.

Film requires it to be sent off to special labs (since most of us don't have access to professional 4K scanning equipment), especially if it's become warped. Then all the fixing you've got to do if it's faded. Scratches, dust, you've got to fix all of that.

Digital is usually just removing the magnetic plate, putting it in a new harddrive and hooking it back up again.

I've dug up 8mm stored in my Grandfathers attic, lots of issues with it. Of course the harddrives i've hooked up aren't as old as the 25+ 8mm stuff, but still.

Most people don't store film perfectly, just like how most people don't store digital perfectly. But damaged digital (to me and my capabilities at least), seems way easier to recover than damaged film. I can move a magnetic plate to another harddrive with about 5 dollars worth of screwdrivers and tools. It would require many thousands of dollars worth of equipment to try to accomplish the same thing with film, and would largely be impossible for me to do on my own.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

All of this came in very handy when digibeta was launched and the world of TV and film went 'digital'. I was ahead of the game and it still serves me well.

Fair enough. I guess I'm still trying to figure out why you say that digital storage is going to be a problem for those wanting their data to last 20 years or more?

It's quite cheap if your attitude is to shove it on a cheap drive and forget about it then hope it comes alive when you spin it back up.

It's still reasonably cheap if you do it properly. I said properly. Your example above is a bad, bad idea. Unfortunately I read about all too many people doing just that.

A good way to archive data is to give your data over to one or two data archival services. Let those guys make all the duplicate copies onto drives, tapes, etc.. carry the insurance... whatever. Don't incur all the hardware expenses up front on your end. Don't put all your eggs in one basket in that you should not trust your data to only one archive. Always keep your own masters and perpetual backups too. This is no different than making multiple archival prints of a film and storing them in different places. You can have 3 prints of a film and foolishly store them in the same same warehouse that burns down.

Archiving what seems to be a flood of digitally acquired films IS going to be a problem because not everyone can do a film out which bothers film libraries immensely.

If I were a film library, I would be bothered immensely as well and I would already be stepping up to the plate offering digital archiving services. Oh wait... Many are, including the US Library of Congress film archives and the WPA.

The cost of maintaining that library will be much more complex and expensive year on year that new digital storage comes to market and they have to move it across.

Yes, it will have aggregate costs over time. But each cost is significantly less expensive than producing film prints at this time and for the foreseeable future. A future where film masters could possibly become much more expensive within the next decade, while data density and prices will continue to shrink.

The ones who will find it a problem to bear continuous costs such as this are the small independent guys who try to do it all themselves. There is most definitely a breaking point... That is indeed a problem, but once again an argument for using data archival services rather than the entire do-it-yourself approach.

I'm not saying that digital storage is perfect or the only answer or anything like that. I'm just saying that it's not some janky concept or mystical voodoo method that many in the film industry make it out to be. Digital archives are very robust and could theoretically be maintained indefinitely, with no loss or degradation to the master material, *IF* handled properly.

 

[Stefan Christou]

Uh huh. You certainly know what you're talking about. You're totally right, film is great for archiving things, way better than infinitely backed up hard drives, that's exactly why the Star Wars print was NEARLY LOST ENTIRELY after fewer than 20 years and had to be completely repaired..........
.............What a joke. I'm very happy to live in this era and have these choices! Now whether other people want to use film, well, whatever, that doesn't affect me, so good for them, go shoot film, have fun with that. I'll enjoy better technology and be happy. They can enjoy their archaic legacy cameras and be happy with that. So everyone is happy! We're all just a buncha happy filmmakers. LOL.

Preach! :emote_popcorn:

 

[Stefan Christou]

I think the important thing is not what format you archive on, but how many archive copies you have. Many a master tape has been wiped, hard drive dead, or film print lost. If you have multiple copies, you have a chance. Multiple copies on multiple types of media is better still.

I enjoy old British telefantasy, but the TV archives are full of holes. Sometimes, all that remains is a black and white telerecording of a colour programme, or a Shibaden tape, or even just a few photographs taken off the TV of the live broadcast, maybe with an audio tape recording of the soundtrack from someone holding a mic near the TV set. Sometimes a copy of a show was made to VHS before that master copy was lost forever, and it's only the VHS we have now.

Graeme

Many were deliberately destroyed by the Beeb, I don't know why. Cultural vandalism or what?

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Yes, either destroyed or lost, or sent to foreign TV companies who were told to destroy after last transmission. Back then, there were limited opportunities for repeats (actors' unions don't like repeats) and no home video, so there was thought to be zero commercial value to the recordings after their repeat or foreign sales. Some TV were preserved as examples of the genre, but most were junked.

Because masters were on Ampex Quad 2", and those tapes were very expensive, and could be re-used - they were wiped and re-used.

I guess the point I'm making is that the easiest way to loose archive material is just not care about keeping it. All other factors are small compared to this one, as history has shown. No one format is able to withstand the ravages of time.

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but perhaps we need this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Tape

Graeme

 

[Shane Betts]

Just wondering, I am not an expert on harddrive design so I could be totally mistaken here, but I don't understand why they wouldn't work after resting on a shelf?

Stiction. The lube on the bearings can dry up, resulting in drives that won't spin up. It's not guaranteed to happen and, yes, I've had drives long forgotten that spin up just dandy, but it can. And, of course, it'll always be the one you need.

And you make a very good point; one can't argue that film is better because well stored film will outlast poorly stored data. And, as you also say, drives can always be rescued by techs - and though it's an expensive way to recover a Word file, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a 2k scan, dust & scratch and regrade of a feature. So far, and I stand to be corrected on this, it seems the life of the actual platters seems quite good. (I'd actually like to know if anyone has those numbers...)

As Jeff rightly points out, data does not suffer generational degradation like film, nor does it die over time. Yeah, NASA lost data (as did a lot of people) in the early days but those things happened because nobody had really thought computing and data storage through back then. Everything was new and nobody was looking ahead. We all know better now and storing movies as data properly represents by far the best way IMHO.

 

[Eki Halkka]

Stiction. The lube on the bearings can dry up, resulting in drives that won't spin up. It's not guaranteed to happen and, yes, I've had drives long forgotten that spin up just dandy, but it can. And, of course, it'll always be the one you need.

As said earlier, powering up the drives every few months will reduce the risk of stiction considerably.

As a side note, even though blurays aren't by no means high enough quality to be considered proper archiving of a film master, they are still pretty darn good compared to, say, VHS tapes - and they're distributed in hundreds of thousands of separate locations at best.

So even in the extremely unlikely case where all digital master copies of some current blockbuster got destroyed, there's still massive redundancy at lower quality level (arguably comparable or better than worn out, 20 year old film release prints).

 

[mike ogden]

I'm glad you have supreme confidence in the technology of today working tomorrow. History tells us otherwise.

 

[Steven Caesare]

. No one format is able to withstand the ravages of time.


Graeme

This is the important point. Acetate hardens. Photochemicals fade. Drive lubrication dries up. Magenetic tapes develop bit errors. Recordable optical disc dyes are not infinitely stable. Paper disintegrates. Oils fade and crack. Stone wears down. Spaceships are slowlay ablated by electromagentic radaion.

Those are just the natural processes. They can be mitigated to some degree by enviromental controls, magnetic shielding, underground storage, etc... but that also requires continued attention, effort, and expense. Left to themselves, no medium is permanent. None.

Then there are "extra-curricular events". Hollywood Studios catch fire. Earthquakes happen. Floods. Asteroids. War and looting. Vandalism. People flip the wrong switch. Languages are lost and forgotten.

So any data, be it handwriting, oil paints, or a stream of bits, needs to be ACTIVELY preserved if you want it to last. The trick is maximizing the life span of the current generation, while minimizing the effort to preserve it until the next. Corporate america and government has struggled with this issue as well as Hollywood.

There is simplicity in analog formats (i.e. a well preserved film from 100 years ago could be played) over digital (while a RLL hard drive from 15 can probably be mounted, there's some non-trivial time and expense in either finding, or perhaps even having to custom build an interface.). However in those cases the medium IS the data. As the medium degrades (either from age or playback) the fidelity of the information dgrades at the same rate (i.e. blacks arent as black).

The advantage of digital is that the information is abstracted from the medium. If the pickup head requires a signal ratio of at least 10:1 to determine a bit is on or off, it does not matter if the medium has degraded form it's original 100:1 ratio down to 50:1, it will still be read with perfect fidelity. Error correction allows for even multible bit errors(up to a threshhold) to be corrected with 100% accuracy.

That certainly doesn't insulate from loss, but as Graeme pointed out, as long as you have a good "mulitple copy" strategy, it does allow for perfect generational archiving.

But it still requires effort.

-Steve

 

[Steve Sherrick]

I'm glad you have supreme confidence in the technology of today working tomorrow. History tells us otherwise.

I'd rather see us all thinking about solutions, rather than mulling in the faults of the available options. Forward thinking, combined with an understanding of history is what propels innovation.

We'll try to tackle this issue in one of the REDUSER East Coast events coming up.

 

[Eki Halkka]

I'm glad you have supreme confidence in the technology of today working tomorrow. History tells us otherwise.

It doesn't have to, at least as far as hardware and file formats go. No-one in their right mind makes one copy of their important piece of work on a hard drive and expects it to last to the next millenia as is.

In two hundred years from now, the movie you shoot today on Red One may be stored on a medium yet unknown, in a format yet unknown - but the content will be fully intact as long as someone out there thinks the work was worth preserving, worth transcoding to a new medium.

As far as digital images go, i have a hard time believing that the current commonly used image formats would be lost in time before new copies of the important content has been made in that day's common formats.

All data that's thought to be worth the trouble to save can be saved.

Heck, i still have the whole hard drive of my first PC (and all the ones following that) stored on my system - the drive capacity has grown so much that i've always been able to simply make a full copy of each computer's C: drive when upgrading my system.

As far as content goes, i have copies of pretty much everything i've done since then on external drives - i've accumulated something to the order of 15-20 terabytes of data along the years (including redundancy - the really important stuff always exists at least on two separate drives). Sure, it's cost me a few thousand bucks, spread through the years, but i don't consider that expensive compared to still having all the important stuff from my past available...

If i live to see what the world will be like in the next 40 years, i wouldn't be at all surpresed if i had all this data still available - maybe stored on the equivalent of the internet of that day, or maybe on a few USB memory stick like devices (again, for redundancy).

 

[christopher witzke]

I don't mean to sound like a hillbilly ( I live on a farm in Kentucky... but I grew up in Northern California ).... But, I take a very simple approach to archiving my files;

I archive to 2 separate hardrives ( mirrors ) and bury them in coffee cans in the back yard.

This way if the house burns down or even if there's an apocalypse, my files are safe.

I've been doing this for 4 years.... and have moved the files to newer and larger hardrives about once every 2 years. Right now I have 8TB of files a few feet underground.... so far so good.

 

[mike ogden]

is it tin foil hat time already :001_huh:

 

[Steven Caesare]

I don't mean to sound like a hillbilly ( I live on a farm in Kentucky... but I grew up in Northern California ).... But, I take a very simple approach to archiving my files;

I archive to 2 separate hardrives ( mirrors ) and bury them in coffee cans in the back yard.

This way if the house burns down or even if there's an apocalypse, my files are safe.

I've been doing this for 4 years.... and have moved the files to newer and larger hardrives about once every 2 years. Right now I have 8TB of files a few feet underground.... so far so good.

Have you tried restores from the oldest ones?

I can't imagine a coffe can not rusting thru and filling with water in a couple of years.

-sc

 

[Eki Halkka]

is it tin foil hat time already :001_huh:

Yeah, the hats are stored right next to the film printer, feel free to take yours ;-)

 

[Eki Halkka]

Have you tried restores from the oldest ones?

He moves the files to new drives every two years.