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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 :)

Red vs Film

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=33162

Read the story...

Digital is never safe as long as it doesn't let data exist physically. If the digital sequence is burned into a crystal or something rock solid then the only thing that is needed is a decoder that exist together with it.
But either way, if we are talking about the archive of our time in history then digital is not a good solution. Doesn't matter what is said, physical storage can be viewed by a caveman, a super rock solid 1 000 000 year durable harddrive can not.

But for us who doesn't intend to go to such lengths there is a new system coming out that is, according to them, durable for a thousand years and at the same time solid state. Can't remember it's name but it's also small like a memory stick.
 
It seems like the archiving issue is the last branch that film has to hold on to in the digital vs. film battle.

Two years ago this would have been only the smallest, most peripheral argument.

Neccesity is the father of invention. we WILL find a way to reliably store digital media for a long time simply because WE HAVE TO.
 
mike ogden said:
I'm glad you have supreme confidence in the technology of today working tomorrow. History tells us otherwise.
Click to expand...

You keep preaching this, but how about some examples other than the lack of foresight from NASA? Please tell me which common-use media from 20 years ago is not readable today? Which common media today do you think will be unusable or unreadable in 20 to 30 years from now and why?

There are still inexpensive solutions to connect to old ESDI, MFM and RLL hard drives. Old SCSI devices from 25 years ago can be connected to current controllers with proper cables and termination.

Media can fail, yes it's true. But anyone serious about preserving their data never makes just one copy, nor do they store all their copies at the same location. Magnetic media is vulnerable to electromagnetic fields and electrostatic ones over extended time. Some optical media (pretty much all writable optical media) is vulnerable to light, especially UV... But no more sensitive than film in most situations. Proper film storage requires more effort to be made to hold constant temperatures and humidity values, much more so than most digital media. Even under the most ideal conditions, film "ages" or changes over time. It's not as robust as many like to think it is.

So what happens to a film that has been properly stored for 75 years and is starting to show obvious signs of decay? Is it transferred, digitally enhanced and then re-printed to new film with a loss of visual information? Or is it better to do the highest quality digital conversion possible and archive that digital remaster? Time will tell us the answer to that, I suppose. Because that's what many studios are doing now as they raid their vaults for creating HD (or higher resolution) masters for Blu-Ray and future formats. And in many cases, they are not only archiving the new digital masters, but also new film transfers as well.
 
Also just a point to reinforce what Jeff said. CDs have been available for more than 25 years. Finding a drive to read a CD from is not at all difficult.

FAT has been available for almost 35 years. If you had a drive with FAT any OS could read it.

NTFS has been available for 15 years and there is no reason to believe that it won't be readable in another 35 itself. Probably more readable as more open source solutions become available.

You can buy an 8track player which still plays 8track cartridges for less than $10. I have no doubt what so ever that the hardware will be available in 50 years to play back any widely adopted and commercialized storage medium.

A caveman might be able to view it. But by the time a caveman got to it, it would probably have been destroyed by exposure and degradation. In the real world finding a playback device is not often a challenge. 25 years later my computer still has a PATA port.

Now saving to a holographic disk? That probably is a bad idea since there aren't a bazillion players on the market.
 
christopher witzke said:
So far I have not had any issues with moving the files to new hardrives....

oh... the cans are actually plastic folgers cans.... but I've been thinking about using a small igloo cooler instead.
Click to expand...

:emote_whack: For realz?
 
mike ogden said:
I'm glad you have supreme confidence in the technology of today working tomorrow. History tells us otherwise.
Click to expand...

A media production house that I visited showed me their media storage room, and they still have U-matic tapes from almost 40 years ago, that still work on their ancient U-matic player.

They had Betacam, VHS, and stacks and stacks of Hi-8, all that still worked almost 20+ years after many of them were recorded.

We've learned a lot from the past, and look at what we've done, we're standardizing the format specs, so now you can have a blu-ray player, toss a CD into it, it works, toss a DVD into it, it works, and in 10-15 years or so when we have 100 Terabyte Holographic discs, they are going to be in a very similar shape, so you'll still be able to throw DVD's and CD's and Blu-Rays into them and have them work.

The industry has shown that people WANT reverse compatibility, and I have a strong confidence that we'll still be able to easily play CD's, DVD's, and Blu-Ray's, in 20-30 years.

Nothing in the past has really told me that current media will be unreadable in the short-term future, and when it's phases out, it'll be at such a slow rate that i'll have plenty of time for moving everything to a new format.
 
Wesley Scoggins said:
The industry has shown that people WANT reverse compatibility, and I have a strong confidence that we'll still be able to easily play CD's, DVD's, and Blu-Ray's, in 20-30 years.
Click to expand...

But you still won't be able to open a Final Cut Pro 15.0.2 project in Final Cut Pro 15.0.1.
 
That's forward not reverse compatibility.

You can't play a BluRay in a DVD player or an 8 track in a USB port.

I can still open 3ds max R1 files 13 versions later.
 
And you can't run 35mm through a 16mm projector either. But of course, that statement is just plain silly.:yesnod:
 
Eki Halkka said:
As said earlier, powering up the drives every few months will reduce the risk of stiction considerably.
Click to expand...

You're right but that kind of manual work requirement is probably the riskiest part of the deal. Humans forget stuff. But even if it does get forgotten, the medium (the platters) will be fine and recoverable.

My backup storage provider offers a full data recovery program. Give him data on anything, from floppy to DLT to buggered hard drives and he will restore it to LTO or HDD for you. Not cheap but neither is film restoration. It's quite a good business model - just buy one of each type of drive that comes along, along with all the cabling, termination and adaptors to hook it all up and wait for the agonizing screams.
 
Stephen Williams said:
That does not guarantee he can restore them.
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Well, I admittedly did mis-read that. I thought he was adding new data every couple of years.

Moving the date from old drives to new does imply he was successfully reading them.

Still, I have reservations about the integrity of a coffe can in the ground :rolleyes5:
 
It is interesting that the film vs Red debate has boiled down to storage.

Someone lent me a copy of click on blu-ray (don't ask), it looked horrible in HD! Now Red footage in HD on an LCD looks great. Go figure.

Also I saw some chick-flick I have managed to mainly blank-out from my mind on a film projector in the cinema and that looked horrible. I'd almost forgotten how much flicker and grain there is in the image, having been used to digital projection at my local cinema.

Does anyone agree that film projection is a bit crap compared to digital? Or that films like Che, look much better than ones like Click?

I'm not saying this proves anything overall, but in those cases Red and digital won hands down.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
:emote_whack: For realz?
Click to expand...

Ya.. I know... sounds really cheesy... but there was a point a few years ago where I became really paranoid about my stills archives for commercial work... Some of the projects I work on end up with thousands of images acquired over a few months and many locations and hired talent... I just can't afford to reshoot these kinds of projects. At the time, I'd never imagined having to archive 4k footage. I'm not at the level of filmmaking that some of you guys are, so I'm sure if I had to archive footage from a feature film I'd insure another route.

Heck... it's basically free other than the cost of the storage media.

If a super fast cloud storage solution comes along at a reasonable cost, I 'd go for it though.
 
There are still inexpensive solutions to connect to old ESDI, MFM and RLL hard drives. Old SCSI devices from 25 years ago can be connected to current controllers with proper cables and termination.
Click to expand...

They stopped making nintendo NES game systems more than 15 years ago...

did the games dissapear?

HELL NO.

in fact, my dusty old NES STILL works just as well as it always has.

And if it didnt, well, the GAMES are NOT lost...theyre on the internet!

Archiving digital media is easy.
 
Eki Halkka said:
Well, usually it's called backward or downward compatibility, so "reverse" is closer than "forward":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_compatibility
Click to expand...
In technology, for example in telecommunications and computing, a device or technology is said to be backwards (or downwards) compatible if it allows input generated by older devices.
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IE being able to open old files.


A forward-compatible system is expected to gracefully handle input which is intended for a newer version, by ignoring the unknowns and selecting the known subset of the data that the system is capable of handling. Forward compatibility is harder to achieve than backward compatibility because a system needs to cope gracefully with an unknown future data format or requests for unknown future features. Backward compatibility does not have this issue because it accepts a known data format.
Click to expand...

i.e. being able to open newer files.


If your software can open a higher version it's forward compatible. If it can open lower version files then it's backwards compatible.

Wikipedia has a definition I've never heard before which is that it has to be able to round trip to be backwards compatible as well. Personally I've never heard that additional definition before although it doesn't say you have to use the same file format to round trip, so you could say it's mostly backwards compatible.
 
Stefan Christou said:
It is interesting that the film vs Red debate has boiled down to storage.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily storage per se, but the need to constantly migrate the data to current physical formats and to ensure that enough documentation is available that the data can be properly interpreted.

Most people here seem to be talking about this in terms of their own personal files. The problem with digital archiving goes way beyond that. Imagine the amount of data in your personal files. Now multiply it by 100 million. That's what studios have to deal with, and frankly, it's what every industry that has digital files has to deal with. The amount of data that is being stored is staggering, and it's already gotten to the point where any data migration plan is already way behind the curve in terms of the amount of data that needs to be migrated. In other words, even if migration were taking place 24/7 on as many systems as there currently are in use, it would never even come close to keeping up with the amount of new data that's being added to the mix daily. If you want an accurate view of what this means to the film industry, I suggest you read the Academy's report "The Digital Dilemma." It will make you re-think the way you look at all of this and make you realize just why digital archiving is such a major issue.
 
Well it seems that film still wins out with dynamic range and resolution for the time being, but digital is getting close, especially red. I saw public enemies a while back and was appalled at the terrible quality of the image. It was one of the ugliest films I've seen in a long time. I believe it was shot on an f23 (same thing as slumdog), but it really did digital a disservice. I've heard so much negative about that film, when the actual story and Depp's acting were actually quite good. I feel that digital is too volatile at the moment, until all digital gets closer to red's level, I'd say the majority of films will be shot on film.
 
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