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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

dmh said:
I believe it was shot on an f23 (same thing as slumdog)
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Slumdog Millionaire was shot on a combination of 35mm film and the Silicon Imaging 2K digital camera. Public Enemies was shot primarily on the Sony F23, with additional photography on the Sony F950, Sony EX3, and 35mm film.
 
As M Most points out, dealing with data on a large scale is indeed an issue. But once again is manageable if dealt with properly. And to discuss how to deal with it properly is something of another discussion entirely, there are many methods and debates over which ways to do it. I think he's correct that most here are approaching this from the perspective of their own personal or small business files. Not that these files are any less significant in the grand scheme of things, but indeed much easier to manage and deal with on a smaller, localized scale.

One thing that's been mentioned before by others and myself in this thread that I think needs to be mentioned again is that we're in a digital world now, no matter how we choose to look at it. Nearly every feature or other production shot on film these days is scanned and taken through a DI or digital post process. Most everything is delivered digitally at some point now. So even for film purists, there is digital data to manage and archive, lest they choose to just throw that all away and only keep the master film transfers for archival.

The data center people I deal with are always faced with migration issues. It's an ongoing process of maintaining volumes and volumes of current data plus archival. And on the large end of the spectrum -- companies dealing with multiple petabytes or even zetabytes of data, the continuous migration paradigm has essentially run its course and is being relegated to a practice of the past. Storage is cheap and it is continuously getting bigger cheaper and faster. So the thoughts are to keep redundantly-secured "live" volumes and backups. We're talking every bit of data ever assembled by these corporate entities or government agencies, stored online and instantly available. Offline backups are made continuously and stored at multiple off-site locations if the need ever arises to pull data from them. But archiving to LTO or other media is a temporary stop-gap and the current archival form. In another 10 years, the archival medium of choice will most definitely be something else, but there should not be any need to migrate those LTO-4 archives as the "live" systems themselves are continuously being expanded and upgraded to maintain all data in an online fashion. This practice doesn't make as much sense for small business or many of the individuals here. But does lend itself to the data archival services I've mentioned. It's quite reasonable to hand over hard drives or LTO-4 media to an archival service and they charge a small annual fee per GB to store and preserve your data. If you ever need to retrieve data from them, they will make it available to you in whatever current form suits your needs.
 
And how much are the studios talking about storing?

Let's be apples to apples in this thing. Are we storing just the negatives and a final cut? Are we storing all the work prints?

A film like Transformers 2 might generate 145TB of data but that was shot on film! How many of those assets actually need to be saved?

If you want to compare film archival to digital archival directly then we're only talking about a few TB per film. Which isn't very much.

It's unfair to say that a film is easy to store in a vault on a feel reels but then compare that to storing every single piece of data generated during feature film.

And if we're willing to accept a little bit of quality degradation on the film then we should also be able to employ lossy compression on the digital files.

We're always trying to wrap our heads around the best archival processes. And are continually adding more TBs of storage. But if we just saved the source files and the final deliverables we could shave of the vast majority of our backups. It's predominantly work files.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
And how much are the studios talking about storing?
Let's be apples to apples in this thing. Are we storing just the negatives and a final cut? ...
A film like Transformers 2 might generate 145TB of data but that was shot on film! How many of those assets actually need to be saved?
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A lot.

Ever since the advent of DVD's, studios have thought much harder about what is a valuable asset and what is not. We now live in an age of multiple deliverable platforms, and a lot of uses for "behind the scenes" footage, B-negative, unguarded moments, anything and everything that is captured during the course of a production. Not to mention additional material that can be used to make "director's cut" versions, "enhanced" versions, and who knows what else. The fact is that just about everything can be considered an asset with some value at some point, and so the studios are loathe to let almost anything go these days. Which means that the average digital storage requirements for a typical feature are far higher than the numbers you're using. Sometimes into the multiple hundreds of terabytes.

I mentioned it in a previous post and I'll mention it again. If you have any interest in this subject, download and read the Academy's "Digital Dilemma" report. It will tell you an awful lot more than I or anyone else can do in an Internet forum post.
 
Again though. My point being that's a procedural problem. Not a problem of Digital vs Film.

If you want to save every little scrap and piece then you're going to have a LOT of data to store. But if you store what you would store on film then you're looking at (in the big picture) very little data.

If the battle cry is "Digital is hard to store" then the first question is "compared to what".

You can't say that digital is hard to store compared to keeping all the negatives and work prints. Even that would be only a handful of Terrabytes which is completely manageable. If we're talking all digital assets from every single little component of the project then you weren't able to store that on film anyway.

Movies are getting harder to archive because we're saving more stuff. That's a challenge completely unrelated to film vs digital.
 
There is an assumption that everything produced in the future is going to get re-purposed, sliced and diced in many different ways for different markets over many years. “It’s not like the film vault of old where you could ship stuff off to underground mines used for storage, and then call a few times a year and tell them to ship stuff back to you.” The assets in the archive all need to be treated dynamically now.

At another studio, a senior technology executive explained that, ideally, he would like to have all his archived assets available on online magnetic hard drives so that in 50 years the studio can use computing power to do things no one has thought of today. This would enable new video and audio search tools to automate the cataloging/metadata bottleneck. H ebelieves that the studio ultimately wants instant accessibility to everything.
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- The Digital Dilema.

That's what we call a problem with scope creep.
 
M Most said:
I mentioned it in a previous post and I'll mention it again. If you have any interest in this subject, download and read the Academy's "Digital Dilemma" report. It will tell you an awful lot more than I or anyone else can do in an Internet forum post.
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After your first post I searched this, and it really is an interesting report. To make it easier for others reading this thread, this is the link:

http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma/download.php

you have to register (free) to download the report.

They talk about having up tot 2 PETABYTES for a digital archive of a movie (I presume this included more then only the Final Cut though ;-) )
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
You can't say that digital is hard to store compared to keeping all the negatives and work prints. Even that would be only a handful of Terrabytes which is completely manageable. If we're talking all digital assets from every single little component of the project then you weren't able to store that on film anyway.

Movies are getting harder to archive because we're saving more stuff. That's a challenge completely unrelated to film vs digital.
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I didn't say it was hard or easy. But it is expensive, and it does carry with it - at least at this point in time - data migration needs that are almost impossible to satisfy.

Read the report, if you haven't already.
 
I have. And I feel like most of the problems aren't with digital or film they're with increasing demands to store ever more data.

In one of their tables they listed the need to store 5,000 HDCam SR tapes at incredible cost.

That's not really material that previously would have been archived. And much of that is the product of VFX and digital workflows not whether you shoot on film or red, since most of that is generated despite it being a film acquisition.

It seems to me the scope of archival that's increasing costs not the medium.
 
A difference that I don't think many of us are talking about is about storage capabilities for indies.

I can take a project, burn most of the raw footage to a dozen DVD's, copy it to a couple of harddrives, and keep that in my bedroom.

With film, if I stored it on the same shelf, that isn't humidity or temperature controlled, it's going to degrade much quicker than if it was professionally stored.

I can afford to store a lot of digital stuff I shoot. While film stuff I shoot, I feel is going to degrade much quicker since it isn't temperature/humidity controlled.

I don't know, I don't have experience with storing film on my own long term, but I have experience storing digital long term and from what I understand it takes far less resources for me.
 
As it's been already said, the good thing will be to be able to choose between film and digital depending on the project. That's really not a possibility in some countries due to the prices Kodak, Fuji and the labs (in a snobish way) ask us. Then some people turned to HD, which really couldn't compare to the filmic quality of film (as redundant as it seems) and the rental for some of those "expensive" equipment made it quite impractical to use it. Then the prosumer HD cameras appeared and it suddenly became possible to shoot for a lower price in a HD format, but the quality was quite compromised. Then it appeared Mr. Jannard and invented the Red One.
With the Red One, we have a quite special look, so filmic but with a special touch (it renders the skins so smoothly) and for a little fraction of all those expensive medias you can finish with an aesthetic that people who sees it doesn't wonder which format did you use, they just assume it's a movie. Even in some situations, experts couldn't notice it was not film.
At least for us film is dead: it's really expensive, not practical to work with, and time consuming... For our projects we don't think in any other camera it's not my Red One.
If you are lucky enough to be able to choose, then I envy you! But Red has made possible for us to have a high end looking product for so little money that the company has won our loyalty.
Just giving my two cents in a long time running discusion.
:emote_hippie:
 
You know, data centres create as much CO2 as aviation (2% of global CO2 each) and a two-word search on google takes as much energy as boiling a kettle.
 
I question those statistics. It would be hard to determine precisely how much CO2 data centers create since they are spread all over the world and all pulling from different energy sources, all of which have different CO2 footprints.

Not to mention all pulling different amounts of electricity, and they aren't always pulling a steady amount.
 
When Michelin built their North American HQ here, they installed their central data center for all of their plants in the basement. The waste heat from that data center heats the entire 80,000 square foot building in cold weather. They did not install a furnace, just AC.
 
Stefan Christou said:
You know, data centres create as much CO2 as aviation (2% of global CO2 each) and a two-word search on google takes as much energy as boiling a kettle.
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Not necessarily. I live in Washington state. Microsoft's Bing datacenter is in state. 84% of our electricity is carbon free. At work we spend a little extra to fund the difference in price to build more green energy projects and as a result pay for "100% carbon free electricity". So our render farm uses electricity but in the accounting books they put out no carbon.
 
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