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This topic comprises 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
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Author
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Topic: Video's obsolescence - Film's ultimate saviour?
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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-27-2009 12:24 PM
quote: Paul Gordon
It costs nearly 12 times the cost to preserve all the film elements digitally then tradtionally on film
I wonder, Paul, if you could provide some qualification for that statement. Twelve times the archival costs? From what, exactly?
quote: Paul Gordon
This is going to be a nightmare with huge losses of data over the years. Maybe complete films lost.
As opposed to the thousands of films lost over the years by improper film storage?
As far as storage and preservation go, the idea that film is the ideal medium is a claim that does a lot of walking. It’s been noted that fully half (half!) of the feature film content produced before 1950 is lost forever. Robert H. Harris has stated in the past that anything produced prior to 1965 is in danger of being irretrievably lost unless it is restored and backed up as soon as possible, and these are things that are kept under film-vault conditions. He has further stated that even black and white CMY separations are no guarantee of longevity, and that is supposedly the ideal medium for long term color film preservation. How many times have you read about “world-wide searches” for adequate printing elements?
Granted, the rise of polyester based film-stock has alleviated some of these issues. But to this day I read about DVD plans that had to be put on hold because it was found that the original elements were shot to hell, either by mechanical damage or layer failure, and these are films as recent as the early eighties stored under supposedly film-vault conditions. So if I shoot a film digitally, and wanted to archive its elements, why bother to make an inter-negative and a viewing print, when I can lay it all off onto DCT or LTO-4 based storage, as Lucasfilm and Fox do? Digital migration is not an issue. I cross-native platform HD files all the time ( .mxf to .dpx and back again, specifically). It’s nothing.
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Julio Roberto
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 938
From: Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Registered: Oct 2008
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posted 02-27-2009 01:01 PM
No beef with Technicolor. Just an example of a (good) technology that is "dead".
Once again, "dead" doesn't mean 100.00% gone forever, just that it is not "mainstream" anymore, nor will it be again, with other "technologies" yielding similar (or arguably better) results while having extra advantages (such as cost, simplicity, speed, etc).
If Technicolor was so superior that only an idiot would ever doubt it, with perhaps only cost being a negative aspect of it, at least a significant number of $200m productions, for which cost of stock/prints is not such a huge issue due to the investment, would be shot/released in Technicolor.
But they are not. It's only used for specialized (or artistical-license) uses. Just like other "dead" technologies, such as black and white, which is not used mainstream anymore except for specialized or artistic purposes.
So perhaps those in charge of those $200m productions don't think that Technicolor is so incredibly superior to move away from Eastman (or whatever).
Or Imax, which is DECREASING and not INCREASING in production, exhibition, or whatever.
Fuji closed a plant or two recently and are downsizing. Those that think that film is still in heavy use or in the rise haven't taken a trip to a Mall recently or haven't seen what the last 50 films coming out of Hollywood were shot in. (Again, a large number of them have been shot in film, and will continue for a while, but not an INCREASING number of them but a somewhat quickly DECREASING number of them).
From a random Fuji employee post dated Mar 2008:
quote:
I actually work at the Crawfordsville Fujifilm lab and while we were having a huge decline on roll work (film), we were also having a huge decline on digital work as well.
And from their annual report:
http://www.fujifilmholdings.com/en/pdf/investors/annual_report/ff_ar_2008_all.pdf
[Short story: film has been less than 3% of Fuji's business for many years and for the past 4 years it has given the company a loss rather than an operating profit. It seems they are going to continue with it, but who knows for how long.]
And the number of release prints in 35mm are not INCREASING but DECREASING. Slightly, as digital exhibition is slightly moving forward while the number of new theaters is not growing much and most that open new are digital.
I hope, at least, nobody needs a reality check with still chemical (film) photography being a dying art as oppossed to a thriving industry in the uprise.
Those doubting the same thing is happening to chemical (film) cinema only have to wait a couple of years to check out the obvious.
Costco has stopped selling 35mm film, if that's of any significance to you. As it may be that Canon and Nikon has stopped making 35mm cameras.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10835599/
[Nikon to stop making most film cameras]
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/digital-cameras/canon-to-cease-film-camera-production-176239.php
[Canon to cease film camera production]
Kodak has discontinued in the past 4 years 5274/7274, 5277/7277, 5279/7279, 5284/7284, 5289, 7289(16 mm), 5246/7246, 5263/7263 ...
Again, I'm not saying it's a quick death or a total death. I'm saying it's an obvious (and "deserved" as digital surpasses quality and economic constrains) slow partial death.
Film served us well for 100 years. Let's hope digital does too.
If someone thinks that film will continue to be mainstream use in domestic, motion picture and TV 20 years from now, I guess he still shops for vinyl records, rents VHS tapes (or better yet, Betamax), buys music cassette, and shoots his kid's sport events on Super8 home movies.
Film, as a "mainstream" use, will die, just like Super8 did when DV video came along (and even before that with analog camcorders). The question is when. Some of us think it's only 3-5 years until most everything outside cinema exhibition is mostly digital, with film being less than 25% of that market. After 10 years, probably film will also be a small minority even in the stronghold of the cinema exhibition market. In 15 years, I have no doubts that film will have "mostly" dissapeared.
Others here may think that my dates are off by x% and they may be very right or very wrong. But I hope nobody thinks that film is going to last another 100 years (as a mainstream medium to capture photographies and moving pictures).
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-27-2009 01:16 PM
The advantage of digital storage is that exact copies can be made cheaply and easily. For less than the cost of a single 35mm print, you can make a dozen LTO-4s and ship them all over the world. This provides excellent protection against fires, natural disasters, and the like. Identical copies can also be made from these copies with no generation loss.
The concern that I and others have with digital storage is that it requires a significant amount of maintenance over time. It is not reasonable to simply put the tape in a vault and expect to be able to pull it out in a few decades and make use of it.
If someone finds an LTO-4 tape in fifty years, the chances of getting anything useful off of it are slim. First, one would need to find a functioning drive. LTO is a good format with a high degree of backwards compatibility which is likely to be retained in the future, but the newest drives will then be at least 30-40 years old. Next, one needs to find an computer with an interface (likely some SCSI variant) which can talk to the drive. Then, there is the question of how the file was written to the tape--was it done with dump, tar, cpio, or some other (possibly proprietary and unavailable) software. Finally there is the question of the format in which the files are stored.
The original format may be obsolete and undocumented, making it nearly impossible to reconstruct whatever was on the tape. At a minimum, it will be necessary to store full documentation of any file formats used (preferably on paper, but a standard text file would probably be almost as good) to allow future software developers to read older file formats.
Now, this can all be solved by paying someone to periodically retrieve the tape from storage, read it, check it for errors, copy the data to a current storage format, convert the file format to a current format (if necessary), update any documentation if necessary, and return everything to storage. This works, but costs money. It can also introduce errors. Furthermore, there is the risk that not all of the metadata (or actual data!) associated with the original file will be retained if the file format itself is converted.
The advantage of film storage (or acid-free paper, or stone tablets, or various other non-digital formats) is that one can put the material on a shelf in an archival storage container. Assuming relatively stable temperature and humidity, it can be taken off the shelf in fifty years and used. The file format is self-documenting--one can hold the film up to a light and see an image. Even if something is wrong with the film (shrunken, dirty, water-damaged, etc.), it is usually possible to get _something_ from it. The other issue is that film storage and preservation are rather well understood at this point, whereas digital archiving and preservation is still in its infancy.
Digital stuff tends to either work perfectly or not work at all, and storage is no exception. In fifty years, may have perfect "looks-brand-new" copies of films that went through a DI stage and where the original scans were preserved electronically. On the other hand, it is possible that the data may be irretrievable and we may need to rely on film elements to see this material. I hope to live long enough to find out.
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Julio Roberto
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 938
From: Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Registered: Oct 2008
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posted 02-27-2009 01:55 PM
I personally think that, for today and a few years into the future, I would want "my" $200m motion picture stored as a film separation negative, or at least a color 35mm negative.
Printing out and developing 35mm neg today is "cheap" enough.
In the future, who knows. It may not be practical to use film anymore (i.e. process too exotic like Technicolor today to really be economically viable for many smaller productions)
About digital "interoperativity", that's an issue that can be tackled with things that XML formats that put most of the information needed for decoding within the data itself.
Perhaps huge redundant "on-line" data centers will develop that will take care of just copying the information over-and-over to new media as needed.
XML meta data con describe the format (i.e. uncompressed 12bits word 4:4:4 2048x1080 pixel matrix and describe the color space in wavelenghts). For audio, uncompressed 24bits words 48khz 7 tracks, i.e.
Even a monkey can decode that in the future.
The problem is "reading" the data, not as much as interpreting it. But if it keeps being copied to a "on-line cloud-like" facility, it doesn't matter, as it will always be kept current.
Sort-of like your email on hotmail.com.
You don't care if it's backed up in hard drives, tapes, or whatever. You leave that up to microsoft. You just know that you "log-in" and you can get your mail (and attachment files) back into a readeable form into your brand new SSD flash drive, i.e.
If you know the format is, i.e., ASCII text, then you are (pretty much) all set to "recover" your mail.
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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-27-2009 03:18 PM
quote: Scott Norwood
It is not reasonable to simply put the tape in a vault and expect to be able to pull it out in a few decades and make use of it. If someone finds an LTO-4 tape in fifty years, the chances of getting anything useful off of it are slim.
I very respectfully disagree, Scott. Granted, if my grandchild stumbled on an LTO tape in an antique store 50 years from now, he would probably have a hell of a time getting anything useful off it. But I think what you suggested in you post is a monumental worst-case scenario that nobody in their right minds with a large digital archive would allow to happen.
Any big media company that plans to keep large scale digital holdings backed up onto such formats would have an infrastructure in place to read them as long as they held them, or until such time as they were transfered to other storage. You would have to agree that it would be foolish not to. As it stands right now, from my office on 57th Street, I can walk within 10 minutes to a fully operational machine that can playback any format of broadcast videotape ever made, including 40 year old quad tapes. The reason I can is that we have kept these machines around and functional to be able to recover decades of material. Of course, these are analog formats, but you get my drift.
Perhaps I have an inordinate amount of faith in people's intelligence, but I simply don't see a studio like Warners or Fox allowing backwards compatibility issues to compromise archival holdings.
On the other hand, as much as I would love to, I still can't see London After Midnight. Also, the original negative of Star Wars, one of the most successful films of all time, is now known to be damaged to the point of being useless. What does that tell us?
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John Hawkinson
Film God
Posts: 2273
From: Cambridge, MA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 02-27-2009 06:01 PM
Julio wrote, "Kodak has discontinued in the past 4 years 5274/7274, 5277/7277, 5279/7279, 5284/7284, 5289, 7289(16 mm), 5246/7246, 5263/7263 ...."
This is unfair. Most of this is part of the normal chronology of film stock development. When '274 was discontinued, it was replaced by '217. When '279 was discontinued, there were plenty of other 500T stocks available to replace it, like 5218, 5260, and 5219.
It's true that '277 and '289 were discontinued without corresponding 320T and 800T stocks to replace them. But it's not like they had been long on the marketplace. VISION2 introduced a whole pile of new stocks, and some of them lasted in the market place, and some of them did not stand the test of time.
I have to agree with Mark, Scott. Though I would be hard pressed to read an 8" floppy now, I know people who do have the hardware. With something like the film industry, data migration issues are tractable, though expensive. I would not be too concerned about failing to migrate critical metadata from one format to another. Also, don't forget that digital formats can exhibit redundancy, too. They are not necessarily "all or nothing" games.
--jhawk
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Brian Guckian
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 594
From: Dublin, Ireland
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 02-27-2009 07:41 PM
There is another issue with digital preservation though and that is the much greater volume of physical material involved, apparently.
Also, Cinematographers like John Bailey, ASC have expressed concerns that if only a filmout of the DI is preserved, the detail in the original camera negative is lost.
Another concern is that apparently some DI facilities cannot retain data on their hard drives so filmmakers without the resources of major studios behind them - e.g. independent filmmakers - face the risk of losing their work completely.
These concerns were expressed in a round-up of the latest thinking on digital preservation in the December 2008 edition of American Cinematographer.
(Purchase your copy now! ![[Razz]](tongue.gif) )
quote:
What is your beef with Technicolor now? In many ways it is a superior process though certainly not the end all for everything.
If the last rebirth of it in the '90s wasn't riddled with so many glitches, it would probably still be around. The 1.37 reissue Wizard of Oz prints were phenominal.
quote: Julio Roberto
If Technicolor was so superior that only an idiot would ever doubt it, with perhaps only cost being a negative aspect of it, at least a significant number of $200m productions, for which cost of stock/prints is not such a huge issue due to the investment, would be shot/released in Technicolor.
Education is the key here. How many in the filmmaking community appreciated IB Technicolor when it was briefly revived?
It could still be done now; in fact it might become even more of a possibility if film is re-positioned as a "boutique" format in the future. If Technicolor don't want to do it, they could license the process to some enterprising specialist lab.
Where there's a will there's a way!
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