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Author Topic: Unhappy Medium: The Challenges With Archiving Digital Video Mark Hajducki Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 500 From: Edinburgh, UK Registered: May 2003 posted 10-14-2014 04:56 PM                     Even if youtube is still around in 100 years it will contain so much content that it would be unlikely that anybody would be able to find his documentary.  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-14-2014 06:03 PM                     Still chances are higher over youtube in 100 years than they were if this was shot/published on film or any other individual media. YouTube is searchable. If you know a few terms of what you are looking for, no problem. And in 100 years 'someone else' will do the thinking for you anyway, - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 10-15-2014 08:45 AM                     YouTube is a powerful brand, but powerful brands can disappear. Technology companies are particularly vulnerable. It's kind of fun to watch a movie like Bladerunner, which was supposed to take place in 2019 (five years from now) and see brand names for companies that no longer exist.  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-15-2014 08:59 AM                     That wouldn't necessarily mean their assets do no longer exist. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 10-15-2014 11:56 AM                     Theoretically, if YouTube went bust (or its parent company Google), who would pay to maintain storage of all those assets? It costs a lot of money to sustain all that data storage capacity. Even the best server hard discs are not designed to last more than a few years, if even that long. Even if YouTube didn't go bust they can (and do) take down and delete videos. They can do so for various logical reasons, such as copyright violation or the offending video violating their obscenity rules. YouTube can also take down videos just because it wants to do so. I'm sure they reserve the right to do whatever they want and probably have it printed that way in their terms of service, buried in paragraphs of legalese.  |  IP: Logged Dave Macaulay Film God Posts: 2321 From: Toronto, Canada Registered: Apr 2001 posted 10-15-2014 12:24 PM                     Youtube will eventually have to cull some of the content, and it may well go bust. Relying on them or any "free" cloud service is not a good plan. Making a physical backup - interpos or paper print - is a good plan but will any capability of recovering a movie exist in the future? There are countless hours of video "saved" on quad or C tape... with under a dozen quad VCRs operable today worldwide, and not many C machines either. Film handling equipment will disappear from use, I expect even a 35mm projector will be unobtainable in 50 or 100 years. Digital storage has gone through many generations. Try to find a 5.25 floppy drive, forget the 8" ones. Many tape archive formats are obsolete and impossible to read now. Current ones will go the same way. Magnetic and optical digital storage media have unknown but far from infinite readable life.  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 10-15-2014 01:47 PM                        Maintaining accessibility to historical digital data means that you have to keep moving the data forward to new storage systems. You can't just throw the media in the corner and leave it to rot if you expect to be able to read it a few decades from now. On the computer that's in front of me right now I have numerous files that date back to the early 80's and a few from before that. Some are actual raw data files, others are images of obsolete storage formats like floppy disks and tapes, occasionally from more unusual sources like eproms. The point is that to use any of these files (which I actually do, occasionally) all I need to do is move into the directory that the file I want is stored in, and away I go. No shoeboxes of floppy disks required. Every time I get a new computer all of my data moves forward with me, and it's a whole lot easier to do that migration now when I can run rsync over my lan instead of having to do something like a Fastback restore from 5.25" floppies like I used to in the old days. Official archives face the same situation, just on a larger scale. Since that's their business, I don't see why they can't or won't implement a scheme similar to what I have been doing by myself for my own purposes for years. I don't think I have any floppy disks left any more, and if I do I'm sure they are no longer readable. Do I care? Not really. My data is right here, and it's more conveniently and immediately accessible than it has ever been.  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-15-2014 07:45 PM                     Before something like YouTube or Google goes finally down, the brand and it's assets will be sold to a couple of follow-ups trying to keep that business alive with it's assets. More than enough time to think about migrating. Not that I'd actually suggest YouTube as a 'backup' - but at least video clips can have a nice and cheap secondary home there. The cloud thing just started. We'll see how long-term distributed data storage will come out in the long run. Enough data on Amazon's S3, and it creates it's own inertia by the sheer business=money that's attached to it. Of course, the new leadline then is: An 'asset' is safe as long as the storage space it occupies is payed for by someone. If the payment stops, the asset will be deleted. That is a bit different from physical assets which can simply stay in a box in someones attic, which is a very different kind of inertia. On the other hand, there are things like Project Gutenberg; Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, where assets are maintained and stored without the original author needing to pay for the conservation of their assets. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Jarod Reddig Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 513 From: Hays, Ks Registered: Jun 2011 posted 10-15-2014 08:50 PM                     The reason computer companies are not taking long term storage seriously I think is because nothing in the computer world is long term. The whole industry is constantly in flux. Same with D-Cinema.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 10-15-2014 09:06 PM                        YouTube is owned by Google. The way things are going, Google will probably own everything, including Film-Tech, before they're done. (Never say never, Brad!)  |  IP: Logged David Buckley Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 525 From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand Registered: Aug 2004 posted 10-15-2014 10:05 PM                        quote: Jarod Reddig The reason computer companies are not taking long term storage seriously I think is because nothing in the computer world is long term. Yes, and no. Today's leading edge computer is tomorrow's doorstop, of that there is no doubt. But every day IT people grapple with the problems of data availability over the long term. When I worked for the UK government, the systems still had data entered in the 1960s online, data that was entered on computer systems now in museums. That data is required for at least a century. Assuming, of course, there is still civilisation, or indeed, IT in a century...  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 10-16-2014 10:42 AM                     quote: Carsten Kurz Before something like YouTube or Google goes finally down, the brand and it's assets will be sold to a couple of follow-ups trying to keep that business alive with it's assets. More than enough time to think about migrating. Not that I'd actually suggest YouTube as a 'backup' - but at least video clips can have a nice and cheap secondary home there. Unfortunately the quality of the clips there is LOW. Video bit rates are very low in relation to other platforms of viewing, such as Blu-ray or OTA broadcast. Audio is usually no better than 160kb/s. Movie studios need to store and continuously migrate master quality assets. Obviously the original digital intermediate file(s) must be maintained. If there's any desire to do alternate director's cuts, etc. then they have to maintain a hell of a lot of A/B roll. Any feature could have multiple terabytes worth of data to store, and that's just for 2K resolution features.  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-16-2014 11:17 AM                     And storing and accessing that stuff on older individual media was easier/cheaper? I doubt it. Most of that stuff today is filebased, even if delivered on some individual physical media. Request it as long as it is readable, conform and index, and put onto distributed storage. The problem is no longer todays productions, the problems are the productions of the past with non-file based and mixed-type media being used by the creative people working on a feature. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Dave Macaulay Film God Posts: 2321 From: Toronto, Canada Registered: Apr 2001 posted 10-16-2014 11:49 AM                     It's all about who will pay for it. The various film vaults are just warehousing decaying film reels, nobody is touching the stuff excepting for some "important" films. Refreshing digital assets as the media go obsolete is not free. Right now the Ontario public TV service is begging for cash donations to get their archives onto current media. I'm not sure Polkaroo is worth saving for posterity, personally. Where is the digital film archive? Do the distributors do this? The studios?  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-16-2014 03:51 PM                     I know the larger more prominent broadcasters went to file based storage already quite some time ago. They do already run their own file based archives. I earned some money a couple of years ago at a large broadcaster copying 1" video tape to DigiBeta as one of their regular measures to conserve their assets. At that time they already told me that the next step would be file based and that they already chose DigiBeta as the last tape based migration media, and digital because it would ease migration into file based storage, even if it was a bit more expensive than would have been necessary for the time being. They did the same 5 years earlier, migrating tape, vinyl and CDs to MP3 and lossless files. They knew they would do it with video just the same once the time and technology would fit their needs. They certainly did not have the idea of distributed and cloud storage at the time, and for sure at that time they would not have trusted a storage system outside of their own walls. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged

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