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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: Academy Warning on Digital Preservation
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Frank Cox
Film God
Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011
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posted 02-06-2012 01:22 AM
I know of a guy who makes a rather good living out of reading obscure and obsolete magnetic media. He has a huge collection of everything from early word processors to tape drives and you-name-it. It's my understanding that he does work mostly for forensic accountants, law enforcement and private investigators.
It's not particularly difficult to read a card deck "manually", just by looking at it and doing some plotting. The data density is obviously very low, and if you know what kind of a computer it came off of (if you're lucky it's noted on the deck somewhere) you can probably figure out if it's 9-left, Chinese binary or something else. A bit of amateur cryptography will probably get you there if nothing else -- if 9-left doesn't provide sensible output, it's probably not encoded that way.
Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the police in the town I lived in at the time seized a lawyer's office and discovered that he had all of his records on a computer. Nobody knew anything about it, in fact they were afraid to touch it for fear of losing evidence. They called me to look at it, and I spent two days there figuring out how he did what he did and printing out records on paper.
It is possible but obviously not cheap to read hard drives and tapes with an electron microscope. There are also several outfits around who do data restoration; again, none of them are cheap. (And if they are, don't deal with them.)
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-06-2012 02:45 AM
It isn't just software that is needed to read a computer file from a disk drive or other storage medium.
What if you had to read a hard drive with a SCSI interface or a PATA interface? Your computer has SATA. How are you going to get that data?
A teletype doesn't even have software. It's entirely electromechanical and it transmits its data with current detector loops. To interface that with your computer, you need to build a circuit that connects to the current loops on the teletype and puts out some sort of bit code that the computer can understand. Then, assuming you got that far, how do you even figure out what software to use to interpret the information you get?
As Frank said, if you are reading Hollerith cards, how will you know whether the data is in 9-Left format, Chinese binary or something else? Then, once you have that data, what do you do with it?
It it a text file? Is it some kind of binary data file? Is it a program? What? Is it a digital video file? Is it MPEG? Is it raw binary data taken from a camera sensor? Even if you know that, how are you going to translate that data from that format to something you can use?
The only way to ensure that your data can be read in the future is to store a complete, working machine which can read that data back along with the data you want to archive. Then you'll have to include printed instructions on how to use it.
Again, the whole reason for this problem is because digital data isn't tangible. You can't see it. Even if you can see it how can you understand it? You can see a box of Hollerith cards and, in theory, you could manually read each card, one by one, and translate the punched code into symbols to type into a computer but that is mind-numbingly boring, tedious and fraught with possibility for error.
With film, you can see the image. You could still project it years from now but, if you couldn't find a projector, you could probably scan it and digitize it using current technology.
BTW, Manny, 50 years was a was nice round number. I bet you could play a 100 year old movie. Even so, you'll often have a hard time reading a computer file that's only ten years old.
While using film is not as convenient, I don't think "practical" is the correct way to characterize the difference. A thing can be practical for one purpose but not another. Digital video might be more practical for lazy movie executives but not necessarily so for theater owners who have to replace all the equipment in the complex.
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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 02-06-2012 04:16 AM
quote:
Now is a great time to figure this out, Hollywood.
Congrats on that!
Go back and re-read the original article, which is addressed to smaller independent and documentary film-ma . . . oh, uh, excuse me, data stream makers, who probably haven't given the issue much thought.
Hollywood and the big players figured this out years ago,and the proof is on every screen that is showing Beauty and the Beast right now. This was a film that was produced on the old, long obsolete Disney CAPS system. They got rid of all that stuff years ago, but kept a few systems around to read archival material and were thus able to resurrect the original files and transfer them.
I tried to make the point years ago that anyone with important digital assets is obliged by common sense to either keep equipment around that can read them, or to migrate them to another format. The pros know this and are doing it. The key is the whole "active management" thing. Everything needs to be actively managed, film included. How many horror stories have been heard about film-makers going back to the vaults and finding their negatives in shit shape, too tightly wound, falling apart, mislabeled, mishandled? Look at the horrors that befell My Fair Lady, which we recently discussed in another thread. Here is a movie shot on 65mm that was in such shit condition that everything had to digitized in order to save it. Even the original b/w separations were screwed.
Anything film or digital that is handled with care, forethought, and common sense will outlive all of us.
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Paul Gordon
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 580
From: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Aug 2005
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posted 02-06-2012 07:25 AM
Its the small players we have to worry about... not so much the big studio films. Thats what the report is all about. In the appx there is a interview with one of the post crew for David Fincher films. He went digital early on. But check out how the film is saved after post.
Q: The rendered DI, the digital master that is the result of all your hard work, must
obviously be protected. How do you insure that?
PM: When a movie is completed, assuming it is finished as a digital intermediate, it becomes
standard operating procedure for us to make the following:
LTOs of the final rendered DI files – at least two sets
Negative made directly from the DI files – sometimes as many as six
Interpositives – often as many as four
Dupe negatives – many
Digital Cinema Package master
High Defi nition video master
Digital YCM 35mm separations
From the above elements are made:
Hundreds, if not thousands, of 35mm prints
Hundreds, if not thousands, of Digital Cinema Package files, although these are erased
at the end of a theatrical run
Many thousands of DVDs and Blu-ray discs
Dozens, if not hundreds, of TV broadcast masters in Hi Def and Standard Def
The point is that in our modern media-addicted world, it becomes nearly impossible to wipe a
movie’s existence off the face of the earth.
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Mark Hajducki
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 500
From: Edinburgh, UK
Registered: May 2003
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posted 02-07-2012 08:05 AM
The data most at risk of being unreadable will be that stored in obscure file formats on equipment made in limited quantities.
The 1986 BBC Domesday Project was an example of this. Stored on laserdisk, accessed using a modified (Acorn) BBC Master computer.
quote:
Domesday Reloaded producer Alex Mansfield explained that transferring the data from Laserdisc to the web was problematic because none of the data was stored in recognisable file formats.
"It was pre-digital photography, so all those pictures are analogue, even though they are on a Laserdisc. There is no compression," said Mr Mansfield.
Each individual photograph, satellite image or map page was stored as a single frame of video on the disc.
While the system appears to function like a modern-day website, with pictures loading when they are clicked on, the playback head is constantly jumping between 50,000 video stills.
Each of these images had to be digitised from the original one inch video tape.
Domesday's many written articles proved easier to recover because they were created in a digital format.
Although, with no data storage capability, the thousands of pages of text had to be encoded and stored on one of the Laserdisc's spare audio tracks.
source
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