Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Future of Studio's original Film Masters???

This is topic Future of Studio's original Film Masters??? in forum Film Handlers' Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Steve Matz (Member # 1890) on 11-30-2013, 11:28 AM:

I know the major Film Studios have kept their master negative and positives
in Temperature regulated environments for decades.In fact I know Disney has 2 places they store their film;one in Burbank and the other in an underground salt mine in Kansas I believe.

What I'm getting too is once the film masters have been digitally transfered to master digital formats than is it really necessary to keep the film inventory other than for nostalgia purposes.
Film is always; no matter how delicate it's stored is always going to show some kind of decomposition over the years even though it may be minimal to the untrained eye.
Theoretically the digital masters should never have any decomposition and if I make a copy 20 years from now it should look as good as one I produce today.

I know as a Film Library collector this would be horrible to destroy your Original Film Inventory but as a Corporate Business way of thinking where time and space equal money,
it would make more sense to be storing Digital Format Inventory which would take up a fraction of space than Film would and also minimal maintainence concerning envirionment conditions.
Just a Scary Thought. I would hate to see something like the masters of "Snow White and the 7 dwarfs" or "Gone with the Wind" just for examples disappear forever,But you can never guess what Studio Heads are Thinking...

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 11-30-2013, 12:47 PM:

Steve...is there a reason you require multiple punctuation marks after all of your topics???????????????????

Seriously, knock it off. It is as annoying as the guy that sends ALL email with the "highest priority."

As to archiving...I suggest you investigate over in such places like AMIA (Association of the Moving Image Archivists).

With current archiving techniques, film has about a 1000-year life span based on the best accelerated aging tests and science on what we know about film's properties and our ability to keep it stable.

Digitally, nothing has that life span yet. As such, the topic of migration comes up where one has to constantly migrate existing content to current technologies and to ensure that content isn't lost while in storage. 20-years later, if left unchecked, your HDD of today may either not work at all or have numerous sections that have damaged/lost areas of storage. Heck, even just a simple accident of dropping the drive could cause it to lose valuable data.

Every generation thinks that they have the cats-meow of technology only for the following generations to regard it as antiquated. Will we get to a digitally stored means of archiving? They are working on it all of the time. We are not there yet at all.

Remember too with analog mediums...if a society dies out and then is rediscovered many years into the future...analog is inherently readable by people that do not have your present (particularly if encrypted) technology. A piece of film, like a piece of paper or stone engravings requires no external technology to interpret beyond figuring out the language (if it is written). It is inherently more archivable though, as you point out, does deteriorate. Then again, the pyramids have taken a beating over the years...don't have the look of when they were new...but they are still standing when most of the buildings with more "modern technology" have long since fallen or destroyed.

The question for archivists will always go for beyond the needs of today.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 11-30-2013, 01:01 PM:

Plus as each year passes the job of re-copying all of the older drives (or whatever storage method) onto new drives to stay up to date with the technology/format of the year, that job will become exponentially more and more impossible to preserve everything as each year passes because each year there will be another year's worth of work added to the task.

Sooner or later studio heads will start storing in compressed form (to try and keep preservation costs under control) and may not choose a lossless format. Imagine if back when MP3s became commonplace if the record companies ordered all of their masters to be converted over to MP3 and then they dumped their original tapes? I could see that happening with movies.

With film even if it does deteriorate over time, at least there is usually something salvageable, even if it looks bad. With digital once it starts to go, it's just gone.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-30-2013, 01:29 PM:

In many cases, the studios don't actually preserve the master (usually defined as closest generation to the camera negative surviving, or in the best physical condition, or both) elements themselves, but have handed them over to nonprofit archives.

Going back to the middle of the last century, the IP value of a movie that had finished its theatrical run was negligible: the odd daytime TV broadcast, and that was it. There was no DVD, Netflix, endless documentary makers wanting to license footage for use in their shows, etc. These films were taking up space in the vaults, which was costing the for-profit studios money. The founders of the first generation of nonprofit archives (in the US, this means MoMA, George Eastman House, the LoC, NARA and UCLA, effectively) realised that studios were quite simply junking many of their holdings, and negotiated with the studios to rescue them.

In many ways this was a success story, with UCLA in particular holding large studio collections. But the situation has changed a lot since then. Old movies are now big business in a way that they weren't until around 15-20 years ago, and studios now invest a lot more in their preservation. Partnerships have been established between studios and nonprofits to manage preservation and access in situations where one party owns the physical film elements and the other the copyright.

But the same underlying problem still exists: film preservation costs money, and lots of it. In terms of the technical issues specifically, the real upcoming problem, as Brad points out, is that of "born digital" content. 30 years of research has told us that all you need to do with nitrate and acetate film is to stick it in a cold and dry vault, and that will almost certainly ensure its preservation for centuries. No such "store and ignore" physical medium for digital data as yet exists on a commercial scale (though there have been periodic attempts to invent one that got as far as the proof-of-concept stage), and so the solutions are ongoing format migration or storage in an "always on" infrastructure such as a massive RAID server, both of which make the cost of a film vault look like small change, once we're talking about storing DCDMs for thousands of movies. So if your master element is now a digital asset (i.e. if the movie was not shot on film), this is basically what you have to do if you want to preserve the master.

Further reading, in case Steve is interested: Caroline Frick's Saving Cinema offers a very good discussion of the contemporary relationship between nonprofit archives and studios. Anthony Slide's Nitrate Won't Wait and Penelope Houston's Keepers of the Frame are the two standard "history of film archiving" books that tend to appear at the top of students' reading lists: Slide's book concentrates on the US, whereas Houston's is more from a European perspective.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 11-30-2013, 03:39 PM:

In any other industry you'd think the powers-that-be would be thinking ahead of the curve, but in this industry, which decided to sell movies for a dollar out of a Coke machine three months after their theatrical debut, anything is possible.