Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Digital archives

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 07-29-2010, 12:51 AM:

How are film companies handling older features in the digital format? Do they keep a couple of drives handy to be available to ship out, or if an order comes in for, say, Shrek 1 do they just download it onto a drive from some massive server and ship it out?

Or do they just say, "Sorry we don't have that one anymore."

Anyone had any experience with this kind of thing -- running a digital "archival" print?

Posted by Peter Castle (Member # 1997) on 07-29-2010, 12:56 AM:

I don't think here in Australia they have anything like that.
I've even had problems getting digital trailers of shows only three months old with responses such as "we don't have any of that title anymore".

I would have thought that Deluxe (not necessarily the distributor themselves) would have an archive (of features and trailers) but it seems not.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 07-29-2010, 07:02 AM:

My guess is that they don't retain copies, and making a new copy onto a disk for you, a fairly slow process, is too much bother.

If they no longer have the files available can they still issue you with new keys for another show, or run of shows, if you've still got the files sitting on your server? If so, maybe you could make a copy of the files while you still have them; buy a couple of 1 or 2 TB. external hard disks and build your own archive. Would only work for titles that you've already run in the past of course.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 07-29-2010, 11:07 AM:

I had assumed that the old problem of "not enough prints" would go away in the digital realm, but that's not happening yet anyway....we wanted to get Inception for next week and were told that "they won't have any digital prints until the week after." WTF?

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 07-29-2010, 11:49 AM:

Will they let you book it in 35mm? If not, perhaps the issue is not so much "not enough prints," but rather "we want to limit the total screen count."

Posted by David Zylstra (Member # 4230) on 07-29-2010, 11:53 AM:

With digital the studios still limit the number of copies shown in each market - i.e. it is not really that there are not enough 35mm prints to go around it is that the studio only wanted X number of copies in that market . . . . their same "formula" applies to digital.

We hit a few situations a couple years ago where a studio made too many 35mm prints and told us they did not have enough digitals to go around and would we accept a 35mm instead?