Digital Archiving

[Neal Shields]

Today's New York Times has an article on digital archiving.

"The afterlife is expensive for digital movies".

They say that the motion picture industry estimates that it costs about 10 times as much per year to archive digital movies as film and that 1/2 of all digital files will be unreadable if left untouched for 15 years.

Before everyone jumps on me, I should admit that I take everything the New York Times prints with a grain of salt.

However, a multi billion dollar industry is making very expensive decisions based on the study this article quotes, so there may be some truth in it somewhere.

Neal

[Ralph Barker]

My gut tells me the 10x expense factor is probably reasonable, particularly if one considers data format and media migration required over time.

The larger questions are how much of what is being archived actually deserves the treatment, and if not all, who gets to decide? :cool:

[Matt Blaze]

Those numbers seem plausible enough. But it's not clear how meaningfully they scale down to enterprises smaller than Hollywood or to individuals. Byte by byte, on the Hollywood scale some of the problems are easier and cheaper while others are harder and more expensive. Hollywood has a pretty miserable preservation track record in any case, so it's also not clear what they are comparing against (do typical original cinema negatives for unprofitable films have more than a 15 year half-life in practice? Perhaps, but perhaps not).

A huge problem, probably harder for individuals and small enterprises, is keeping up with changing (and sometimes proprietary) data and media formats. I'll probably have a way to read my 2007 TIFFs and JPGs in 2022, but I'm a lot less sure about camera-raw and .psd files. And all this is assuming that I remember to keep copying these files onto whatever kind of storage my computers can read over that time.

[John Curran]

I'll probably have a way to read my 2007 TIFFs and JPGs in 2022, but I'm a lot less sure about camera-raw and .psd files.

Adobe's DNG format addresses this.

john

[Matt Blaze]

Adobe's DNG format addresses this.

john

Well, I suppose we'll find out in 15 years.

As Admiral Hopper famously said, the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from...

[Gene McCluney]

I think putting the words "Digital" and "Archiving" in the same sentence is an oxymoron.

[Witold Grabiec]

Adobe addresses what? DNG isn't a perfect format, it already allows manufacturers to skip some data in open clusters. While it may be gaining grounds in manufacturer support, it is nothing we should bet on long term. There is (was?) a group of photographers that tries to promote an OpenRAW format, a REAL open format. They seem to have stumbled a bit, their web site does not appear to have been updated in a while. and they don't seem to answer much email anymore.

[Ben R]

Aha but does the money and time saved in the shooting and editing process pay for that 10X cost and probably far more? As always there is a larger picture...

[Steven Barall]

So in other words, instead of it costing them nothing to store their movies, now it's going to cost them just a little bit more than nothing.

[Ben R]

Did you actually read my post?

[gregstidham]

That Times article is spot on. Archiving digital movies or any file has numerous problems to overcome in the short and long term. Instead of leaving your heirs a file box of negatives, you leave them an archiving system of constant monitoring and updating.

Archiving is the dirty little secret of digital acquisition in my opinion.

[Ben R]

I think that a far more scary proposition is that the digital steamroller may mean that it will be very hard and will cost a fortune to do anything with those negatives in 30 years time, I don't like it but believe it as a reality that cannot be ignored (personally believe it's closer to half that amount of time).

As I said before there is a larger picture that these studios are looking at and if the editing and time is less and future accesability will cost less then that may well be worth the extra cost if not make a sizable profit in the end. These studios aren't stupid, with their level of immersion the change to digital has cost hundreds of millions, I doubt they did it without doing the math first.

Does a terebyte hard disk cost much more than the film used for an entire movie (after processing)? How much will it cost to update the format every 5 years or more especially as it's all automated anyway? Of course with several backup sites you don't need huge fire and damp proof bunkers and have far more redundancy anyway. Personally I don't think that people can see past their prejudeces to the larger picture...

[darr]

I think putting the words "Digital" and "Archiving" in the same sentence is an oxymoron.

In digital photography terms, could this mean an actual print could become "priceless?" :D