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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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Martin McCaffery
Film God
Posts: 2481
From: Montgomery, AL
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 01-21-2012 12:16 PM
From VARIETY (18 January 2012) at http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118048861?refcatid=1009&printerfriendly=true. You can download the AMPAS report at http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma2/index.html.
Acad sounds alarm about fragility of digital prod'n
Sci-Tech report spotlights short lifespan of non-film formats
By DAVID S. COHEN
On the day that Sundance kicked off and Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy, the Motion Picture Academy threw a bucket of ice water on the digital filmmaking revolution.
Preserving movies is an ongoing issue for the entire industry, but a new report from the Acad warns that movies shot or finished digitally face a lifespan so short they can be lost even before they get distribution. Worse, indie and docu filmmakers, whose work is most vulnerable to this risk, seem oblivious to the danger.Those grim conclusions, found in the long-awaited Part Two of the Acad's Science & Technology Council "Digital Dilemma" report on the problems of digital preservation, will likely make for some somber chatter in Park City.
Where part one (released in 2007) focused on the studios, the second installment looks at indies and docs and finds "the technology that makes it easy to make the picture also underlies the lack of guaranteed long-term access to it." And while the Acad found those communities still ignorant of the fragility of digital files, it may not matter -- those sectors lack the resources to attack the problem anyway.
"The bottom line is we're running out of time," Sci-Tech Council member Milt Shefter, co-author of the report, told Variety. "The time for studies is past. We have to find some solutions or we're going to lose a lot of material."
In short, digital storage, be it on hard drives, DVDs or solid-state memory, simply isn't on a par for anything close to the 100-plus-year lifespan of film. The life of digital media is measured in years, not decades, and file formats can go obsolete in months, not years. As the report explains, that affects movies still looking for distribution, not merely library titles. "In general," the report says, "independent films that beat the odds and secure some form of distribution do so after a much longer time period than movies produced by the major studios. This time period quite likely exceeds the 'shelf life' of any digital work; that is, by the time distribution is secured, the digital data may become inaccessible.
"Most of the filmmakers surveyed and interviewed for this report were not aware of the perishable nature of digital content or how short its unmanaged lifespan is compared to the 95-plus years that U.S. copyright laws allow filmmakers to benefit from their work."
Much indie content, the report says, is in danger of being lost before it can receive the full benefits of those 95 years of protection.
Shefter called filmmakers' ignorance of the issue "probably our biggest surprise."
"They were concentrating on the benefits of digital workflow," he said, "but weren't thinking about what happens to their (digital) masters. They're structured to make their movie, get it in front of an audience, and then move onto the next one."
Also a surprise to the Acad's researchers: Documentarians also were unaware of the vulnerability of digital files. On the contrary, documakers were generally excited about the easy access to footage in the digital age. When Acad interviewers raised the idea that there might be "a black hole for the last 25-30 years" because digital files aren't being preserved, said Shefter, "they really didn't get that."
"The main difference between analog and digital is, analog was store-and-ignore," said Shefter. "Digital has to be actively managed."
Such active management is expensive, however, vastly more expensive than putting film in a vault. Even when they take such steps, however, filmmakers and producers are up against an insurmountable problem: The only reliable method for archiving digital images is to go analog. The best archiving solution today is to print out to film, ideally with a three-color separation printed onto black-and-white archival film. That's a very expensive solution.
The Academy is doing what it can to help address the problem, said Andy Maltz, director of the Sci-Tech Council. "One of the keys to preservation is to have file-format standards, so if you can recover the zeros and ones, you'll know what they mean and know what they're supposed to look like on the screen." The Acad's Image Interchange Framework project is helping create such standards. SMPTE will be publishing the first of them later this year.
The Acad is coordinating Hollywood's efforts to work with the Library of Congress and with other industries to find a method for archiving digital data. But, said Maltz, "It's up to the manufacturers to incorporate archival lifetimes into their products." Fortunately for the entertainment industry, it's not alone in facing this issue. Banking, medicine, energy and other fields all need to preserve digital data for more than a few years, and they're all looking for the same elusive breakthrough.
The report says that unless preservation becomes a requirement for planning, budgeting and marketing strategies, it will remain a problem for indie filmmakers, documentarians and archives alike. "These communities, and the nation's artistic and cultural heritage, would greatly benefit from a comprehensive, coordinated digital preservation plan for the future."
The report includes proposals for more education, sharing of information and collaboration among archives and other orgs.
Shefter was careful to say that the Council and the report are not attacking digital, which offers "tremendous benefits" in some areas. Said Shefter, "The broader issue is (that) as we embrace the benefits of the newer technology, one thing is missing: long-term guaranteed access. That's what the analog world had and we think any replacement should have at least as much."
Contact David S. Cohen at david.cohen@variety.com
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 02-05-2012 11:24 AM
quote: Martin McCaffery
The main difference between analog and digital is, analog was store-and-ignore," said Shefter. "Digital has to be actively managed."
I don't think it's as simple as that. For one thing, storing was an active decision: a lot of early cinema has been lost because its creators regarded it as ephemeral, first and foremost a business asset, and thus not worth storing in the first place after its initial commercial lifetime. Secondly, if you ignored it, it could decompose in storage (film), or become obsolete and impossible to play back (some analogue tape formats).
So we have been here before. The real difference is that the migration cycles are so much shorter, and metadata replaces the information about the digital asset that with analogue films and tapes, was embodied in the physical object. I suspect that Moore's Law will inflate away a significant amount of the preservation problem, because it'll become cheaper and easier to preserve a given file as storage media capacities increase over time.
As an example, I remember when I bought my first CD burner in 1999: I was able to preserve the contents of all 300 or so floppy discs in my possession, some of which dated back to the first time I used a computer in the mid-80s, on the single disc that was thrown in with the drive. The contents of that disc have since been migrated to the hard drive backup system I use to keep my personal data safe now (copy everything to a USB hard drive every Sunday, which is then stored in my office 26 miles away during the week. All the files I created between the mid-80s and 1999 now represent less than 1% of the total contents of my 'My Documents' folder on my home PC.
But the essential point of the report is dead right - preservation and migration has to be done, done actively and managed.
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Manny Knowles
"What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???"
Posts: 4247
From: Bloomington, IN, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 02-06-2012 12:12 AM
As an independent filmmaker who came close to losing segments of a film I made in 2001, I can confirm the need to archive actively.
In my case, it wasn't an issue of whether there was software that could read the file. As it happened, the master tape (Mini-DV) had dropouts near the start of the tape... and the editorial file was missing several shots, so we couldn't simply output to a new master tape.
Fortunately, the original camera tapes had been properly filed and we were able to recapture the missing shots and reconstruct the whole film.
Yes, there were at least a few other copies of the entire film intact. But these were lesser-quality versions including: a QuickTime file (some compression), a few DVD's (noticeably compressed) and a backup output to Mini-DV (in LP mode). Luckily, the camera tapes were available.
That was a wake-up call, proving the old adage -- "There are two kinds of people: those who have lost data, and those who will."
If money was no object, I'd be in favor of originating on film and doing everything else digitally (including distribution/exhibition) -- preservation would include black-and-white separations on film. Again... if money was no object.
In the real world... periodic backup drives and tapes will have to suffice.
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-06-2012 12:50 AM
quote: Joe Redifer
As long as the industry keeps shit around that can read uncompressed files, I really don't see what the big deal is.
That is the problem, right there. How can you read any digital file if you don't have a machine that can read it and interpret it?
If I handed you a file on a floppy disk and told you to read it, you'd probably laugh at me. Now, if I handed you a box of Hollerith cards and told you that some vital piece of information is contained on the media in that box and, if you couldn't read it, your business would go bankrupt you'd be stuck holding your ass.
In 50 years, how do you know that computer data isn't going to be stored on some kind of holographic crystal or something like that? A magnetic hard drive will become the Hollerith cards of the future.
This begs the question that, even with a machine that can read the file, you'll even know what that file or what digital format it is encoded in? Even if you know that, how are you going to interface that old machine and that old data format with current computers?
What if you had to interface an ASR-32 teletype to your computer?
Can you even get your computer to understand 5-bit Baudot code?
(BTW: I know a guy who did this... just because he could.)
It is possible to play a 50 year old movie on 35mm film on a projector that was made today (recently) but there's no way of knowing whether you'll be able to play a movie made today and stored on digital video 50 years from now.
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