The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence | Hacker News Reader

The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence

spectrum.ieee.org

44 pointsmoreati17 comments

What happened to the "1000 year DVD?"[1] MDisc sells ceramic DVD blanks and a drive that can write them. Blanks are about $2 each, and the drive is under $100. Many newer drives can write them.[2] Any drive that can read the format can read them. Capacities to 100GB. A U.S. Navy test says it works, while all the other "archival" disks didn't survive.[3]

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-1000-year-dvd-is-here/ [2] http://www.mdisc.com/m-ready/ [3] http://site.produplicator.com/downloads/Manuals/China_Lake_F...

Facebook and a few other people are working on BluRay based cold storage robots[1]. Simply having the media survive isn't enough. Just ask the BBC's Domesday Project[2].

[1] http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/meetings/documents/storag... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservat...

Archivists are in the business of preserving the past and like most people, they tend to overvalue what they are familiar with. But most old art, like all art, is mediocre and very much of its time. After that, it quickly loses its value. And therefore preserving old art is only somewhat useful. Some works are good enough to stand the test of time, but those are in no danger of disappearing, because continuing interest means that natural commercial forces keep producing copies from generation to generation.

Even if all the archivists of the world lost their minds for a generation, we would be in no danger of losing the works of the Beatles, Hemingway, and Scorsese. What we might lose are large numbers of works by their less accomplished contemporaries. Would that be a real loss? Yes. A big one? No. And that's why it's simply not that important that the archivists succeed in preserving everything.

Not sure popular necessarily equals accomplished.

Me either particularly since a lot of what we consider "masterworks"/"master pieces" where often only moderately popular (if that) in their contemporary period.

As far as I can tell, that is very much the exception. The artists who are famous long after they are dead were typically famous during their lifetimes, too. Over in classical music, for instance, all of the top ten were (at least) distinguished professionals during their own lifetimes.

Hollywood archivists must be pretty bad at their jobs then. The data they archive, if digital, has a fixed size. Cost per byte to store digital data goes only one direction, far, far down. Thus, cost to store digital data which is fixed in size, goes only down.

Exception may be film where you may want to scan with better scanners every once in a while to extract more detail. Even in this case, storage cost goes down faster than scanning technology increases in resolution.

12TB 255MB/S read/write 3.5" drive is $700 currently. (HGST HE12) That's currently state of the spinning disc art.

backblaze.com is storing over 250 million GB currently.

Thus, regardless of the complications of redundancy and detecting bitrot, Storage shall always outpace archival for all things digital. For one's getting cheaper every day, and the other is fixed in size.

You could open source it and run a torrent seed, I bet the world would be more than happy to help store, remix, improve what you've archived. minus those pricey software editing tools of course, because the studio may not own those.

> He quickly realized, though, that film “didn’t have the sensitivity to capture the scenes we were trying to shoot, especially the things we shot at dawn and dusk,” as he told an interviewer.

Sounds like he simply didn't have the right cameras. As far as I remember Barry Lyndon was shot without electric light; but Kubrick had to use some rather special lenses (ex-NASA i think).

Correct. There were Carl-Zeiss 50mm and 35mm f/0.7 lenses that were built for NASA and which Kubrick modified to fit on a Mitchell BNC camera. These let him shoot by candlelight (albeit specially-made candles designed to burn brighter than normal).

The problem with the "fast" lens approach used in Barry Lyndon is there's a tradeoff between how much light you let in and how much of the scene is in focus (keyword: "depth of field"). If that works for whatever mood you're trying to create, great. But that's not always what a director is going for. You can mitigate this by letting less light in and using more sensitive film or overdeveloping ("pushing" is the term people use) your film to compensate, but that might lead to more film grain than you'd like.

You can use "fast" lenses on digital cameras, too. The benefit is that if you're using increased sensitivity on a modern digital sensor, the noise you get is usually less noticeable than you'd get with film.

Apparently one of the "tricks" in Barry Lyndon was that the actors had to be coached to move in very specific planes so that they would remain in focus.

Sensor sensitivity is IMO one of the underappreciated aspects of digital--especially with full frame sensors. I can attend an event and shoot at ISO 3200 (or higher with newer cameras) at a fairly fast shutter speed and expect quality still photos. Back when I was doing photojournalism, something around 1600 was the fastest you could push even black & white film and still have usable results. (And those were still a compromise.) For color slides, 200 was close to the limit--and that was a compromise.

>Sounds like he simply didn't have the right cameras.

This isn't really fair. There were 10 of the 50mm f0.7 lenses ever made. And they were very difficult to use because of the narrow depth of field. I'm not sure snowy wilderness is as suitable an environment as languid candlelit for very precise blocking.

>uncompressed JPEG 2000 files

That's clearly wrong because JPEG 2000 is a compression format. They must mean lossless, not uncompressed.

Once the films are recorded digitally, how is any of this specific to film?

The aspect that comes to mind is the archiving of assets that go beyond simple frame output, a bit further up the workflow—project files, renderers, effects processing plug-ins, etc.

For example, the article mentions the issues that Pixar ran into reconstructing Finding Nemo. I can imagine a studio saving a movie's project file, and then discovering that no software can use it in 20 years. Even if ecosystem standards like OMFI prove to have staying power, details like color timing might not be able to be perfectly reproduced even if the project file is openable.

Archiving the tools/specifications to manipulate data is a few orders of magnitudes smaller than the data itself. If you archive the software tools, and the data, you should be good.

Archiving the source code as well? And the compilers used? And the source code for the compilers? The hardware itself?

Nemo for example was probably rendered on Silicon Grapics or other NLA systems. If all your software was built for some old MIPS architecture it might be a challenge to get that running again in 2017.

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