"It's a Silent Fire": Decaying Digital Movie and TV Shows Are a Hollywood Crisis | Hacker News Reader

"It's a Silent Fire": Decaying Digital Movie and TV Shows Are a Hollywood Crisis

hollywoodreporter.com

50 pointsCharlesW56 comments

You can tell this is authentically the industry insiders' own stunted understanding of the problem by the fact that the words 'copyright' and 'intellectual property' never appear as aspects of the challenge.

Storage is cheaper than ever before. Accumulated shared wisdom about older format, & open tools for forward- and up- conversions, keep growing. Communities of enthusiasts can now find each other & coordinate effectively on arbitrarily niche and old media.

Hollywood's policy of monopolizing the right-to-copy works, enforced with aggressive legal prosecutions and fragile proprietary technical-complexities, puts cultural history at extra risk.

Spot on. I got about 2/3 of the way through looking for the specific problem, wondering if it was codec issues, backups, etc.

No, just mystical hand wringing about losing digital works. It's a procedural problem driven from the top.

Stipulate for the discussion that you’re correct; what would your ideal preservation scenario look like? Hollywood DCP servers open to enthusiasts to allow copying of terabytes of movie data to other archives?

That and 6k (21MP) or 18k (63MP) film scans where applicable. Modern formats can’t quite handle that yet but soon, and mixed reality/projection displays will open up screen formats

A reasonable solution would be to recognize abandonware as a legal category under copyright law. If a company decides to tax write-off a work or let it go out of print (including print on demand for an obscene price) then revoke the copyright and put it in the public domain. Tax write offs that weren't ever released like Warner Bros has become infamous for of late should additionally be required to be publicly released. Uploading it to something like a "Warners Bros Tax Write offs" Youtube channel would be sufficient for preservation purposes.

If you do that, the preservation problem will take care of itself between organizations like The Internet Archive and the various piracy groups. This might also make it easier politically to crack down on the pirates who insist on distributed unauthorized copies of new releases by making them less sympathetic.

Or at least send a watermarked copy to the Library of Congress for future preservation. If those copies get out, the US can reimburse them or…something.

It is a little more complicated than you describe because copyright doesn't just apply to published or finished work. That means you are effectively advocating for the end of privacy.

For example, it is pretty common for famous or even some private peoples' diaries or letters to be published. Will you sell me a copy of every single one of your emails? Oh, you refuse to sell them? I guess that means you forfeit your copyright and now anyone can sell them.

The right for a creator to stop the distribution of their own work is pretty important. I agree that we should tweak the tax write-off process to maybe force that work into the public domain, but worked destroyed for tax purposes is only a tiny fraction of all abandonware.

Copyright law already recognizes a concept of "work for hire". Limiting the "abandonware" concept to only works for hire would trivially address your concerns.

It would also open up a trivial hole to exploit this. Lots of creative work, especially written work, is not done as work for hire. That would expand more the more you disincentivize that categorization.

If you forfeit your copyright for the purpose of a tax right off, and to abandon your responsibilities to the work, then your work reverts to the default status (prior to any copyright law) of public domain. (And, Yes, you better make sure you have the rights to public domain every part of the work, or you don't get the right off.)

If you retain ownership rights (+ responsibilities) then you don't get the tax write off.

That seems pretty simple, no?

Well yes.

Bring back the 28 year copyright term. Or something similarly sensible.

How much money would Disney lose if Independence Day, the top earning film 28 years ago would become free to replicate this year?

Independence Day? Probably not much.

Every bit of their content from the 90s? Likely a fair chunk. Not billions, but real money. That's a lot of the attraction of their streaming service, especially classics like their Princess movies.

If it's not even billions, is it even real money on the Disney scale? These guys rake in, what, sixty? seventy? billion bucks a year. You are losing ... one percent of that?

Consider it a marketing expense "old Disney hogged IP but we reformed look how cool we are" consider it an investment in up and coming creatives who one day very well might make a successful movie ...

Good question! Things that'd help:

• a founders-duration copyright term – at most 28 years from date-of-creation

• absolute statutory & precedential immunity for any copies made, or DRM-circumventing-technologies created/used, solely for non-commercial preservation – that is, only competing witht the rightsholder in the commercial market would be prosecutable

• whatever extra protections/enforcement options available with formal copyright-registration also come with the duty to deposit/escrow full-quality unencumbered versions with multiple responsible preservation institutions, from the Library of Congress to NGOs, who are free to release those versions at end-of-copyright

Storage is cheaper, but as the article states, the problem is mostly Indies who have no money. As someone who produced a film that was purchased by Netflix, I don't even know if any of the original RED camera footage exists. I think First Wife has an original Blu-ray burnt from the first director's cut with the original music that never made it into commercial production. It would still be pricey to store all the original footage (which is what you want to archive) in a 3-2-1 backup scenario for most small productions.

The article doesn't discuss it but pervasive DRM is also reducing the chances of some media being preserved for the future. A key problem is that newer digital distribution formats make it trivial to enable DRM by default as part of the compression process. One example is the new ATSC 3.0 UHDTV broadcast format, where we're now seeing even smaller local broadcasters transmitting all their content with DRM active, even though the majority of their content has no contractual or practical reason to be DRMed. It's just easier to leave the "encrypt" switch on 24/7.

This is a problem because many smaller broadcasters do not archive their feeds for more than a few months, especially locally-produced live content. Today, a large portion of the 70s and 80s-era local TV content we have is thanks to a few obsessive home recordists who would record 6 and 8 hour blocks of certain local channels on VHS. Today's pervasive default DRM eliminates this avenue of preservation.

It seems to me that we could just as easily record DRM’ed content (e.g. by taking screenshot videos), we’re just not as obsessed with recording it anymore

Is there a streaming app that doesn't block screenshots?

Does the app drive a robot that hangs a curtain between the screen and the video camera?

How are topical TV shows getting around this? They rely on having a setup recording many TV channels so they can quickly find and reuse clips.

Is there a lower resolution available without the DRM?

It's worth noting that there are three levels here:

1. Preserving the "final copy" - so many old films literally do not exist in any format whatsoever. A DVD or Blu-ray or Laserdisc meets this.

2. Preserving the "best copy" - some things we have in Laserdisc only. It's not the best version ever made, and it's potentially not perfectly preserved.

3. Preserving the "master/source" - this is much more difficult, because these are never released outside the studio, and can be much more than just the "Final Cut" - source files, 3D models, the software used, etc.

You might call the “best copy” level “intermediate masters” or “DIs” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_intermediate), and there may be a bunch of these for different editions, versions, and frame sizes/rates.

I'm more familiar with audio - but yeah, things like source tracks after mixing but before compression, etc.

Preserving the source for every movie would be absurdly expensive. That can easily be many terabytes each. Textures and models are huge if any CGI was used. Not to mention all the raw footage... Wouldn't be surprised if most studios just throw that stuff away a few years after release. Why would you need to re-render the movie?

Ballpark, how much would you estimate it to cost?

They still had source negative film for Star Trek: the Next Generation in 2012, 18 years after it went off the air. They used it to do an HD remaster for a show originally mastered on video tape [0]. I don't know if this is common or rare.

[0]: https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2012/07/remastering-star-tr...

It's apples to oranges, but it's interesting contrasting this with community-driven efforts in the gaming preservation space. It's a relatively simple matter to find, say, a full archive of the vast majority if not all commercially released games for the Sega Genesis, along with a smattering of unreleased prototypes that have found their way into community hands. Many, like myself, are hobbyist digital archivists, curating collections of data and hardware for exploring the medium.

Film and TV are harder for a number of reasons. Video is just bigger, and the vast majority of works have their primary versions on film and tape that take far more effort to preserve (physically or digitally). Having said that, I believe Hollywood shot themselves in the foot by so aggressively going after piracy (the same can be said about music) in a way that the video game industry didn't (Nintendo's recent efforts notwithstanding). They spent fortunes on lawyers and lobbyists to protect short-term profits (and, realistically, how many ticket sales did they save?), at the expense of locking away our shared cultural history.

We used to have the solution to this - require a deposit copy for copyright. It's the "no formalities" rule that killed archiving.

On a Macro level, I've been exploring M-DISC as a solution to archiving my own media which is irreplaceable. (Documents, photos, videos, etc.)

It seems like M-DISCs are getting harder to buy for some reason.

It's because they're so expensive and don't offer a lot of storage for modern standards.

People that want to store a little use cloud or other stuff like Flash. Of course that degrades over time but for a few bucks you have multiple. People that want to store a lot use tape. There isn't really much room in between.

> People that want to store a little use cloud or other stuff like Flash. Of course that degrades over time but for a few bucks you have multiple. People that want to store a lot use tape. There isn't really much room in between.

Traditional rotating platter drives?

Yeah that's what I do but it's a lot lot higher capacity than M-DISK.

I have almost 100TB. An M-DISK is 50GB max or 100 Dual-Layer (with more worry about longevity). I'd need 1000 of the 100's to store all my stuff :)

So I see this more as a different niche.

Different niche for sure.

You probably do not need to store 100tb of data for 30+ years. I have ~50tb of storage at home but really probably only 50gb of it I need to store for that long, and that is being generous.

Culture is ephemeral. Some things are preserved, others are not. It's fine.

Why is it fine?

History, paleontology, anthropology, cosmology, and other fields have highly educated people spending their entire lives dedicated to recovering the past when it couldn't be preserved or when people tried to purposefully destroy it.

Knowing about the past adds to our understanding of the universe and guides us into the future. There is no downside for our current culture to know about the past.

Plus sometimes it's just interesting.

Sure, everything is ephemeral, but these works have impacts on people's lives and ambitions. How many folks are named after movie or TV characters? How many people got into software after watching The Social Network?

I follow a couple of small communities of amateur VHS archivists. Through this I randomly watched the marketing material of an 80s/90s era MLM, which finally put into context a similar MLM that my mom had fallen for when our family was at a financial low point. This random bit of preservation helped me to better understand a part of my family and upbringing; far better than I could reading a Wikipedia article about the company in question.

We all die alone. God is dead. Etc.

At the end of the day we're just a bunch of atoms, I suppose.

I actually agree. I dont think art needs to be supported. Not that I'm against it or anything, it simply doesnt need support imo.

As long as there are humans around, they will be creating great art on a regular basis, it's just like pooping or eating to us.

Filesharing to the rescue? A torrent will last as long as someone is seeding.

Torrents solve this

Not really, unless you're suggesting production companies either adopt torrenting internally themselves (which does nothing if the company goes defunct), or publicizing all their internal material including works-in-progress (a nonstarter for most serious creatives).

The lack of a period on their thought fragment implies it’s incomplete, allow me to supply the second half.

…assuming we lived in a completely different world where money doesn’t matter.

I believe distributing media for archival purposes should be legal and that unpaid enjoyers of the media are more likely to correctly preserve the media than the rights holders.

This has been proven over and over, where the rights holder copy of a movie is low quality with poor sound, has cut content and poor translations and the unpaid archivist copy is closer to the directors intentions.

Make hard copy backups on film.

Film decays if not stored properly.

We need to end entropy. https://www.theonion.com/christian-right-lobbies-to-overturn...

Person at the end of the article is missing the point because they don’t understand that bitflips and other corruption can happen with digital storage.

it's exceedingly rare. Rarer even than the usual numbers thrown around imo

An archival quality format can take this into account with error correction data and logic. Nothing says you have to use the common formats (which may be more vulnerable to data corruption) for the archives.

Similar to a peeve of mine - old TV shows incorrectly “up rendered” for HDMI. There is pixelation, color problems, lots of things. Maybe it’s just my cable provider.

Yup, the quality in how these programs get upscaled for HD is all over the map. There's a lot of examples of people on Youtube and archive.org who are ripping their personal collections of old content who are doing this, I would say, correctly.

Here's one of my favorite examples of archiving being done "right":

https://archive.org/details/@the_vista_group

Any HN folks know of resources/guides for doing this “right”? I’ve had great luck restoring images and would like to try my hand at video. My dream is that there are tools which can take advantage of temporal changes to get better results.

Have to agree. Along with the practice of cropping original 4:3's to 16:9/Letterbox.

Me to my wife: "Is this show old? Like from the 90s? I can see the dithering on it."

For some shows like Seinfeld, the widescreen "HD remastered" version show extras standing in for the shows star in some scenes. There is no way to remove this, as the original narrower 4:3 aspect ratio would only show part of their hair.

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