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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

I was in film school in the mid 00s, when RED was just starting to sell digital cameras to Hollywood studios. I remember a lot of my professors being concerned that we'd lose the archival properties of cinema - you can play back a 100 year old movie with a bright light and a ratchet - the same stuff you need to play back a movie from the 90s. They were concerned there'd be too much churn in digital formats.

Just this weekend, I saw a headline that the Looney Tunes box set I bought then probably doesn't work anymore, because Warner Bros used crappy materials to mint the DVDs and people have had them degrade beyond playability.

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Film wasn't always perfect either. A lot of early, pre-1950s cinema has been lost because the old nitrate film stock degrades over time. And can catch fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose#Nitrate_film_fi...

Even modern film is often not great, particularly theatre prints that aren't explicitly made for archival purposes. There was a fascinating YouTube video recently where the author pushes back on the purported superiority of fan-scanned 4Ks now competing with official, studio-supervised restorations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQwQRFLFDd8

Obviously DNR and bad HDR jobs are kind of their own issue, but he focuses specifically on coloring and the notion that theatre prints are themselves often wildly inconsistent and change over time, so it can be extremely difficult to even establish a baseline for what a film was meant to look like or even what it actually looked like upon release.

As a modest 4K collector myself, it frustrates me when certain films seem to sit in indefinite limbo, but Amadeus (released this week) looks fabulous and was absolutely worth the wait, so I have hopes that the people taking their time to do right by films like Ben Hur and The Sound of Music are doing so for the right reasons.

Thanks for posting that, it was an interesting watch!

There's a lot of really great film meta-commentary like that on YouTube. Nerrel's video about about dynamic range and colour gamut in the context of Aliens was a game changer for me in appreciating the true potential of the UltraHD format:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxOqWYytypg

Thing is, those old films will eventually degrade too unless very carefully maintained. I don't think there's realistically any storage format that doesn't degrade over some period of time. Even things carved into stone will weather away over time unless somehow protected.

In an interesting way it's almost that human memory is the most durable format -- as long as we remember to care for and preserve information, we can keep it around as long as people are around; But once people stop caring about it, eventually it will fade.

The word unless is unfortunately superfluous in your statement. David Fincher just went through a grueling restoration process for Seven, and he talked about the process and basically said: Eastman Kodak has spent a lot of money to convince Hollywood that if your shoot on film and keep it in a vault that it will never degrade. It’s false.

I guess you could stave off the degradation by occasionally transferring the film to new media. But yeah, the unless is kind of superfluous there, even with frequent 'refreshing' film will eventually degrade.

We have ancient oral traditions that describe constellations that no longer exist (the Seven Sisters). doi:10.1007/978-3-030-64606-6_11

Do you mean the Pleiades?

Yes, the Pleiades, which consists of 6 bright points of light in the sky, yet is still called the "Seven Sisters" (or "Seven Brothers", or similar). Some mythologies tell us what happened to the seventh, while others leave the discrepancy unresolved – or else, those stories do not survive.

This place is not a place of honor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...

Also, ray cat memes: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/

That's it, data needs to be refreshed regularly, archival data needs to be kept 'alive' and transferred to newer media on a continuous basis.

I wonder if you could come up with a preservation metric tied to time investment or labor. The oral tradition is very labor intensive. How does it compare to the labor required to mine, refine, and build computers and hard drives for a storage service like S3 to preserve an equivalent amount of information? Or to chiseling everything into giant stone tablets? Printing and re-printing books?

So kind of correct but not quite related?

The old film stuff which survives is mainly due to material quality, storage and luck, in that sequence. Those DVD started already losing the battle.

DVDs use organic layer for data storage (that rainbowy part IIRC). There is no way in chemical reality that that layer can last more than 2-3 decades, apart from very few outliers. I'd say half-life is somewhere around 15-20 years from what I've witnessed.

If you have anything worthy still on DVDs that still works, make a backup to keep it.

I recently found an old spindle of DVDs that I burned a while ago, mostly with booty gathered from sailing the seas, if you will. I had a 100% success rate with guessing which discs would be unreadable just by looking at them -- the recording layer had degraded so much over time that it was apparent to the naked eye.

Luckily this was all stuff I had no issue with discarding, but if those discs had contained anything of sentimental value, I'd have been quite upset to find that they were basically useless now.

> If you have anything worthy still on DVDs that still works, make a backup to keep it.

And make sure to make it to multiple other formats, preferably including some sort of cloud storage. Solid state storage, especially modern small portable drives, are great if you use them often, but if you're planning to just copy stuff to them and leave them sitting unpowered for a long time, you should be aware that over time they too will suffer from data corruption. The charges in the storage cells don't leak fast, but they do leak.

You gotta actively maintain your backups, even if that just means plugging the backup drive in every other month to check its' health.

If done correctly a ~35 year old Laserdisc's glue layers are still fine. This depends on the plant and when the disk was produced, but Pioneers plants were quite good by the late 80's.

Most 1980's CD's are still fine, except for ones made by PDO UK.

I'm not sure if the glue layers in DVD are organic or not, but I think the rainbow part itself is aluminum.

For archival purposes M-DISC can then be used, whith a purported lifetime of 1000 years.

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