The Perils of an All-Digital Movie Future

If film actually lasts that long, then why not print a digitally-encoded film? (Think full-frame QR codes or how Dolby Digital used to encode digital audio between the sprocket holes.) Sure, the film would probably be longer than a human-visual print, but then the encoding could include forward error correction. Don't use inter-frame compression (so that one part of the movie is independent of another), and for that matter don't get creative with the intra-frame compression--just use RLE or something really easy to reconstruct.

Also, when printing such a digital film, be sure to write down the encoding algorithms on archival-quality paper, and store that along with the film. ("We sampled an 8192x4096 image in anamorphic ratio X, with three channels, 16 bits per sample per channel planar, over the color space Y...")

As with all such things, if people were serious about it (or money becomes involved), this would be a solvable problem (or at least a tractable problem).

Apparently the authors and archivists haven't heard of tape or Amazon Glacier. I'm sure Amazon Glacier would be happy to back up their digital archives for a reasonable monthly fee. And the archivists would get people monitoring and making sure the data is accessible for free.

Nicholson Baker wrote a book presenting a similar hypothesis about the preservation of library books (Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper). A core idea of Baker's book is that librarians and the general public drastically underestimate the longevity of printed paper books, in large part because of their experience with newspapers and especially cheap paperbacks, which are often printed on very acidic paper. But books printed on higher-quality paper (including most books from centuries ago) will commonly last centuries under normal archival conditions, so there isn't necessarily an urgency to switch their format from paper to something else. Baker was outraged that librarians were cutting open ("disbinding") perfectly serviceable books in order to microfilm them and often then discarding the original paper editions.

Baker's point matches my experience fairly well; I have some cheap paperbacks from the 1970s that are yellowed and brittle already, while I have several books from the 1700s (some nearly 300 years old) that are in great shape and that you can read normally with your hands. They haven't been stored in an argon environment in a freezer or anything, just on normal bookshelves at room temperature. The older books were printed on low-acidity paper ("before that was a thing", we might say) and are likely to last for centuries more if they don't get lost to a fire or a flood.

But the main villain for Baker at the time he wrote Double Fold wasn't digitization so much as microfilm, which isn't always archivally preferable to acid-free paper and which is horribly inconvenient for search or reading. (Baker did prefer paper card catalogues to digital catalogues; I think he was probably right about the serendipity aspect but wrong on almost every other practical dimension.) By contrast, digital books have been great for usability, great for search, great for academic research, great for disability accessibility, great for distance education, and so on. They even have a fairly strong preservation story when copyright considerations don't obstruct it. (But it's really important for people to remember that optical discs are probably not an archival medium. It looks like "mirroring stuff regularly from one hard drive array to another" is the archival medium.) I cherish, respect, and continue to acquire, collect, and read paper books, but I think the idea that paper is the uniquely best format for preservation and accessibility purposes is no longer right when the competition is computerization rather than microfilming.

M-discs claim to last up to 1000 years:

http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/

Solution: store them in an analog format as well...

Amazing that someone with so little understanding of digital data storage can be paid to write about the dangers of it.