[article below found via Tom Sito's blog]
My comments:
Always take it with some skepticism when someone tells you "film is dead". (see the last paragraph of the article pasted below) 35mm three-strip Technicolor and 16mm and 8mm Kodachrome movies from the 30's, 40's , 50's and 60's are still viewable and in vivid color,
while much video footage from the 50's - through- the early 80's is either completely unviewable or fading fast . Countless TV specials, comedies and dramatic shows broadcast in the 50's and 60's are now considered "lost" because even when the original tapes exist there are no video machines that can play them back. Digital image files and videos saved on floppies or Zip or Jaz drives from the 90's can no longer be easily accessed on today's computers (so what about 10 years from now ? 25 years from now? 100 years from now ? ) .
Tom Sito wrote :
"Remember when the big concern was to save films shot on cheaper 35mm Eastmancolor film stock which needed to be rescued while classic 3-strip Technicolor prints like 1939's "Gone With the Wind" suffered minimal deterioration ? "
Now it's that problem x 10 or worse . Digital storage is an improvement over magnetic tape (VHS , 8mm, Beta), but how much better in the long-term ?
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Digital proves problematic ;
Industry lacks method to store footage
By DAVID S. COHEN -- "Variety"
As far as movies are concerned, digital, like diamonds, was supposed to
be forever.
No more dyes to fade, no more film stocks to decay or catch fire. Just
pristine digital data, preserved for all time, and release prints as
clear and sharp as the images caught by the camera.
Just one problem: For long-term storage, digital is -- so far --
proving to be a time bomb, more permanent than sand painting but not much else.
Simply put, there's no generally accepted way to store digital
"footage" for more than a few months. After that the industry is using a hodgepodge of improvised solutions, some rather costly, others not very reliable.
That looked like a small problem when digital filmmaking was limited to low-budget indies, animation houses and tech pioneers like James Cameron and George Lucas.
Now, though, that small problem is growing geometrically as the major
studios shift away from film to digital capture. Such recent releases
as "300," "Apocalypto," "Zodiac" and "Superman Returns" were shot on
digital. Their digital masters could be seriously degraded if the problem isn't addressed quickly.
In fact, the problem is so severe that the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts & Sciences' Science and Technology Council warned in 2005 that within just a few years films shot with digital cameras could be lost.
Two years on, digital is going mainstream, but "The problem is still
there," says Phil Feiner, chairman of the Acad Sci-Tech Council's archiving committee. And those few years the council warned of are nearly up.
It's not that there's no way to store digital data. On the contrary,
there are dozens of ways to store it, most of which go obsolete in just a few years. Remember 5" floppies and Zip disks?
And the disks that have stuck around? Not so reliable.
Data tapes are balky and can fall apart. Data DVDs and CDs have a history of "rotting" and can't be counted on to last as long as their commercially pressed cousins.
Plus there's no reason to expect that the computers of 20 years from
now -- never mind 100 -- will be able to plug in to today's hard disks.Some private companies are jumping in as awareness of the problem grows, and Feiner's committee will be launching several initiatives over the months to come.
But the amount of digital footage that needs to be archived is growing
faster than ever.
More than one tech expert, including the Academy's Sci-Tech Council
director Andy Maltz, told Variety they had found archival tapes unreadable just18 months after they were made.
Feiner, the former longtime prexy of Pacific Title, says when he worked
on studio feature films he found missing frames or corrupted data on 40% of the data tapes that came in from digital intermediate houses.
The tapes were only nine months old.
"On certain pictures we had to go into the DI negative and re-scan the
data," he says. "You couldn't retrieve it. Gone."
Milt Shefter, who is a team leader on Feiner's digital archiving
committee, warns that "Long term, it's possible that we're looking going back to the early days of motion pictures, where films are made, put out for a week or two, then thrown away."
With acetate or polyester film, the typical approach to archiving has
been summed up as "store and ignore."
Color film can be turned into black-and-white color separations on
polyester stock. Properly stored in cool vaults at low humidity, such film can last centuries. But there's no way to "store and ignore" digital.
Instead, digital data has to be copied, or "migrated," to new storage
every few years. Migration, however, takes computers, an IT staff, software and a lot of labor. In short: money.
While indies may lack the funds to do regular migration, studios are
plunging in.
Sony's VP of asset management and film restoration, Grover Crisp, says
the studio has put in a program of migrating every two to three years.
"The motion pictures and original material, those are primary assets of
the company," says Crisp. "We all want to do whatever we can to protect those assets."
Disney's VP of production technology Howard Lukk, says as the studios'
digital archives grow, migration becomes a bigger job.
"It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge and it getting a foot longer
every year."
Not only are more films shot digitally now, but digital filmmaking
encourages directors to shoot more footage.
"The technological issues here are not going to be solved by the
entertainment industry," says Shefter. "It's going to take big
business, big science and maybe big government."
In the meantime, the Academy is stepping in to make the motion picture industry's voice heard in any big business initiative to solve the problem.
The digital archive project is the broadest initiative launched since
the Academy decided in 2003 to fund the current incarnation of the Science & Council.
Maltz expects a report that will pin down what the industry needs to do
to be released in a few months.
Meanwhile, private industry is attacking the problem of digital archiving, too, with at least one announcement in the field planned for NAB.
At NAB, Elektrofilm Digital Studios and Sun Microsystems announced a
service to manage and archive the vast amounts of video from feature film production.
Many tech experts expect the studios to eventually outsource all their
archiving and migration to companies like Elektrofilm rather than try
to do it themselves. Feiner says what is happening is, in effect, the birth of a new business: digital archiving.
He speaks from experience. Earlier this year, three companies received
Science & Technology Awards for their work on archiving. Feiner and his
Pacific Title team were among the winners.
Their solution takes the data from a digital intermediate and turns it
into three-color separation negatives. In other words, they take the digital movie and turn it into good old-fashioned film.
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Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117963533.html
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This same problem has been documented in the area of "home movies".
Video shot in the 70's and 80's, even some in the 90's is now unwatchable unless protection copies have been made and migrated over to 8mm digital tape or DVD. (which will have to be migrated again in a few years as the formats change). Some of the magnetic tape from the 70's and 80's is unsalvagable. The video camera companies sold you on "preserving your precious memories for years to come" , which most parents figured would mean they could watch movies of baby's first step or the kids playing with grandma years later when they themselves had become grandparents. In many cases that isn't proving to be true.
Ironic that in a few years time we may be able to retrieve and watch people's home movies from the 30's - through- the - late 70's shot on 16mm and 8mm B&W or Kodachrome film , but our own home movies from the 70's through the 90's (and beyond ?) will be unviewable . Precious memories , indeed.
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This made me start Googling around to see what was the current status with Super 8mm film:
I was encouraged to see Eastman Kodak's updated page devoted to their Super-8mm film products with links to many articles about people who continue to choose to shot on film for aesthetic reasons. There's even a relatively new magazine devoted to film-making in the Super-8mm format, Super-8 Today magazine. Puts me in mind to haul out the good ol' Nizo or Canon Super 8's , or my Bolex 16mm . (I used these more frequently until the last 7 or 8 years , but I've kept them , not bearing to part with these beautiful cameras).