
The Perils of an All-Digital Movie Future - luu
http://www.vulture.com/2014/12/perils-of-an-all-digital-movie-future.html
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isomorphic
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).

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mistercow
Film may last longer than the hardware used for delivering DCPs, but that's
surely a matter of optimizing costs. The DCP delivered to a theater is not
intended to be archival. Indeed, given that it's lossily compressed (via JPEG
2000, of all things), it's not even _appropriate_ for an archive.

What should be archived instead is the DCDM, which is uncompressed and
unencrypted. And it shouldn't be archived on a mechanical HDD which will
obviously fail within 10 years.

But I digress. The point is that we _have_ better long-term storage options
than HDDs; they just wouldn't be economical for delivering content to
theaters. There just isn't any reason for archiving and delivery to be
coupled.

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rustyconover
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.

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schoen
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.

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kqr2
M-discs claim to last up to 1000 years:

[http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/](http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/)

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

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

