200,000 USD cost per year to digitally archive a cinema film

MirkoBoeddecker

For those who can speak English ;-): ? http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business/media/23steal.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all& ? In short: it costs a Hollywood studio USD 200,000 (per year, mind you) to securely archive all the data from ONE film produced entirely digitally using current technology. ? If the film had been produced using analogue technology, the cost for the same amount of data would be USD 5,000 (cold storage in a salt dome in Kansas with security personnel, etc.). ? That quickly covers the cost of shooting on film ;-) ? ? Best regards, ? Mirko ?

Morte

Goodness me. It somehow reminds me of the nuclear (lobby) politics from the 1950s onwards – right up to the present day. Glossing over whatever suits us. You can always twist the figures one way or another. Perhaps in 60 years’ time we’ll see the great digital phase-out. Once it becomes clear that there simply isn’t such a thing as a large-scale digital final repository. :)

Photux

Interesting article, thanks! € And there’s a reason for the saying: ‘Produce digitally, archive analogue.’ I’ve noticed this myself on a small scale: at first, you don’t want to delete anything digital, but later on it becomes too overwhelming – so you end up needing ever-larger hard drives, always hoping that the main drive and the backup drive won’t both fail at the same time. Not to mention the effort involved in regular backups and long-term readability (certain for JPGs for the next 50–100 years, but not so much for unstandardised RAWs). Developing film and filing it away in Adofiles is simply easier, especially as there’s less waste. € As a history student, I could well imagine that the digital age will one day turn out to be a very dark age (due to a lack of preserved records).

Quinquaginta

Everyone who has studied the subject of long-term archiving of visual material in depth has so far reached the unanimous conclusion that archiving on film is both significantly more secure and considerably more cost-effective. All films shot digitally in Hollywood studios (fortunately, most major productions there are still shot on film) are therefore archived on film without exception (as are films shot on film, of course). For this reason, both Kodak and Fuji continue to produce substantial quantities of archival film for this purpose (Fuji had introduced a new archival film, ‘Eterna’, just a few years ago). Detailed information on this can also be found here (“The Digital Dilemma I + II”): ? http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma2/index.html ? Best regards, Henning

sigint

Yeah, that’s the thing about digital image files. I’m not a fan of them either, and I’d love to find an affordable way to archive my image files. The funny thing is, I was given a film scanner a while back, but I don’t have the software. :( So it’s still a case of: always make sure to back up regularly! € Best regards, € Bastian

Photux

Related to this topic: Following the fact that Episode II was shot almost entirely and Episode III entirely using digital technology, the new Star Wars trilogy is set to be filmed on film once again: http://www.starwars-union.de/nachrichten/13262/Episode_VII_wird_offenbar_auf_35mm-Film_gedreht/