The Death of Cinema pt. 94

I'm imagining files that become corrupted and/or file formats that become obsolete.

any "format" digital or otherwise can become corrupted or obsolete.

Of course, but there is no reason to think that digital files are more or less subject to this, or that their lifespan is anything close to other formats. At the very least, you can see an analog image so long as it isn't utterly degraded.

5D sunday photographers

ILP's 'tumblr whites'

Adam otm

File corruption is easy to prevent and doing so can be automated. File format worries are a real issue.

Obv I have a preference for analogue but I do try to be realistic. I actually deal with HD footage most days for work and the abundance of formats and how to and not to convert them is constantly an issue. I will miss 35mm projection but I did also just get HDTV and Blu Ray and it's been fantastic to see some of the digital preservation work that has been done on classic films. I was never much of a DVD-hoarder/criterion dude but Blu Ray is changing my position on all that.

Also as per corruption/backup I have had enough awful moments where I have a pretty good regimen in terms of backing up my projects, but then archiving files from old projects, transferring from drive to drive, switching on drives every couple of months to make sure they are still ticking over drives me nuts.

The biggest editing job I ever did (on someone else's films) was totally saved by the hard-drive-in-a-grocery-bag-in-the-freezer-for-a-couple-of-hours trick.

And when I say archiving files, I am not just talking about video files, but all of the other data that comes along with a finished, outputted project.

i have regular 8mm films sitting in a freezer, they've been there for months :/

exposed film or raw stock?

exposed

Apparently the last in Bordwell's series on the Big Switch. I had no idea 35mm reels were now made w/ mylar, not celluloid.

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/02/28/pandoras-digital-box-from-films-to-files/

I suppose the death of cinema thread is as apt a place as any to ask if I should finally watch Auntie Mame.

Just wait for a revival of the musical at a dinner theater near you. And as I have no intention of watching Mommie Dearest anytime soon, Fight the Fag Canon.

Celluloid exceedingly flammable which is why, no? I guess I should read article.

"The Fag Canon" (and esp. Mommie Dearest) >>>>> Woody Allen's entire filmography

well, if you're including all of Fassbinder, sure. ;)

My roommate from nearly 20 years ago remembers a live Scorsese interview we saw at NYU where he talked about the switch to mylar, so there's another thing I didn't know I'd known.

more about the likely death of 35mm and the dubious 'permanence' of digital work:

"If I spend," [UCLA Film & Television Archive director Jan-Christopher] Horak says, "as we did on one restoration, $750,000 to preserve one film digitally, and then it goes into a computer somewhere and it disappears, that money's gone."

Think it doesn't happen?

It does.

Five years after the first Toy Story came out, producers wanted to release it on DVD. When they went back to the original animation files, they realized that 20 percent of the data had been corrupted and was now unusable. Granted, digital was new at the time. Surely advances have made digital storage much less problematic?

Not really.

Fast-forward to Toy Story 2, which was almost erased from history. Pixar stored the Toy Story 2 files on a Linux machine. One afternoon, someone accidentally hit the delete key sequence on the drive. The movie started disappearing. First Woody's hat went. Then his boots. Then his body. Then entire scenes.

Imagine the horror: 20 people's work for two years, erased in 20 seconds. Animators were able to reconstitute the missing elements purely by chance: Pixar's visual arts director had just had a baby, and she'd brought a copy of the movie — the only remaining copy — with her to work on at home.

In the digital realm, the archivist's mantra, "Store and ignore," fails. If you don't "refresh," or occasionally turn on a hard drive, it stops working. You can't just stick it on a shelf and forget about it. As restorationist Ross Lipman says, "You're shifting from a model focused on a physical object to data. And where the data lives will be constantly changing."

http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood

> Pixar stored the Toy Story 2 files on a Linux machine.
> One afternoon, someone accidentally hit the delete key sequence on the drive.
> The movie started disappearing.
> First Woody's hat went. Then his boots. Then his body. Then entire scenes.

computers do not work like this.

should store these films as Lossless files

Koogs otm. That Pixar stuff is str8 up bullshit; even in 1999 the TS2 *original* files would be many terabytes in size, there is no fucking way that their art director would be able to "take it home". Total bollocks.

I heard they put some Pop Rocks in the disc drive and that is what caused the meltdown.

TS2 original files would just be 3d models, shaders, and the movement data. If someone was working on just animation, it's possible they'd not have the textures, so the file sizes could be reasonable.

This "omg digital film could disappear" thing is complete bullshit. I mean, unless you think banks use paper money all the time or credit cards don't actually work or that... oh hell, anything digital

and cmon, pixar probably had a pretty good backup routine in place by then. unless they were completely and totally insane.

asking my friends at ILM and Pixar about this

Jefchak works at the New Beverly, which is owned by Quentin Tarantino. A regular at the art-house cinema, Tarantino bought the place in 2007, when it was in danger of closing. The New Beverly still plays traditional reel-to-reel 35mm, and Tarantino has said that the day the cinema puts in a digital projector is the day he burns it to the ground.

I lol'd

he made a movie documenting how he'd do that iirc

all I know about tech stuff is what I read in LA Weekly

This "omg digital film could disappear" thing is complete bullshit

however, ppl who allegedly understand this stuff have told me the opposite of this.

It all comes down to whether people think it's economically viable to keep original artifacts. With film, a ton of material was lost because film degrades or warehouses of material were just torn out or because the worth of materials was deemed more than the worth of keeping the film. With digital, the only major risk is if someone believes something is worth archiving and not keeping in a live system.

In an archive, it's possible that a digital film could be on backup tapes, a hard drive, whatever. If that's the case, then it's possible that even with two copies, they'd both degrade -- a dead hard drive is a dead hard drive, unlike film where you can replace frames, clean it up, etc.

If they're "archived" by using network-attached storage, or a film cloud, or whatever else, then you're not going to lose it. If you don't differentiate between the files added this week -- those with active demand -- and the "archived" ones, then your backup strategy is going to cover them all.

Again, it's just a matter of how much effort people are going to put into archived materials. But with digital, you gain a lot by the factor of the long tail -- newer films are going to take much more space, so archiving older ones becomes an exponentially smaller burden.

Example given just now is simplified, cooked up but nonetheless it does seem like there could be a problem

however, ppl who allegedly understand this stuff have told me the opposite of this.

ditto my film editor (and former projectionist) bandmember/buddy at ILM ("the more we rely on digital, the less we'll preserve. 1's and 0's are less precious/more unstable" - she says)

Sorry, I xposted with mh, who makes some good points

Oh, certainly. The problem is that with physical materials you just put it in a room, hopefully climate-friendly, and leave it there. With digital, you have to keep things moving, and people are less likely to care.

The larger point in that article is tons of films are not going to be converted to DCPs.

For them will be back to the old days of watching a 16mm print projected on a sheet or in an amphitheater with a hump in the middle.

even with decent backup in place you're still susceptible to format shifting and dependencies like codecs falling out of use. the bbc doomsday project, for instance. were hundreds of copies around the country but they had to scrabble around for working hardware to read it after only 20 years. with film the required working hardware is a lightbulb.

however, ppl who allegedly understand this stuff have told me the opposite of this.

Yeah, this. Giovanna Fossati's From Grain To Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition is a useful text on the subject, according to my partner (who works in film preservation/curation).

even with decent backup in place you're still susceptible to format shifting and dependencies like codecs falling out of use. the bbc doomsday project, for instance. were hundreds of copies around the country but they had to scrabble around for working hardware to read it after only 20 years. with film the required working hardware is a lightbulb.

― koogs, Friday, April 13, 2012 5:44 AM (1 hour ago)

only films liked by "olds" will disappear forever, so no worries. rock on, ILX.

waiting on an apology, mh, lol

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ib7bo-wKtVA/TWcEdJqEA7I/AAAAAAAAAGg/d-iLBp_KsMU/s320/chimesat.jpg

tbh it would be kind of awesome if toy story disappeared and ppl in 20 years time were trying to reconstitute it from exterior evidence

I wouldn't necessarily count on employees of Pixar confirming/denying such story. About 20 years ago a friend at Sony swore me to secrecy about the original soundtrack elements of Dr Strangelove being lost forever, tho I've since seen this fact published.

more on this topic from C Nolan (ye gods, right) and others:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/christopher-nolan-on-the-digital-switchover-and-3d

morbs' greatest allies, christopher nolan and quentin tarantino

i don't know if digital will make it more likely or not for old films to be lost; studios sure did a pretty great job of losing/destroying them when they were on film

the more things change etc.

For things to remain the same, everything must change

Although the way I heard it before was "Everything has to change so that everything can stay the same."

apology for what? I think that there's great possibility for long-term preservation with digital means, but I really doubt anyone's done it.

I campaigned for movies for the olds on recent polls, too, Morbs!