The Death of Cinema pt. 94

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!

you can say that all you want but i dont think he'll ever believe it :D

It's ok, I'd never join any club that would have me as a member

ok, you just sounded like a digital needs no archiving guy

stop being such a DNNAG

c'mon dude, if that's a parody acronym i haint got a prayer.

o i c

nah I said it needs CONSTANT archiving, not just throw it on a hard drive and forget it

well i'm sure that's what folx will do with a digitized History Is Made at Night

(not that there currently is one)

Uh, anything can be lost if no one pays attention to making sure it survives. Even films that once earned millions of dollars for someone. If it isn't anyone's job to preserve it, it disappears. It really doesn't matter what the medium is.

Um

Thought experiment: far future being digs through the rubble, breaks into a cave, unspools a reel of film, says "what's this?" shines his flashlight on it and sees tiny little pictures. Same guy shines light on another object, says "ah, a storage disk. EBCDIC,ASCII, ...? Windows, Linux, ...? SmallTalk, Eiffel, ...? ...? No problem, I'll run my handy little universal bit decoder to figure out what it is"

Far future film stored in cave rubble won't have much, if any, emulsion left on it. Such emulsion as it has will be scratched, clouded or faded to indecipherability. Certainly digital is less easily retreived than analog, but even brass doesn't last forever.

OK, cut it back to 100 years. Or even twenty

Saving something twenty years old from oblivion is a lot easier if it is analog than if it is digital, but even then it's going to depend largely on the format used and how widespread it was when the digital copy was made. For example, PDF, MP3 and JPEG will be decipherable a lot longer than HD-DVD formatted stuff.

In the bleeding-edge world of Pixar and other digital studios, the formats are much more likely to be highly specialized to the hardware and proprietary, therefore much more vulnerable to loss.

all these jpegs lost in time

In the future, rep theatres will just be a small blue square with a white ? In the center. Attendance will be limited.

Yep

Mr. Johnson, it happened again!

Wednesday morning, Indiewire film critic Eric Kohn set off a flurry of retweeting and favoriting on Twitter when he reported an accident at a movie screening:

http://www.slate.com/content/slate/blogs/browbeat/2012/04/26/the_avengers_deleted_at_a_press_screening_how_the_digital_age_makes_it_easier_to_lose_movies/jcr%3acontent/body/image_9f9f.img.jpg/1335475789509.jpg

Three hours later, Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwartzbaum corroborated Kohn’s report, joking:

http://www.slate.com/content/slate/blogs/browbeat/2012/04/26/the_avengers_deleted_at_a_press_screening_how_the_digital_age_makes_it_easier_to_lose_movies/jcr%3acontent/body/image_edf.img.jpg/1335475789547.jpg

How easy is it for a digital projectionist to delete an entire film? Slate asked Steve Kraus, whom Roger Ebert has called one of “the best projectionists in the nation.” Kraus told us that it’s as easy as deleting any important file from your computer. “It’s click to delete from the server and an ‘Are you sure?’ confirmation,” he explained over email. “Of course, as with most computers it's not really gone … but probably only a real computer geek could get into the system to ‘undelete.’”

The lack of real computer geeks—or serious techies of any kind—behind digital projectors was one of Ebert’s plaints when he wrote about the visual pitfalls of digital projection last year. His main concern: Many people employed as digital projectionists lack the skill and training to switch out 3D lenses when projecting 2D films, an oversight that results in dim projections. Whereas film projectionists are skilled workers—and used to be compensated accordingly—digital projection requires the bare minimum of menial tasks, and movie theaters may be tempted to hire (and pay) their new projectionists with that in mind.

According to a fascinating story about the death of 35mm film published in L.A. Weekly earlier this month, “Playing a movie on a DCP [Digital Cinema Package] projector involves plugging the hard drive into the projector, creating a playlist, as you would on an iPod, and pressing a button to play.” Though digital projection equipment is costly—up to $150,000 per screen—theaters are increasingly happy to shell out the upfront cost in the hopes of long-term savings (which may include not employing projectionists at all). Studios, meanwhile, save money on printing and shipping when they use DCPs instead of 35mm film. It’s win-win for everyone—except the projectionists who have lost their jobs and the audiences who occasionally endure mishaps like dark screens and deleted movies.

lol dumbass