The Death of Cinema pt. 94

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

I mean, no one ever fucked up a reel or had the wrong lens on or etc etc

^^^things that don't take hours to fix

oh i see the digital dillema was being talked about upthread. was thinking of starting a thread about that a couple weeks ago

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.

― Aimless, Friday, April 13, 2012 10:02 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

sorry but thats insanely reductive (and to what purpose??)

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118048861?refcatid=1009

"The main difference between analog and digital is, analog was store-and-ignore," said Shefter. "Digital has to be actively managed."

Such active management is expensive, however, vastly more expensive than putting film in a vault. Even when they take such steps, however, filmmakers and producers are up against an insurmountable problem: The only reliable method for archiving digital images is to go analog. The best archiving solution today is to print out to film, ideally with a three-color separation printed onto black-and-white archival film. That's a very expensive solution.

The Academy is doing what it can to help address the problem, said Andy Maltz, director of the Sci-Tech Council. "One of the keys to preservation is to have file-format standards, so if you can recover the zeros and ones, you'll know what they mean and know what they're supposed to look like on the screen." The Acad's Image Interchange Framework project is helping create such standards. SMPTE will be publishing the first of them later this year.

The Acad is coordinating Hollywood's efforts to work with the Library of Congress and with other industries to find a method for archiving digital data. But, said Maltz, "It's up to the manufacturers to incorporate archival lifetimes into their products." Fortunately for the entertainment industry, it's not alone in facing this issue. Banking, medicine, energy and other fields all need to preserve digital data for more than a few years, and they're all looking for the same elusive breakthrough.

The report says that unless preservation becomes a requirement for planning, budgeting and marketing strategies, it will remain a problem for indie filmmakers, documentarians and archives alike. "These communities, and the nation's artistic and cultural heritage, would greatly benefit from a comprehensive, coordinated digital preservation plan for the future."

and they're all looking for the same elusive breakthrough.

quick! better switch to digital!

"The main difference between analog and digital is, analog was store-and-ignore," said Shefter. "Digital has to be actively managed."

True, this is what I was trying to say in this thread.

Such active management is expensive, however, vastly more expensive than putting film in a vault

See, I don't completely buy this because FILM DEGRADES. Yes, you could theoretically lose a movie on a hard drive or a backup of a movie's production assets, but if I put a digital file in a well backed-up system, it is there in the exact same format later. If I put a film on a shelf, it degrades and needs restoration.

but if I put a digital file in a well backed-up system, it is there in the exact same format later.

hope you still have software that can read the file

digital totally degrades, it's just in a different way from film. hard drives crash, files become corrupt, software changes too quickly etc.

The fules who pooh-pooh the problems with digital should look at some of the threads about "how can I store my digital music collection" or "remastering digital recordings"

^^^

what do you mean I can't get my .wav files off this outdated minidisc format

I saw The Five Year Engagement Digital today, and it didn't look very good (a bit dim, a little fuzzy maybe). Then again, I went to see War Horse on film and it didn't work at all. Wound up waiting 90 minutes before they said they couldn't fix the projector. Got two passes for other films though.

what do you mean I can't get my .wav files off this outdated minidisc format

^ exactly, and that's only going back a decade or two. challenge for archiving digital film & cet is to make sure it's still accessible a century from now.