Percentage of Films going to 2K or 4K DIs?

[Max Jacoby]

Is it fair to assume that nowadays, even if a picture goes through chemical-optical instead of DI, that a 4K scan is made off a neg right away? It would seem insane to me not to scan them at max resolution right away to protect the picture.

Unfortunately that is not the case, simply because it costs so much. I'm sure most filmmakers would like to see a 4K or even 6K scan of their negative for archival purposes, but unfortunately it is hardly ever possible.

[Tom Lowe]

Unfortunately that is not the case, simply because it costs so much. I'm sure most filmmakers would like to see a 4K or even 6K scan of their negative for archival purposes, but unfortunately it is hardly ever possible.

 

I find that to be very shocking, considering that most of these major films can afford $600 a day for a boom op and 10 million dollar+ salaries for "stars."

Edited April 11, 2008 by Tom Lowe

[Stephen Williams]

I find that to be very shocking, considering that most of these major films can afford $600 a day for a boom op and 10 million dollar+ salaries for "stars."

 

Hi,

 

I think the $200,000+ costs a year for digital storage does not help.

 

Stephen

[Paul Bruening]

That's both a strength and weakness of the movie making business. You've got as many as three hundred people all making maybe hundreds of decisions each as they participate with the production. Groups of them participate from low levels to top decision making in ranks. From any given perspective, other people's decisions don't make any sense. It seems that most people necessarily must lean on conventions in hopes that everyone will cooperate better that way. When you think of the fallibility of human thought, it's a wonder how movies get made at all. But, I agree with you, Tom. If they're going to throw so much money at a movie creation, you'd think they'd apportion a little higher ratio towards preserving that investment. My observation is that movies are treated more like food. Cook it up, feed a lot of people, throw away the leftovers.

 

There has been a change in market consumption, lately. People are consuming more old product. Product providers like Netflicks, companies that can stock inventory in depth, have reawakened consumers hunger for classic product. Basically, it is only in this time that preservation becomes a profitable activity. Maybe that will change the conventions of "movies as perishable product".

 

Social change is peculiar and unpredictable. Saying that, I'd like to see a revival of theaters running classic product. There is no replacement for the energy a group creates together while watching a good movie. With the current economic shrink going on, theaters are closing more and more. That might be an opportunity for classics revival utilizing those older houses. Sadly, I think most market pundits would predict that home consumption on bigger screens will make theater classics presentation unlikely

[Tom Lowe]

Hi,

 

I think the $200,000+ costs a year for digital storage does not help.

 

Stephen

 

Is it "cheaper" to store chemical film and let it degrade?? Sheesh, at a minimum they could back up their 4K scans to some cheap $300 external hardrives they could pick up at Best Buy and be safe for a decade or two! I've still got my old comuter from the early 1990s, and all the data on the harddrives is just fine and dandy! How in the heck can it cost 200K a year just for storage? I guess the same reason it costs $2,000 a day for a hair stylist.

[John Sprung]

Sheesh, at a minimum they could back up their 4K scans to some cheap $300 external hardrives they could pick up at Best Buy and be safe for a decade or two!

Hard drives can freeze if you don't spin them up once in a while. They also fail so unpredictably that we have all those different RAID levels for disk arrays. LTO tapes are a better choice. They're what the banks and insurance companies use. Figure $50 each for tapes that can hold 2-3 hours of HD, $4k for the drive to record/play them.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Max Jacoby]

Is it "cheaper" to store chemical film and let it degrade??

Film properly stored will last a long time. Even films that do a DI (and output a new neg) still cut the original neg and store it, so that they can rescan it in the future.

[John Sprung]

Film properly stored will last a long time. Even films that do a DI (and output a new neg) still cut the original neg and store it, so that they can rescan it in the future.

To keep film for a long time, the best approach is sequential YCM separations on B&W stock.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Tom Lowe]

I just find it extremely hard to believe that it's "too expensive" to store a 4K copy of a movie. Make multiple copies on different media, and back them up everry few years. Easy as pie.

[Guest tylerhawes]

YCM seperations work great. There's no question that in 20 years, you'll still be able to use those YCM film reels to restore your movie. If it's in a controlled vault, they will still look great.

 

OTOH, with LTO tapes, best practice is to refresh them every 4 years (copy to another tape), and you have to worry about maintaining legacy equipment to be sure you can actually read those tapes now that the market has moved on to LTO7 or whatever is the format of choice then. It's this unpredictability of a moving target in digital backup that makes them (the studios) nervous.

 

For an individual filmmaker, it's not such a big deal. But in that case you're not managing hundreds of films.

 

Ideally they'd do both YCM seperations and LTO tapes. And a lot of studio films ARE doing this. It's just not standardized yet.

 

The guys I've met from the various studios who are in charge of this decision making are universally well-informed, intelligent, and meticulous in their research and choices on this matter. Ever since DVD proved way more successful than expectations, the studios are keenly aware of maintaing value years down the road and not just release. I'm sure that all the big companies have very sound reasons for why they are taking the approach they have and are not just looking at the short-term.

[Guest tylerhawes]

One other point: if your YCM film gets damaged in some places, there are great restoration tools to treat in digitally and restore it, especially since you probably don't have the same damage on the other two color layers, so you can extrapolate a lot from them.

 

If your tape get damaged, it's digital damage, and it can effect the integrity of many more shots in the film, potentially even the whole tape.

 

So film degrades more gracefully.

[John Sprung]

The other issue is sequential vs. three separate YCM's. With sequential, registration and shrinkage will be the same for all three records, and there's no issue with losing one of the three, or getting colors out of sync. But you don't get the reconstruction protection that Tyler mentions.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Tom Lowe]

Of course no one saying do not preserve the film. But if you have a 4K of the neg right after it's shot, that will never, ever degrade, since it's just binary information; whereas film, due to the laws of chemistry and physics, will eventually begin to break down. Keeping a digital copy freshly scanned from the original neg in two separate places essentially guarantees that your film will never degrade below the resolution it was scanned at - 4K or 6K downsample to 4K, whatever. Not to do this seems insane to me.

 

Tyler, you have a lot of faith in movie execs to protect these films, and I hope you are right. But keep in mind that movie execs from only a decade or two ago have let their films fall apart. Have you seen the Blurays of Terminator 2 or Basic Instinct? The degradation is truly shocking. Now maybe they will be able to restore those films and have them presentable at 1080p some day, but the transfers they sent to Bluray and HD-DVD now are atrocious. We're not talking about pictures from the 40s or 50s, we're talking about fairly recent movies!

Edited April 12, 2008 by Tom Lowe

[Max Jacoby]

But if you have a 4K of the neg right after it's shot, that will never, ever degrade, since it's just binary information;

With digital storage, the issue is not the degradation of binary information, it's the degradation/failure of the media that information is kept on. Since any failure means an instant loss of information (unlike film) the storage is labor intensive and expensive. It's really not as simple as it seems, at least at the current state of technology.

 

Have you seen the Blurays of Terminator 2 or Basic Instinct?

 

I haven't seen these yet, but bad picture quality does not automatically mean that these films are degraded already. They might just have taken an older transfer (meaning telecine). It was the same with early dvds, they did not look very good, loads of compression artifacts, weave, probably scanned off an IN.

[Freya Black]

With digital storage, the issue is not the degradation of binary information, it's the degradation/failure of the media that information is kept on. Since any failure means an instant loss of information (unlike film) the storage is labor intensive and expensive. It's really not as simple as it seems, at least at the current state of technology.

 

 

 

I haven't seen these yet, but bad picture quality does not automatically mean that these films are degraded already. They might just have taken an older transfer (meaning telecine). It was the same with early dvds, they did not look very good, loads of compression artifacts, weave, probably scanned off an IN.

 

Surely an older transfer would only be at S.D. resolution?

I think they must have made new transfers but they may not have had access to very good materials for making the transfer. Perhaps they just had an old and degraded print, or it could be colour neg that hasn't been stored in a salt mine or whatever so has degraded quite quickly. With advanced techniques and access to a variety of original materials they might be able to do a restoration to bring back the film closer to the original quality but such a process would probably be really expensive. Lastly older stocks were not as advanced anyway. I know that the filmstock used for aliens was known to be super grainy. Having said that grainy film can be nice, but then again, I've found that grain looks horrible on modern flat panel displays for some reason.

 

love

 

Freya

[K Borowski]

I think Max's speculation is probably most likely, that they scanned off of an old IN that was made for the original SD transfer. While two generations of removal aren't likely to be THAT noticeable in SD, HD is obviously another story. That being said, I prefer transfers from IPs to those from the OCN, because honestly there's just something about the slight grittiness of an IP that sparkles. Maybe this is why I can't get enough of Murder She Wrote. Now there's something that desperately needs to be remastered in HD. . .

[Guest tylerhawes]

Tyler, you have a lot of faith in movie execs to protect these films, and I hope you are right. But keep in mind that movie execs from only a decade or two ago have let their films fall apart.

 

 

If it were MY movie, I would want a 4K scan archived like you say, Tom. But I can also see why a studio officer could come to a different conclusion.

 

The decision process 10 or 20 years ago was a lot different. Back then, movies made their money mostly in the theater and then a nice bonus income from VHS. DVD changed everything, and the studios are now keenly aware that they make most of their money from video and broadcast rights and licensing even years after the movie left the theaters. As a result, it's no longer a "movie exec" that is making these types of decisions. The studios have picked experts from within their organizations to obsess about this issue and make informed choices. These are pragmatic, quality-conscious, risk-averse and highly technical people from those I've met. So no, I don't have confidence in movie execs, but they seem to have good people in these positions and I have some confidence in them.

[Guest tylerhawes]

I'll just add that my comment applies to studio films. Indies and small production companies are a whole other story, where they are much more concerned about the short-term bottom line cost.

[Tom Lowe]

With digital storage, the issue is not the degradation of binary information, it's the degradation/failure of the media that information is kept on. Since any failure means an instant loss of information (unlike film) the storage is labor intensive and expensive. It's really not as simple as it seems, at least at the current state of technology.

 

Right, but that's why I mentioned backing the digital data up on several tapes and different types of media. Then your chances of failure can be brought to near 0. I suppose using a newer 4K codec with a more manageable datarate would make things a lot easier, and perhaps the industry is making strides in that department.

 

I haven't seen these yet, but bad picture quality does not automatically mean that these films are degraded already. They might just have taken an older transfer (meaning telecine). It was the same with early dvds, they did not look very good, loads of compression artifacts, weave, probably scanned off an IN.

 

Yeah I imagine these might have been taken from some older scans of transfers. At least I hope so! The quality is so bad that it must be some kind of issue like that, and hopefully new transfers and scans and restorations can bring these pictures up to par in terms of 1080p. Now whether these pictures will ever hold up at 4K is whole nother question, and I am convinced that some day 4K or some other similar format will replace 1080p as the gold standard. It's only common sense that the trend toward higher resolution for consumers will continue.

 

You never know. Apparently the 4K restoration of Strangelove went well, but I've never seen a 4K sample, and of course it was projected in LA at 2K, not 4K. So my fear is that a lot of these films from the 80s and 90s might not ever regain their full glory, and might not hold up well at 4K.

Edited April 12, 2008 by Tom Lowe

[Max Jacoby]

I think there is a definite advantage of scanning at 4K, even though you might not have 4K worth of picture information (actual image) on there, especially on the faster stocks, but at least the grain shows up sharper. That's so annoying about 2K DIs, they always have this smoothed out look compared to a photochemical finish.