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Well THIS is a little sickening!!


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Guest Christopher Sheneman

Truthfully? Besides a handful of purists and professor celluloids- nobody cares. Hate, haaate, to see you guys [and others] put yourselves through yet another round of "it ain't like it used to be."

 

I know that my current and future productions will never color fade, will never have bad sound, etc..they look as beautiful as the day they finished and the same in a 1,000 years.

 

You guys are kinda old and shaking your sticks but you can still be excited about the future as I'm sure you once were.

 

 

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^ Future productions will never fade (maybe) that is if you can get them to be stored anywhere. Have fun trying to get a SATA connection hard drive to work in 50 years from now. Let alone whatever codec or format the films are stored on working on the new machine.

 

Not enough it being done about archiving digital formats. A lot of film has stood the test of time, I'm not sure if a lot of these digital formats will unless something is done.

 

Hell it's annoying enough with all the multiple proprietary file formats these days and getting them to work, plugin this, update that.

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I know that my current and future productions will never color fade, will never have bad sound, etc..they look as beautiful as the day they finished and the same in a 1,000 years.

 

They might if only you could read the codec or access the files... Currently the safest bet is colour separation using B & W film.

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I know that my current and future productions will never color fade, will never have bad sound, etc..they look as beautiful as the day they finished and the same in a 1,000 years.

They will if you archive them to B/W separations.

But the article isn't about current practice, which will change, it's about the first century of cinema history and simply not being able to get a copy of a film made only 20 years ago. It may be good business to eat your own history but it's a bad idea.

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Guest Christopher Sheneman

They will if you archive them to B/W separations.

But the article isn't about current practice, which will change, it's about the first century of cinema history and simply not being able to get a copy of a film made only 20 years ago. It may be good business to eat your own history but it's a bad idea.

I can make hundreds of perfect digital copies of my work in a few days. I could purchase a brand-new player or reader and keep it in the same environment as the original film and the outcome would be the same, if not better in a hundred years.

 

How do anyone of you know what formats will or will not work in the future?

 

Every single format from cinema's past still functions wonderfully- If you want to hand-crank silent 35mm film through a candle-lit projector you most certainly can!

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In the words of archivist Ken Weissman:

Okay, let’s say we don’t do film to film transfer as the main preservation workflow any longer. What’s the impact of an all-digital workflow on data, and our data infrastructure? The numbers are really, really scary… Speaking very broadly, with 4K scans you wind up in the neighborhood of 128 MB per frame. Figure that a typical motion picture has about 160,000 frames, and you wind up around 24TB per film… Everyone is pretty much agreed that you had better migrate that data after five years to the next latest greatest thing, or you risk losing it. And of course, you want to have a backup copy.

That’s a lot of data. And all of this just makes me realize I have no strategy whatsoever for backing up finished projects other than to maybe copy it to a second hard drive. What do you do to archive your projects?How does anyone know? Yes exactly that's my point.

 

 

Film on the other hand If stored at 25 degrees Fahrenheit and 30% relative humidity, 35mm motion picture film will last for 2,000 years!

 


Don't be so quick to dismiss film.

I can make hundreds of perfect digital copies of my work in a few days. I could purchase a brand-new player or reader and keep it in the same environment as the original film and the outcome would be the same, if not better in a hundred years.

 

How do anyone of you know what formats will or will not work in the future?

 

Every single format from cinema's past still functions wonderfully- If you want to hand-crank silent 35mm film through a candle-lit projector you most certainly can!

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Perhaps a little off topic but related - there's a film called Mahoney's Last Stand, shot here in Ontario Canada around 1972, that disappeared for about 30 years, just resurfaced on youtube, but the transfer is terrible. I managed to source a VHS dub from TV broadcast circa 1984 or thereabouts, and I'm about 2/3rds of the way through it, replicating each cut, and CCing it. There is an overall green/red cast to the VHS, and whoever timed the film print fell asleep a few times, resulting in shots that are simply chromium green. The DP, Harry Makin, has told me to make the film my own, so to speak, so that's what I'm doing, but using McCabe And Mrs. Miller as a guide, since both films had the negative flashed.

 

Library Archives Canada has informed me they are still searching for a print or elements, but they are also keeping my contact info should their search prove fruitless. Let's hope not - the VHS version is perfectly watchable, but a film print would be amazing!....and I'm not a film archivist....

 

Just a little tale about what can happen to a movie....some guy with no involvement in the project, fiddling with it 40 years later....because no one else cares! Anyway I'll be uploading the final result to youtube soon-ish, so I'll let y'all know when that happens.

 

As for knowing anything about how your project and will look and/or sound after you are gone, that's a delusion regardless of capture medium. Sheesh! All you can do is put your best effort into crafting the thing, and hope someone somwhere in the future cares enough to preserve it.

 

Mitch

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Digital to date is not a format anyone would invest in for storage.

 

It seems that way but that's just because we're surrounded by the technology of the time that It will be easy to transfer it, because it's hard to predict what future technology will be.

Wait till your "secure HDD" fails in 20-30 years time and everyone is using technology beyond SSD'S and no one repairs "some old spinning disk technology"

Film you just get a lens and light and there you go images.Probably be quantum computing by then anyway.

 

@Oliver:

Don't know about 2,000 years tho?

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Hey Paul, yes the Library of Congress is addressing the challenge of preserving emulsion.

 

Read about what they are doing here: http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/the-library-of-congress-unlocks-the-ultimate-archive-system

 

And here is a little quote from the Library

 

 

 

 

Under cool office conditions, film would only last about 50 years before serious degradation could occur, but stored at 25F and 30% relative humidity, you can expect it to last 40 times longer than that - 2000 years.

These numbers are relatively non-controversial, so we can take them as a starting point.

That's why, as we move further into digital technologies, the plan for now is still to scan the images, restore or preserve them as needed, then run them back to film, and put the film away at 25 degrees, 30% relative humidity, for practically forever. For most people, in practice, somewhere between 600 and 2000 years is beyond forever. Because frankly, once you get to that point, what are you really worrying about?

 

 

 

Digital to date is not a format anyone would invest in for storage.

 

It seems that way but that's just because we're surrounded by the technology of the time that It will be easy to transfer it, because it's hard to predict what future technology will be.

Wait till your "secure HDD" fails in 20-30 years time and everyone is using technology beyond SSD'S and no one repairs "some old spinning disk technology"

Film you just get a lens and light and there you go images.Probably be quantum computing by then anyway.

 

@Oliver:

Don't know about 2,000 years tho?

Edited by Oliver Hadlow Martin
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In fact that whole article is excellent and answers pretty much everything in regard to storage. Digital for the time being cannot even compete.

 

As you previously said all you need is the film and light, a lens and a white backdrop. As Ken Weissman says in that article " I don't think I'm going to get radically criticized for saying that that technology is never going to go away."

 

 

You gotta love it.

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The question is "is the art contained in a motion picture worth preserving?" Well, how old is the Mona Lisa? How old are Shakespeare's manuscripts? How old are the cave paintings in Chauvet Cave? This is our legacy, the thing we leave to the ages that tell future generations who we were and how we lived, what our values were and what we chose to be. That legacy is worth preserving because it is all that will survive us.

 

As for making digital copies on DVDs or Blu-Rays, are you JOKING??!! Compressed garbage images that look like crap with terrible sound? 4K is NOTHING compared to a media that creates images at a molecular level. The only reason you like digital is because that's all you've ever know. You watch movies in crappy multiplexes with digital projectors on on a big screen TV in your living room.

 

Digital is not even CLOSE to better or particularly any easier. What it is, is CHEAPER! It allows lazy "filmmakers" to shoot every single angle so you don't really have to make any decisions. The editor does that for you so in essence, you don't have a vision, your editor does. All this happened when multinationals took over the film industry as a tax dodge and an advertising platform. At lease when the Moguls ran the studios, they cared about their business.Today, it's a line in an accounting program and the last film is a spent tube of toothpaste. No one cares about saving movies or even making images that look good because there's no profit in that. The profit is in pandering to the lowest common denominator. I know this because "Duck Dynasty" is the #1 TV series in the world. So unless we want our legacy to be that of buffoons, we in the motion picture industry should start taking a stand for quality and a stand for preservation on our art.

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A great read is "Instant the story of Polaroid" very interesting story of a company which was the Apple of it's time, at the end the author describes what happened to the last photochemical assets and how the venture capitalists expected demand to drop to zero, but it didn't and with a few twists and turns we now have the Impossible project and film. I think it will be similar for other emulsions, demand won't drop to zero and film emulsion will always be with us.

 

-Rob-

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I have an issue with the title of such articles making a clear assumption that 35mm film is dead. I feel that such titles are innacurate, misleading and are sensationalist, a sign of bad grammar and irresponsible journalism. Death is such a strong metaphor, and to me it really is the end, it's so final. As far as I know film is still being made and I can buy it - so it's not dead - Is it? Maybe I need to brush up on my English skills?

 

I can see that film's role in the motion picture industry is being affected. I recently saw a workshop about making film emulsion at home in the kitchen, as far as I know you can't do this with a digital sensor, but again I could be wrong.

 

Digital is great, film is great then why the need for people to joyfully denigrating film?

 

P

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Digital to date is not a format anyone would invest in for storage.

 

It seems that way but that's just because we're surrounded by the technology of the time that It will be easy to transfer it, because it's hard to predict what future technology will be.

Wait till your "secure HDD" fails in 20-30 years time and everyone is using technology beyond SSD'S and no one repairs "some old spinning disk technology"

Film you just get a lens and light and there you go images.Probably be quantum computing by then anyway.

 

@Oliver:

Don't know about 2,000 years tho?

 

Indeed…the electronics will eventually fail. Reliability is an issue today more than ever, considering, for example, the use of lead-free solder, circuit board packaging density and cleanliness practices during assembly, where dendrite growth is a big problem. Then there are component obsolescence and counterfeit issues.

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There was a recent article about how SSD's fail faster in server farms than mechanical hard drives, basically the SSD was described as a "Sponge" which could only absorb and release data so many times before it wore out, I also think I read something about how all solid state memory eventually becomes unreadable. So that leaves mechanical hard drives and LTO tape both which have long term reliability problems.

 

There have been some recent articles about storing data in DNA strands as a long term solution.

Here are a few things which bother me about the digital revolution:

 

First is this idea that one "Can make zillions of perfect copies forever, so there" the aspect that is troubling is that most people don't understand that most file copy operations are not checksum or otherwise verified, so most of the time you don't know if that copy is perfect, there are replication errors which can compound over time.

 

The second problem is what do you do with all of the discarded digital containers? The average digital container be it a USB stick, SSD or Hard Drive is made from highly toxic material which is difficult to recycle and due to the short shelf life of the container they represent a significant and dangerous waste issue.

 

The third issue is that digital storage requires a constant energy input in either the form of spinning disks, or the manufacture of containers and migration.

 

Finally digital data is not neglect tolerant, it requires somewhat constant attention to maintain, miss a few migrations and the data may be unretrievable.

 

 

 

-Rob-

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I have an issue with the title of such articles making a clear assumption that 35mm film is dead. I feel that such titles are innacurate, misleading and are sensationalist, a sign of bad grammar and irresponsible journalism. Death is such a strong metaphor, and to me it really is the end, it's so final. As far as I know film is still being made and I can buy it - so it's not dead - Is it? Maybe I need to brush up on my English skills?

 

I can see that film's role in the motion picture industry is being affected. I recently saw a workshop about making film emulsion at home in the kitchen, as far as I know you can't do this with a digital sensor, but again I could be wrong.

 

Digital is great, film is great then why the need for people to joyfully denigrating film?

 

P

The whole "Film is Dead" issue is absurd, MOST of the bigger motion pictures being made as we speak are being shot on film. What's being shot on video is mostly low budget films, 5 Mil. and under and digital 3D. It does make sense in some of these cases, depending on the project, to use digital, however, on the picture I'm currently packaging, we budgeted for 35mm anamorphic at a 15 to one shooting ratio. Perhaps, not surprisingly for those in the know, once all the costs were factored in, it really didn't average out to be that much more than electronic acquisition and the images should be far and away, much better. I really don't have anything against film makers who prefer digital but for myself, if I can shoot film, I WILL shoot film and I'm sure there are many more like myself so the very idea that film is dead is ridicules and much more a propaganda campaign than a refection of industry reality.

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You know, James, I've been telling people that for years, but no one wants to hear it. Once you start to scale up to any type of feature with some financial backing the price difference between high-end digital (red/alexa) and 35mm really starts to become a wash.

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The OP was really about film as an exhibition medium. It's the volume of prints which support the making of camera stocks. With that gone, the economics change.

Though to be noted, Fuji axed the motion picture film stocks but keeps manufacturing color still photography film. If anything, that proves that one segment doesn't necessarily depend on another one (many people speculated before this that color still film would be buried with motion picture film. But it wasn't.)

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This is one of the much better Film Vs Digital posts. I think hands down these days a clear win for film is archival. Things like dynamic range, resolution ect. could be debated for ever.

 

Tho I think the term "Film is Dead" should not refer to superiority by digital but rather cinematographers in the industry being pushed out of film by greedy producers and people.

 

If you want to get really into it, Film is on par in terms of costs with digital on the higher end productions, but for things like small budget indies, it may cost allot more due to the lower amount of film being shot etc.

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Actually, the cost of film has dropped. What's suffering is R&D. Their limiting the number of stocks available and putting less emphasis on developing new stocks but the good news is the current stocks are damn good and depending on the project look you're trying to achieve, older stocks are still available.

Edited by James Steven Beverly
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