If anyone has tried to access files they wrote on media that no one uses anymore, they can relate. How long will my digital photographs last? The words on this blog?
NYT
March 16, 2010
Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit
By PATRICIA COHEN
Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.
But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering, “born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form — are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.
Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.
Imagine having a record but no record player.
All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.
........
Read the full article and view media HERE.
Showing posts with label archive/preservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label archive/preservation. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Olmec giant heads in Mexico damaged by ritual
AP
Olmec giant heads in Mexico damaged by ritual
By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer Mark Stevenson, Associated Press Writer Tue Jan 13, 12:07 am ET
MEXICO CITY – A group performing a ritual poured grape juice, oil and other liquids over four Olmec "colossal head" stone sculptures, badly damaging some of Mexico's most prized archaeological relics, authorities said Monday.
Experts will try to remove the stains from the porous stone using special solvents but warn the treatments could be time-consuming and costly, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement.
Two people were detained for damaging the pre-Hispanic sculptures, which are displayed in the La Venta park in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco, the institute said. It did not give details on the group or what ritual they were trying to perform.
Four of the thick-lipped, glowering carved heads and 19 other Olmec carvings were heavily stained by the suspects on Sunday.
"This act was carried out by persons performing an apparent ritual," the institute said. "As part of the 'ceremony," they poured oil, grape juice, salt water and other substances" over the heads, a tomb, altars and other structures.
The artifacts are displayed in an open-air setting meant to replicate the jungle region in which the Olmec culture flourished starting about 3,200 years ago.
The Olmecs are often referred to as the "mother culture" of the region that later saw the rise of the Mayas and Aztecs, and the colossal stone heads are often considered the most emblematic pieces of their art.
The government news agency Notimex quoted Tabasco Gov. Andres Granier as saying the park would have to be temporarily closed until the statues are restored.
The Aztecs and Mayas daubed ceremonial structures with the blood of human sacrifice victims. But pouring substances like grape juice and oil over statues does not figure in most historical accounts of pre-Hispanic religions.
The institute said the treatments might have to be applied repeatedly and could cost about 300,000 pesos ($21,750).
In a statement, it said that the grape juice "stains any surface almost permanently."
The heads appear to wear helmets and a total of 17 have been unearthed to date in Tabasco and Veracruz state. No two are alike. They range in size from 1.5 to 3.4 meters (5 to 11 feet) and the largest heads have been estimated to weigh between 25 and 55 tons.
The institute said it had filed a criminal complaint with federal prosecutors.
The incident comes amid a growing debate about how to protect Mexico's archaeological artifacts from human intervention. A project to install illumination equipment for a nighttime light show at the famed Teotihuacan pyramids outside of Mexico City has drawn criticism from preservationist groups, who argue the pyramids are being damaged by holes drilled into the stone to anchor the gear.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Long-forgotten old-time music finds new audience (Roots music reissues)
Read the original (w/photos) at the CSM HERE
Long-forgotten old-time music finds new audience
Roots music from the early 20th century is experiencing a mini-revival with a series of new CD releases.
By Mark Guarino | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
from the January 2, 2009 edition
Entertainment galas like next month's Grammy Awards are festooned with fresh faces, trim bodies, and the latest couture. Yet in a second ceremony, when the television cameras are off and the shrieking masses have yet to gather, The Recording Academy acknowledges the less glamorous side of the music industry, which includes awarding artists who not only did their best work before Justin Timberlake was born, they also happen to be dead.
The Grammy category for Best Historical Album was launched in 1978 to little fanfare and designed mostly for compilers of big band or opera recordings. But in recent years, as record companies mine their vaults more aggressively to repackage early recorded music in box sets, and patch together snatches of lost tape to create wholly new albums, the category has grown to represent not just the legacy of a certain era or artist, but also an important new revenue channel.
This year, the category is split among a group of independent labels that are innovating how we listen to and appreciate early-century music, some of it predating electrical recording and performed by entertainers whose names are largely forgotten. Instead of shoving the music into the marketplace and waiting for it to sell, these small operators have lovingly filtered it through an interpretive lens to discover thematic connections between where we came from and who we are today.
As a result, boxed compilations are not just bringing forgotten voices back to life, they are making them suddenly relevant. Here, African-American comedian Bert Williams and popular singer Billy Murray can finally be recognized as the greatest recording stars of the Edison cylinder era.
With technology allowing access to centuries of culture through the click of the mouse, having someone curate the past is becoming more essential.
"One thing we strive for are the historical liner notes and photographs and trying to recreate the time period you just don't get with an MP3," says Lance Ledbetter, founder of Dust-To-Digital, an Atlanta independent whose biggest seller is "Goodnight Babylon," a six-CD collection of early Southern sacred songs and sermons, packaged with a 200-page book in a cedar box with pieces of cotton nestled inside. The box has sold 7,500 to date, a smash hit for a label with little overhead, no staff, and marketing the old-fashioned way: word of mouth and print reviews.
That kind of traditional business model works especially well, Josh Rosenthal says, when targeting the two audiences major labels tend to ignore: well-educated and culturally curious baby boomers and 20-somethings who ignore mainstream media channels and listen to college radio. Collectively they are the two groups that helped make "People Take Warning!" a hit for Tompkins Square, the New York City label Mr. Rosenthal has singly operated for three years.
Endorsed by Tom Waits, who contributes an essay, the three-CD set assembles hillbilly songs, blues, country, and general esotery between 1913 and 1938 into three categories: "Man V Machine," "Man V Nature" and "Man V Man." Followed in that order, the songs unfold like a news ticker detailing the hardships of the first half of the last century, when disease, shipwrecks, and floods shaped the nation's character in the industrial age, and created its folk heroes, like Casey Jones, Stack O'Lee, and Tom Dooley.
Some songs double as historic documents, written in the immediate wake of the event they describe. This includes "Fate of Will Rogers and Wiley Post," sung by West Virginian singer Bill Cox two weeks after the 1935 plane crash that killed the American humorist and his pilot. Seventy-eight years later, the tremors in Cox's voice remain harrowing.
"All these forgotten stories" in the box makes it "a tribute to these lost people," Rosenthal says.
The renewed interest in early recordings is connected to two landmark reissues of the 1990s: the "Anthology of American Folk Music" in 1997 and the box of complete works by the blues singer Robert Johnson, the latter which Rosenthal helped produce in 1990 in his former life as a vice president of marketing and sales at Sony Music.
Both releases benefited by arriving alongside the Internet explosion. As adventuresome music fans unplugged from the mainstream to hunt online, music that was long marginalized began to be heard by greater numbers.
Having a digital benefactor for such primitively recorded music is an irony not lost on Richard Martin, cofounder with his wife, Meagan Hennessey, of Archeophone Records, in Champaign, Ill.
Mr. Martin says the recordings on his label, which specializes in minstrelsy, early jazz, ragtime, and vaudeville singers from before the advent of electrical recording, can often be unsettling for listeners used to the sleek production standards of today. Before microphones and consoles to manipulate signal frequencies for intimacy and depth, singers were relegated to shouting into conical horns that etched physical imprints onto discs, a primitive process resulting in recordings that today can sound murky and distant.
"You don't have lows or highs, it sounds like a telephone receiver. When you're used to that, like we are, there's a certain beauty. I like the sound of a good, clean record from 1912," he says.
Younger musicians who are inspired by early century music are likewise not bothered by the primitive sound. For them, including Andrew Bird, the acclaimed fiddler-songwriter, the purity is in the performance.
"It's good to remind yourself now and then what it is to be truly naturally musical," says Mr. Bird. "A lot of that stuff is social music, it served a purpose and was not part of the recording industry. That's a big thing for me. It's not one person's headphone symphony and not a personal ego project, it's part of a living culture."
Growing listener interest has created a demand for deeper excavation of sonic antiquity. Because Archeophone deals in the earliest era of recording, that process means salvaging archaic artifacts of a lost era (wax cylinders and heavy shellac discs), transferring them to CD, and packaging them with exhaustively researched booklets. The pursuit leads Archeophone and other labels through collector vaults, flea markets, and even eBay. But no recent discovery is as special as a 10-second recording of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune," sung by a young child in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison's recordings that, until last March, were considered the first document of the human voice.
Already a free stream via firstsounds.org, a site run by a collective of researchers and historians, which includes Martin, the recording will make its official public debut as a 45-r.p.m.–-vinyl single on Dust-To-Digital later this year.
Using a credit card over the Internet to purchase a vinyl record of a song recorded before the light bulb may just represent how far technology has come in cross-wiring history, making it possible for Polk Miller, a Virginian bandleader who died in 1913, to receive Grammy consideration the same year as Coldplay.
"This is part of the cultural subconscious," Martin says. "Reminding us of our history is a very good thing."
Long-forgotten old-time music finds new audience
Roots music from the early 20th century is experiencing a mini-revival with a series of new CD releases.
By Mark Guarino | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
from the January 2, 2009 edition
Entertainment galas like next month's Grammy Awards are festooned with fresh faces, trim bodies, and the latest couture. Yet in a second ceremony, when the television cameras are off and the shrieking masses have yet to gather, The Recording Academy acknowledges the less glamorous side of the music industry, which includes awarding artists who not only did their best work before Justin Timberlake was born, they also happen to be dead.
The Grammy category for Best Historical Album was launched in 1978 to little fanfare and designed mostly for compilers of big band or opera recordings. But in recent years, as record companies mine their vaults more aggressively to repackage early recorded music in box sets, and patch together snatches of lost tape to create wholly new albums, the category has grown to represent not just the legacy of a certain era or artist, but also an important new revenue channel.
This year, the category is split among a group of independent labels that are innovating how we listen to and appreciate early-century music, some of it predating electrical recording and performed by entertainers whose names are largely forgotten. Instead of shoving the music into the marketplace and waiting for it to sell, these small operators have lovingly filtered it through an interpretive lens to discover thematic connections between where we came from and who we are today.
As a result, boxed compilations are not just bringing forgotten voices back to life, they are making them suddenly relevant. Here, African-American comedian Bert Williams and popular singer Billy Murray can finally be recognized as the greatest recording stars of the Edison cylinder era.
With technology allowing access to centuries of culture through the click of the mouse, having someone curate the past is becoming more essential.
"One thing we strive for are the historical liner notes and photographs and trying to recreate the time period you just don't get with an MP3," says Lance Ledbetter, founder of Dust-To-Digital, an Atlanta independent whose biggest seller is "Goodnight Babylon," a six-CD collection of early Southern sacred songs and sermons, packaged with a 200-page book in a cedar box with pieces of cotton nestled inside. The box has sold 7,500 to date, a smash hit for a label with little overhead, no staff, and marketing the old-fashioned way: word of mouth and print reviews.
That kind of traditional business model works especially well, Josh Rosenthal says, when targeting the two audiences major labels tend to ignore: well-educated and culturally curious baby boomers and 20-somethings who ignore mainstream media channels and listen to college radio. Collectively they are the two groups that helped make "People Take Warning!" a hit for Tompkins Square, the New York City label Mr. Rosenthal has singly operated for three years.
Endorsed by Tom Waits, who contributes an essay, the three-CD set assembles hillbilly songs, blues, country, and general esotery between 1913 and 1938 into three categories: "Man V Machine," "Man V Nature" and "Man V Man." Followed in that order, the songs unfold like a news ticker detailing the hardships of the first half of the last century, when disease, shipwrecks, and floods shaped the nation's character in the industrial age, and created its folk heroes, like Casey Jones, Stack O'Lee, and Tom Dooley.
Some songs double as historic documents, written in the immediate wake of the event they describe. This includes "Fate of Will Rogers and Wiley Post," sung by West Virginian singer Bill Cox two weeks after the 1935 plane crash that killed the American humorist and his pilot. Seventy-eight years later, the tremors in Cox's voice remain harrowing.
"All these forgotten stories" in the box makes it "a tribute to these lost people," Rosenthal says.
The renewed interest in early recordings is connected to two landmark reissues of the 1990s: the "Anthology of American Folk Music" in 1997 and the box of complete works by the blues singer Robert Johnson, the latter which Rosenthal helped produce in 1990 in his former life as a vice president of marketing and sales at Sony Music.
Both releases benefited by arriving alongside the Internet explosion. As adventuresome music fans unplugged from the mainstream to hunt online, music that was long marginalized began to be heard by greater numbers.
Having a digital benefactor for such primitively recorded music is an irony not lost on Richard Martin, cofounder with his wife, Meagan Hennessey, of Archeophone Records, in Champaign, Ill.
Mr. Martin says the recordings on his label, which specializes in minstrelsy, early jazz, ragtime, and vaudeville singers from before the advent of electrical recording, can often be unsettling for listeners used to the sleek production standards of today. Before microphones and consoles to manipulate signal frequencies for intimacy and depth, singers were relegated to shouting into conical horns that etched physical imprints onto discs, a primitive process resulting in recordings that today can sound murky and distant.
"You don't have lows or highs, it sounds like a telephone receiver. When you're used to that, like we are, there's a certain beauty. I like the sound of a good, clean record from 1912," he says.
Younger musicians who are inspired by early century music are likewise not bothered by the primitive sound. For them, including Andrew Bird, the acclaimed fiddler-songwriter, the purity is in the performance.
"It's good to remind yourself now and then what it is to be truly naturally musical," says Mr. Bird. "A lot of that stuff is social music, it served a purpose and was not part of the recording industry. That's a big thing for me. It's not one person's headphone symphony and not a personal ego project, it's part of a living culture."
Growing listener interest has created a demand for deeper excavation of sonic antiquity. Because Archeophone deals in the earliest era of recording, that process means salvaging archaic artifacts of a lost era (wax cylinders and heavy shellac discs), transferring them to CD, and packaging them with exhaustively researched booklets. The pursuit leads Archeophone and other labels through collector vaults, flea markets, and even eBay. But no recent discovery is as special as a 10-second recording of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune," sung by a young child in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison's recordings that, until last March, were considered the first document of the human voice.
Already a free stream via firstsounds.org, a site run by a collective of researchers and historians, which includes Martin, the recording will make its official public debut as a 45-r.p.m.–-vinyl single on Dust-To-Digital later this year.
Using a credit card over the Internet to purchase a vinyl record of a song recorded before the light bulb may just represent how far technology has come in cross-wiring history, making it possible for Polk Miller, a Virginian bandleader who died in 1913, to receive Grammy consideration the same year as Coldplay.
"This is part of the cultural subconscious," Martin says. "Reminding us of our history is a very good thing."
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Recordings added to the National Recording Registry 2007
See and hear clips HERE at the National Recording Registry, Library of Congress. The list:
The National Recording Registry 2007
Montage of Recordings named to the 2007 National Recording Registry. (6:52).
NOTE:
* This is a national list and many of the items listed are housed in collections across the country. The Library of Congress does not currently hold copies of all the recordings listed.
* Images on this page are from the Library's collections except where otherwise noted. The Library does not grant or deny permission for their use by others. Users of this material must make an independent legal determination whether they need to obtain permission directly from the rights holders.
Recordings are listed in chronological order:
1. The First Trans-Atlantic Broadcast (March 14, 1925)
2. "Allons a Lafayette," Joseph Falcon (1928)
3. "Casta Diva," from Bellini's Norma. Rosa Ponselle; accompanied by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Giulio Setti. (Recorded December 31, 1928, and January 30, 1929.)
4. "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again," Thomas A. Dorsey (1934)
5. "Sweet Lorraine," by Art Tatum (1940)
6. Fibber's Closet Opens for the First Time, Fibber McGee and Molly radio program (March 4, 1940)
7. Wings Over Jordan radio broadcast (May 10, 1942)
8. Fiorello LaGuardia reading the comics (1945 )
9. "Call it Stormy Monday but Tuesday is Just As Bad," T-Bone Walker (1947)
10. Harry S. Truman Speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention (July 15th, 1948)
11. "The Jazz Scene," various artists (1949)
12. "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," Kitty Wells (Recorded May 30, 1952)
13. "My Fair Lady," original cast recording (1956)
14. Navajo Shootingway Ceremony Field Recordings representing the David McAllester Collection (Recorded by David McAllester 1957-1958)
15. "‘Freight Train,' and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes," Elizabeth Cotten (1959)
16. United States Marine Band (1963)
17. "Oh, Pretty Woman," Roy Orbison (1964)
18. "Tracks of My Tears," Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (1965)
19. "You'll Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song," Ella Jenkins (1966)
20. "Music from the Morning of the World," Various Artists, Recorded by David Lewiston (1966)
21. "For the Roses," Joni Mitchell (1972)
22. "Headhunters," Herbie Hancock (1973)
23. Ronald Reagan Radio Broadcasts (1976-1979)
24. "The Sounds of Earth," Disc prepared for the Voyager spacecraft (1977)
25. "Thriller," Michael Jackson (1982)
The National Recording Registry 2007
Montage of Recordings named to the 2007 National Recording Registry. (6:52).
NOTE:
* This is a national list and many of the items listed are housed in collections across the country. The Library of Congress does not currently hold copies of all the recordings listed.
* Images on this page are from the Library's collections except where otherwise noted. The Library does not grant or deny permission for their use by others. Users of this material must make an independent legal determination whether they need to obtain permission directly from the rights holders.
Recordings are listed in chronological order:
1. The First Trans-Atlantic Broadcast (March 14, 1925)
2. "Allons a Lafayette," Joseph Falcon (1928)
3. "Casta Diva," from Bellini's Norma. Rosa Ponselle; accompanied by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Giulio Setti. (Recorded December 31, 1928, and January 30, 1929.)
4. "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again," Thomas A. Dorsey (1934)
5. "Sweet Lorraine," by Art Tatum (1940)
6. Fibber's Closet Opens for the First Time, Fibber McGee and Molly radio program (March 4, 1940)
7. Wings Over Jordan radio broadcast (May 10, 1942)
8. Fiorello LaGuardia reading the comics (1945 )
9. "Call it Stormy Monday but Tuesday is Just As Bad," T-Bone Walker (1947)
10. Harry S. Truman Speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention (July 15th, 1948)
11. "The Jazz Scene," various artists (1949)
12. "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," Kitty Wells (Recorded May 30, 1952)
13. "My Fair Lady," original cast recording (1956)
14. Navajo Shootingway Ceremony Field Recordings representing the David McAllester Collection (Recorded by David McAllester 1957-1958)
15. "‘Freight Train,' and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes," Elizabeth Cotten (1959)
16. United States Marine Band (1963)
17. "Oh, Pretty Woman," Roy Orbison (1964)
18. "Tracks of My Tears," Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (1965)
19. "You'll Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song," Ella Jenkins (1966)
20. "Music from the Morning of the World," Various Artists, Recorded by David Lewiston (1966)
21. "For the Roses," Joni Mitchell (1972)
22. "Headhunters," Herbie Hancock (1973)
23. Ronald Reagan Radio Broadcasts (1976-1979)
24. "The Sounds of Earth," Disc prepared for the Voyager spacecraft (1977)
25. "Thriller," Michael Jackson (1982)
Sunday, December 23, 2007
The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
New York Times
December 23, 2007
Scene Stealer
The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES
TIME was, a movie studio could pack up a picture and all of its assorted bloopers, alternate takes and other odds and ends as soon as the production staff was done with them, and ship them off to the salt mine. Literally.
Having figured out that really big money comes from reselling old films — on broadcast television, then cable, videocassettes, DVDs, and so on — companies like Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures for decades have been tucking their 35-millimeter film masters and associated source material into archives, some of which are housed in a Kansas salt mine, or in limestone mines in Kansas and Pennsylvania.
A picture could sit for many, many years, cool and comfortable, until some enterprising executive decided that the time was ripe for, say, a Wallace Beery special collection timed to a 25th-anniversary 3-D rerelease of “Barton Fink,” with a hitherto unseen, behind-the-scenes peek at the Coen brothers trying to explain a Hollywood in-joke to John Turturro.
It was a file-and-forget system that didn’t cost much, and made up for the self-destructive sins of an industry that discarded its earliest works or allowed films on old flammable stock to degrade. (Indeed, only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survive.)
But then came digital. And suddenly the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren’t as durable as they used to be.
The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.
Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.
All of this may seem counterintuitive. After all, digital magic is supposed to make information of all kinds more available, not less. But ubiquity, it turns out, is not the same as permanence.
In a telephone interview earlier this month, Milton Shefter, a longtime film preservationist who helped prepare the academy’s report, said the problems associated with digital movie storage, if not addressed, could point the industry “back to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away.”
Mr. Shefter and his associates do not contend that films are actually on the verge of becoming quite that ephemeral. But they do see difficulties and trends that could point many movies or the source material associated with them toward “digital extinction” over a relatively short span of years, unless something changes.
At present, a copy of virtually all studio movies — even those like “Click” or “Miami Vice” that are shot using digital processes — is being stored in film format, protecting the finished product for 100 years or more. For film aficionados, the current practice is already less than perfect. Regardless of how they are shot, most pictures are edited digitally, and then a digital master is transferred to film, which can result in an image of lower quality than a pure film process — and this is what becomes stored for the ages.
But over the next couple of decades, archivists reason, the conversion of theaters to digital projection will sharply reduce the overall demand for film, eventually making it a sunset market for the main manufacturers, Kodak, Fujifilm and Agfa. At that point, pure digital storage will become the norm, bringing with it a whole set of problems that never troubled film.
To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.
DIFFICULTIES of that sort are compounded by constant change in technology. As one generation of digital magic replaces the next, archived materials must be repeatedly “migrated” to the new format, or risk becoming unreadable. Thus, NASA scientists found in 1999 that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975; the format had long been obsolete.
All of that makes digital archiving a dynamic rather than static process, and one that costs far more than studios have been accustomed to paying in the past — no small matter, given that movie companies rely on their libraries for about one-third of their $36 billion in annual revenue, according to a recent assessment by the research service Global Media Intelligence.
“It’s been in the air since we started talking about doing things digitally,” Chris Cookson, president of Warner’s technical operations and chief technology officer, said of the archiving quandary.
One of the most perplexing realities of a digital production like “Superman Returns” is that it sometimes generates more storable material than conventional film, creating new questions about what to save. Such pile-ups can occur, for instance, when a director or cinematographer who no longer has to husband film stock simply allows cameras to remain running for long stretches while working out scenes.
Much of the resulting data may be no more worth saving that the misspellings and awkward phrases deleted from a newspaper reporter’s word-processing screen. Then again, a telling exchange between star and filmmaker might yield gold as a “special feature” on some future home-viewing format — so who wants to be responsible for tossing it into the digital dustbin?
For now, studios are saving as much of this digital ephemera as possible, storing it on tapes or drives in vaults not unlike those that house traditional film. But how much of that material will be migrated when technology shifts in 7 or 10 years is anyone’s guess. (And archiving practices in the independent film world run the gamut, from studied preservation to complete inattention, noted Andrew Maltz, director of the academy’s science and technology council.)
According to Mr. Shefter, a universal standard for storage technology would go far toward reducing a problem that would otherwise grow every time the geniuses who create digital hardware come up with something a little better than their last bit of wizardry.
As the report put it, “If we allow technological obsolescence to repeat itself, we are tied either to continuously increasing costs — or worse — the failure to save important assets.”
In other words, we could be watching Wallace Beery long after more contemporary images are gone.
December 23, 2007
Scene Stealer
The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES
TIME was, a movie studio could pack up a picture and all of its assorted bloopers, alternate takes and other odds and ends as soon as the production staff was done with them, and ship them off to the salt mine. Literally.
Having figured out that really big money comes from reselling old films — on broadcast television, then cable, videocassettes, DVDs, and so on — companies like Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures for decades have been tucking their 35-millimeter film masters and associated source material into archives, some of which are housed in a Kansas salt mine, or in limestone mines in Kansas and Pennsylvania.
A picture could sit for many, many years, cool and comfortable, until some enterprising executive decided that the time was ripe for, say, a Wallace Beery special collection timed to a 25th-anniversary 3-D rerelease of “Barton Fink,” with a hitherto unseen, behind-the-scenes peek at the Coen brothers trying to explain a Hollywood in-joke to John Turturro.
It was a file-and-forget system that didn’t cost much, and made up for the self-destructive sins of an industry that discarded its earliest works or allowed films on old flammable stock to degrade. (Indeed, only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survive.)
But then came digital. And suddenly the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren’t as durable as they used to be.
The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.
Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.
All of this may seem counterintuitive. After all, digital magic is supposed to make information of all kinds more available, not less. But ubiquity, it turns out, is not the same as permanence.
In a telephone interview earlier this month, Milton Shefter, a longtime film preservationist who helped prepare the academy’s report, said the problems associated with digital movie storage, if not addressed, could point the industry “back to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away.”
Mr. Shefter and his associates do not contend that films are actually on the verge of becoming quite that ephemeral. But they do see difficulties and trends that could point many movies or the source material associated with them toward “digital extinction” over a relatively short span of years, unless something changes.
At present, a copy of virtually all studio movies — even those like “Click” or “Miami Vice” that are shot using digital processes — is being stored in film format, protecting the finished product for 100 years or more. For film aficionados, the current practice is already less than perfect. Regardless of how they are shot, most pictures are edited digitally, and then a digital master is transferred to film, which can result in an image of lower quality than a pure film process — and this is what becomes stored for the ages.
But over the next couple of decades, archivists reason, the conversion of theaters to digital projection will sharply reduce the overall demand for film, eventually making it a sunset market for the main manufacturers, Kodak, Fujifilm and Agfa. At that point, pure digital storage will become the norm, bringing with it a whole set of problems that never troubled film.
To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.
DIFFICULTIES of that sort are compounded by constant change in technology. As one generation of digital magic replaces the next, archived materials must be repeatedly “migrated” to the new format, or risk becoming unreadable. Thus, NASA scientists found in 1999 that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975; the format had long been obsolete.
All of that makes digital archiving a dynamic rather than static process, and one that costs far more than studios have been accustomed to paying in the past — no small matter, given that movie companies rely on their libraries for about one-third of their $36 billion in annual revenue, according to a recent assessment by the research service Global Media Intelligence.
“It’s been in the air since we started talking about doing things digitally,” Chris Cookson, president of Warner’s technical operations and chief technology officer, said of the archiving quandary.
One of the most perplexing realities of a digital production like “Superman Returns” is that it sometimes generates more storable material than conventional film, creating new questions about what to save. Such pile-ups can occur, for instance, when a director or cinematographer who no longer has to husband film stock simply allows cameras to remain running for long stretches while working out scenes.
Much of the resulting data may be no more worth saving that the misspellings and awkward phrases deleted from a newspaper reporter’s word-processing screen. Then again, a telling exchange between star and filmmaker might yield gold as a “special feature” on some future home-viewing format — so who wants to be responsible for tossing it into the digital dustbin?
For now, studios are saving as much of this digital ephemera as possible, storing it on tapes or drives in vaults not unlike those that house traditional film. But how much of that material will be migrated when technology shifts in 7 or 10 years is anyone’s guess. (And archiving practices in the independent film world run the gamut, from studied preservation to complete inattention, noted Andrew Maltz, director of the academy’s science and technology council.)
According to Mr. Shefter, a universal standard for storage technology would go far toward reducing a problem that would otherwise grow every time the geniuses who create digital hardware come up with something a little better than their last bit of wizardry.
As the report put it, “If we allow technological obsolescence to repeat itself, we are tied either to continuously increasing costs — or worse — the failure to save important assets.”
In other words, we could be watching Wallace Beery long after more contemporary images are gone.
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