Judging from the program at the Hollywood Post Alliance’s Tech Retreat this week, archiving is a top-of-mind issue at L.A. post houses. Speakers declaimed on the subjects of digital archives vs. celluloid, interoperability among archive systems from different vendors, and the kinds of high-capacity optical media that could change the whole playing field for long-term storage.
Speaking on behalf of Sun Microsystems, Dave Cavena made the pitch for moving, today, to digital movie archives. “You walk into a film archive, and what you smell is the image coming off the print,” Cavena said, hyping the ability of a digital archive to maintain movies lossleslsy in perpetuity.
Sun’s motion-picture archiving model is based around an enterprise-class tape library with a front-end server and disk drive. A studio would maintain two complete libraries in different locations, and each library would include two complete copies of each movie. The library would comprise components that would be changed out on a regular schedule – every five years for the computers and disks, every 10 years for the actual tapes (with an audit of each tape to be conducted every six months to keep on top of any developing problems), and every 20 years for the library systems. Data would be stored in an open tarball data format; as it’s copied from tape to tape, it can be recorded in whatever file format the current tape system uses. Content would be kept in the clear (unencrypted) and uncompressed for maximum readability in the future. The archive would have no network connectivity.
S. Merrill Weiss of the Merrill Weiss Group offered an update on SMPTE activity around a proposed format for interoperability among media archives. An ad hoc group inside SMPTE is writing a draft standard for an archive media format that would allow material to be moved between different systems. Each archival system will continue to use its native format, but with special routines that will explicitly import or export data in the new, SMPTE-specified format. Eventually, SMPTE’s hope is that archive vendors will migrate their own internal formats to match the new SMPTE-specified format.
And Art Rancis, VP of InPhase Technologies, talked about the various testing metrics being applied to determine the useful lifetime – and other characteristics – of its holographic storage media. (Rancis also mentioned OvalRock, the Vista, CA, company that uses a holographic drive inside a VTR emulator.) The capacity of a single write-once disc is 300 GB, but that’s expected to increase to 800 GB next year, and to 1.6 TB by 2010. The long-range roadmap leads to 17 TB on a single holographic disc — but by then, won't there be a hot new storage technology that leaves holographic discs looking paltry by comparison?
OK, just write what they want; we won't let little things like possible other views interfere with your world view.
Posted by Frank Wylie on Saturday, February 3, 2007 @ 04:39 PM
2.
Um....it's a report from an event. And doesn't the final question raise doubts on what what "they" are saying?
What is your world view on the subject of archiving, Frank?
Posted by Jerry on Sunday, February 4, 2007 @ 10:28 AM
3.
Hi, Frank. I guess I should have dug around to include quotes from somebody else that would have balanced out what Cavena is pitching. I thought it was interesting mainly because of the model for a digital motion-picture archive that he was outlining.
Myself, I'm wary of any move to digital archives, at least until we're sure that contemporary film scanning techniques are getting all the useful information off of the film negative. I'm told that 2K scans of 35mm film miss detail that 4K scans catch, and I wonder if higher resolutions still wouldn't be necessary to get a truly archive-worthy copy of a film negative.
I also worry that we've been spending time in a sort of digital gully where film technology is concerned, and that some of the movies created in digital post over the last decade are going to look primitive when viewed 20 or 30 years hence. I recently saw a screening of a Thai film called "Tears of the Black Tiger" that was the beneficiary of a very aggressive digital color grade back in 2000. Unfortunately, the digital color grade took place at DigiBeta resolution, and the resulting film doesn't look so good on the big screen -- there are some aliasing artifacts, and halos around sharp edges. A friend of mine had seen the film before, but only on DVD, and was puzzled that it didn't look much more impressive on the big screen!
So "Tears of the Black Tiger" was shot and released on 35mm film, but the quality of release prints has forever been compromised by the DigiBeta transfer in post. If studios were to start archiving their films digitally, I'd worry that today's 2K and 4K scans might start to look like DigiBeta in a higher-resolution future.
Posted by Bryant Frazer on Monday, February 5, 2007 @ 12:24 PM
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