Film vs Digital?

David Pierce · Post by **David Pierce** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 6:03 pm

azjazzman wrote: Moore's Law, which has now become shorthand for the entire computer industry, holds that capacity will double and cost will be reduced by half every two years. That represents a 400% cost reduction every 24 months.

That's not Moore's law. Wikipedia's definition is "The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years." In other words, the cost of processing has dropped dramatically since the 1960s.

Storage has progressed much more slowly - especially drives that meet the specs for mission critical applications. Eight years ago I was buying drives that spun at 7200 rpm for video editing. And the current standard for hard drives - still 7200 rpm.

David Pierce

azjazzman · Post by **azjazzman** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 6:24 pm

David Pierce wrote:That's not Moore's law. Wikipedia's definition is "The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years." In other words, the cost of processing has dropped dramatically since the 1960s.

Storage has progressed much more slowly - especially drives that meet the specs for mission critical applications. Eight years ago I was buying drives that spun at 7200 rpm for video editing. And the current standard for hard drives - still 7200 rpm.

David Pierce

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As stated, Moore's Law has been popularly expanded to apply to all sorts of computer related technological advances - including data storage.

7200 rpm is the speed at which the drive spins, which has nothing to do with the capacity of the drive. That is a mechanical function only. Since an increase in areal density can increase throughput at the same rotational speeds, that is the focus of drive manufacturers. There really is no need to increase rotational speed, as the mechanical part of the drive is the part most likely to fail. So faster speed drives would actually be less reliable, not more reliable.

A 1TB drive (any speed) today costs about 1/4th what it did only 2 years ago. That applies to high reliability, mission critical application drives as well as mass market computer drives.

Brooksie · Post by **Brooksie** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 7:33 pm

azjazzman wrote:A 1TB drive (any speed) today costs about 1/4th what it did only 2 years ago. That applies to high reliability, mission critical application drives as well as mass market computer drives.

According to the Academy's figures, preserving a single 100% digital film made today would take 2 petabytes - that's 2,000 TB. It's not inconceivable that saving movies at a reduced quality in order to save memory may be the future equivalent of melting nitrate down for the silver content.

Whatever you think of the figures or how the Academy arrived at them, I think it's an important discussion to have.

boblipton · Post by **boblipton** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 7:38 pm

More copies, Brooksie. Do you know how many works of literature are lost from the Classical era? Don't you think one or two bad copies would be better than their complete absence? More copies. Better quality, yes, but let's make as many copies as possible.

Bob

Daniel Eagan · Post by **Daniel Eagan** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 8:56 am

In my very limited experience, each upgrade leaves something behind. Not every album made it to CD, not every film gets digitized. And once digitized, not every file gets transferred to the newest technology.

Yes the warhorses will always show up in new formats, but for an archive to consider revamping its holdings every five or ten years to meet new technological standards is a daunting prospect.

The irony is, properly stored film elements will last a lot longer than the latest iteration of mpeg.

Jack Theakston · Post by **Jack Theakston** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 12:49 pm

Films compressed to the JPEG2000 standard of digital projection run into the hundreds of GB, so a TB hard drive (or perhaps even a 500 GB drive) would hold a feature.

One additional benefit to digital presentations is that it is quite simple to copy drives and therefore, make films available that would otherwise be difficult to book because they're the only projection print and may not be available for off-site screenings.

The benefit of digitization is not meant to be archival practice, but an infrastructure of distribution that previously didn't exist.

Post by **Mike Gebert** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 1:07 pm

In my very limited experience, each upgrade leaves something behind.

But to be fair, many things are on DVD which never saw laserdisc or VHS. I would say 80% of my silent dvds were first-time titles, and a few more were in earlier, inferior editions.

azjazzman · Post by **azjazzman** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 1:57 pm

Mike Gebert wrote:
In my very limited experience, each upgrade leaves something behind.
But to be fair, many things are on DVD which never saw laserdisc or VHS. I would say 80% of my silent dvds were first-time titles, and a few more were in earlier, inferior editions.

Yes, and that is just as true with LPs and CDs, too. I remember back in the 1980s when my friend Randy Skretvedt launched his newsletter "Past Times" the front page article of issue no. 3 was bemoaning the fact that as the music biz transitioned to CDs, so much great 78rpm material that had been reissued on LP would never make it to CD. "The Demise of Vinyl" cited examples such as the Washboard Rhythm Kings, The Hotsy Totsy Gang and "The Fred Waring Memorial Album". Small LP producers were quoted as saying that they never could afford to reissue their LP releases on CD.

Well, of course, it turned out that all that stuff came out came out on CD eventually...including the COMPLETE Washboard Rhythm Kings and Hotsy Totsy Gang, in better sound. And an avalanche of other recordings that had never made it to LP at all.

Yes, there are loads of 78s that never made it to CD or LP. But, it's amazing how much stuff did. With CDs or music downloads, there are still new 78rpm transfers being made available every day, so the story isn't finished yet.

I just got a CD of Arthur Lally 78s with Al Bowlly. To the best of my knowledge this is the first appearance of most of these tracks on anything but 78rpm.

azjazzman · Post by **azjazzman** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 2:17 pm

Brooksie wrote:Whatever you think of the figures or how the Academy arrived at them, I think it's an important discussion to have.

The real point is that it doesn't matter what I or anyone else does or doesn't think of their methodology. The industry has changed and it isn't going back. As younger people start to infiltrate the film business, the sentimental attachment to older technologies will fade away. They won't have the institutional bias against new technologies that the previous generation has that is steeped in film.

When you read the Academy report, the bias is pretty clear...but as I say, that is just a bump in the road. 20 years from now someone will trot out "studies" like that one and everyone will get a good chuckle out of it.