Proof That All-Digital Cinema Uses Less Electricity (Now and Later)

http://greenscreenblog.com/?p=175

 

Scott McCollum on February 26th, 2009

Look, I understand why you believe that digital cameras are mechanical and soulless. I know all the reasons you can give about how 35mm film with all of it’s warm, grainy goodness is the only medium that can truly capture your artistic vision.  I went to film school, too.

However, it’s an emotional reaction to pick film stock over digital HD and justify your emotional choice with a “digital is just as bad for the environment” missive. The facts are on the side of going all digital.

The bulky cameras full of electric motors used to turn film reels that after a solid century of use still only record a few minutes at a time before needing to be changed. The gallons of toxic chemicals that cannot be recycled that are required to expose those film reels. While the industry has progressed to a point where editing a film with a blade and tape is as rare as a Republican with a diary on Daily Kos, the practice of editing 35mm film digitally requires scanning and encoding every frame into a computer-friendly format–which has an associated electric cost (both financial and ecological).

Contrast this to all-digital productions: professional HD cameras have image capture tech specs that are almost indistinguishable from 35mm film cameras while requiring fewer lumens (lowering the electricity cost for lighting) and almost no stopping for storage media changes (increasing overall production efficiency). Because the raw footage (if you can call it that) does not require scanning and encoding, there’s no additional cost for post production.

Here’s where the film maven will pull a “gotcha” by saying that the cost for electricity to run all of the computers during post is astronomical. The argument is that if you count up all of the computers in the editing bays, the VFX render farms, and the terrabytes of hard drives required for storage on servers that run 24/7, then it’s basically a wash… and if there’s no real cost savings then we ought to just shoot on 35mm film!

That’s completely wrong. Any computer from a major manufacturer in the last eight years adheres to the Energy Star standard. Even the quad-core powered monsters following the latest Energy Star requirements only use a maximum of 95W while idle. That’s not bad considering the coffee maker in your house right now uses eight times that amount.

Another criticism from the “film only” camp is that if cinema goes all-digital we’ll be trading a harsh toxic photochemical process for an electricity-sucking nightmare of production houses with rooms full of server-class computers required to render each digital frame of a movie in 4K  HD. The argument from the film only crowd is that because those servers use so much power and create so much heat, the overall carbon footprint created by an all-digital production isn’t that much different than filming on 35mm and then converting to digital later. That’s not true because not only are servers now more powerful and energy efficient than ever before, their computing power can be multiplied through virtualization–a process that helps reduce the number of physical machines by consolidating the workloads of multiple computers onto a single physical server.

There have been studies done proving the energy savings by “virtualizing” servers. One study published at Software Enabled Earth shows an interesting chart of the lessened electricity usage when combining the work of ten servers onto a single server:

That nets out to decreased overall energy usage and no toxic chemicals for those of us in the all-digital camp. I guess that blows holes in the “you might as well just shoot on film” theory.

There are even more reasons to be optimistic about all-digital cinema because the energy savings for digital cinema will only get better on increasingly powerful and lower cost equipment. That’s the benefit of Moore’s Law. The upcoming eight-core Intel processor will use 1/7000th the power of the processors they manufactured in 1971. That means if the fuel efficiency of automobiles had improved at the same rate a car would get 200,000 miles per gallon. The typical driver could put one gallon in their gas tank at the dealer and never have to stop at a gas station again for the life of the car (and still have plenty of fuel left over).

So there are clear and measurable benefits for every studio/producer/director to go all-digital. C’mon, if digital media was so awful for artistic content then Apple wouldn’t be selling millions of iPods every year.