Old-Fashioned Film Storage Still Trumps Digital

http://www.thewrap.com/article/even-digital-age-studios-find-old-fashioned-film-best_4353

 

July 16, 2009, 1:31PM CDT  

 

Significant material has already been lost on digital, from outtakes to on-set interviews.

 

By Carolyn Giardina

 

It’s a digital age. We download music digitally and watch TV shows and movies on our iPods. Almost 20 percent of all theaters now feature digital projection.

 

So when it comes to saving a movie like “Benjamin Button” or “Up” for the future, it only makes sense that the cheapest, safest and most space-efficient method of storage would be digital as well.

 

Wrong.

 

Surprisingly, entertainment technology industry leaders agree that film remains the only format on which one can guarantee safe long-term archive and access to motion-picture materials. In fact, film remains the standard in archiving -- and that’s not expected to change anytime in the foreseeable future.

 

Not even for films projected digitally in theaters -- these are actually converted from digital to film for old-fashioned storage. In a dark room in a cold temperature in secure spots scattered around the country.

 

The major studios currently store all movies on film. While they may store some ancillary material like on-set interviews and outtakes digitally, they have come to the conclusion that digital storage is not only less safe but, incredibly, far more expensive.

 

It has, though, been a learning process of trial and error. “We have already lost a great amount of digital material,” said Milt Shefter, who led the Science and Technology Council of AMPAS’ influential 2007 report on archiving issues. “The Digital Dilemma.”

 

This lost digital material, Shefter told TheWrap, include a range of supplemental material. (Shefter would not name any titles or parts of titles that had developed problems, claiming the academy had to sign nondisclosure agreements in doing its research.)

 

And there have been some close calls that nearly resulted in the loss of complete Hollywood features, AMPAS’ SciTech Council director Andy Maltz. “Ultimately the data was recovered, but it was a real scramble to make that happen.” (NASA wasn't so lucky with the original moon-landing tapes; see TheWrap's story.)

 

It was losses like these that led to AMPAS’ “Digital Dilemma” investigation and report.

 

“The changes have tended to arise piecemeal and so rapidly that the industry has not had a chance to step back and consider long-term implications,” the report read. “Even some of the artists who have been the most evangelical about the new world of digital motion picture sometimes seem not to have thoroughly explored the question of what happens to a digital production once it leaves the theaters and begins its life as a long-term studio asset.”

 

The report warned that the industry was in danger of making decisions that “produce financial and cultural consequences.”

 

The studios paid attention. The majors all have agreed with the report’s conclusion, and their titles ARE archived on film -- though it is not always as clear with independent films. In those cases, decisions are made by the individual content owners.