philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

5Nov/19Off

Why Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original ‘Superman’ Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc

Project Silica at the Microsoft research lab in Cambridge with Ant Rowstron and Richard Black. 21 Station Road, CB1 2FB. 16 September 2019

Project Silica at the Microsoft research lab in Cambridge with Ant Rowstron and Richard Black. 21 Station Road, CB1 2FB. 16 September 2019

The piece of silica glass storing the 1978 “Superman” movie, measuring 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm x 2 mm. The glass contains 75.6 GB of data plus error redundancy codes.

Microsoft has teamed up with Warner Bros. to store a copy of the 1978 movie “Superman” on a small glass disc about the size of a coaster. The collaboration, which will be officially unveiled at Microsoft’s Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida Monday, is a first test case for a new storage technology that could eventually help safeguard Hollywood’s movies and TV shows, as well as many other forms of data, for centuries to come.

“Glass has a very, very long lifetime,” said Microsoft Research principal researcher Ant Rowstron in a recent conversation with Variety. “Thousands of years.”

And to this date, Warner Bros. is storing most of its movies and TV shows on film, even if they’re being shot digitally. For archival purposes, the studio splits a film into its YCM color components, resulting in three distinct copies that are then written on black-and-white film. The results are being stored away in a cold vault, which is kept between 35 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit.

Hollywood studios have been storing films like this for decades, explained Collar. “This process is tried and true.” And it works: When Warner Bros. recently decided to reissue “The Wizard of Oz” in 4K, employees just had to go back into the studio’s vault, retrieve those 3 color-isolated copies, digitize each, and reassemble them to the color master copy. “It is an evolved process,” said Collar.

However, the process doesn’t work for all kinds of assets. Video games, for instance, need to be stored digitally. Light field video captures, holograms, or whatever else the future may hold for next-generation entertainment, will likely also require different solutions. And with recent visual improvements like 4K and HDR, there is an ever-increasing need for petabytes of storage, said Warner Bros. chief technology officer Vicky Colf. “It’s the quality of the content that we are dealing with.”

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/project-silica-superman-warner-bros-microsoft-1203390459/

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