philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Film preservation 2.0

The most commonly used format for digital archiving is Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology, a magnetic tape format that is most commonly used for enterprise data backups. LTO tapes are more stable than hard drives, which are subject to mechanical failure, but they’re far from ideal. Although it’s estimated that they have a 15-to-30-year lifespan, most studios assume a practical lifespan of five years. ...

Worse still, if the studio’s copies of a Digital Source Master are lost, another copy isn’t likely to appear. The Digital Cinema Packages that are distributed to theaters are encrypted with keys that will only work for a limited period of time—after the key expires, the data is irretrievable. So the days of a pristine print being found in the basement of a small-town theater are over—at best, trash-pickers would find hard drives with files they couldn’t play back. ...

No one is ever going to tell the story, years from now, of the tape-copy operation that gave The Wolf Of Wall Street five more years. But digital cinema—our cinema—won’t survive for some future Howard Carter to find generations from now. It will be saved, if it is saved, by an older kind of archivist: monks in scriptoria, loading tapes into drives, painstakingly transcribing old data to new media, outrunning history.

See the full story here: http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/429-film-preservation-20/?curator=MediaREDEF