DVD Talk Forum - RIP, the movie film camera

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Re: RIP, the movie film camera

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nick Danger (Post 10967193)

Some people believe that digital data will remain available, in new formats, for as long as there is a world-wide web... I'm less optimistic. The hardware underlying the cloud is owned by a handful of large operators, who could purge yottabytes of data because it is no longer accessed by anyone.

Purges by these large operators have already occurred. Geocities, for example, was taken offline by Yahoo. Luckily a group of internet users called The Archive Team managed to preserve about 650GB of it, although I don't think there's a readily available way to access it right now:
http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/09/dev...gital-pompeii/

The Archive Team has archived a number of other sites as well. One of their more recent projects was Friendster.
http://archiveteam.org/

Meanwhile, Google has an archive of Usenet messages dating back to 1982. While these are somewhat buried within their Google Groups service, there doesn't appear to be any likelyhood of them being taken offline anytime soon.

Part of it is the constantly shrinking cost of storage. A decade ago, it likely would've costs thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, to back up 650GB. Nowadays, a home user could store all that on a $80 1TB drive, and still have room for more.

Of course, the efforts of amateur archivists and socially responsible corporations will likely only manage to save a fraction of all that has ever been on the internet. So while I don't think it'll be as bad as you think, I don't think we'll ever have 100% retention either. And of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that what we want to preserve/recover was put up on the internet in the first place.

Quote:

In the science fiction story "The Green Leopard Plague," the vacation snapshots of people who've been dead for a century are still on the web.

Coincidentally, this story is available for free online:
http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0406/greenleopards.shtml

Quote:

What disturbs me most is the problem of George Orwell's 1984 on Kindle. Amazon pressed a button, and every copy disappeared.

That's a DRM issue, since Amazon has control over where and how content from it's Kindle service is viewed. For their part, they've stated the mass deletion was a mistake. It does illustrate the perils of DRM usage though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by wm lopez (Post 10967693)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO looked beautiful in the theater and that was a digital camera.
All the colors were true. I don't understand all this green,teal and yellow in movies we've been getting for the last 11 years. Is that digital or film?

Elaborating on what filmerp wrote, this is a result of digital grading of films using a DI (digital intermediate). It's affected both movies shot digitally and shot on film. Prior to digital grading, tinting of movies was possible using certain film stocks and developing techniques, but digital grading has made it so much easier that it's become more prevalent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_grading

Quote:

Originally Posted by Drexl (Post 10967934)

Yeah, "The Blog of Anne Frank" wouldn't survive.

I do think the more popular blogs and such will have a much higher chance of surviving, since the increased visibility will increase the likelyhood of mirroring and archiving. Ironically, one of the major indicators of a blog's popularity currently is that it gets a book deal.

Of course, Anne Frank wasn't the only child of the Holocaust to have written a diary. The popularity of hers has somewhat overshadowed these lesser known diaries:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article....uleId=10007952

Re: RIP, the movie film camera

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nick Danger (Post 10965822)

As for the loss of history, people are still hoping a complete copy of Metropolis will be found.

I am thrilled to be the one to tell you Nick; they found the missing reels of Metropolis two years ago and fashioned a complete version. It's available on DVD and Blu Ray.

Re: RIP, the movie film camera

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mabuse (Post 10968604)

I am thrilled to be the one to tell you Nick; they found the missing reals of Metropolis two years ago and fashioned a complete version. It's available on DVD and Blu Ray.

While the recently released restoration is called "The Complete Metropolis," this is a misnomer, since it's still missing about 8 minutes of footage.

From Wikipedia, regarding the recently discovered footage and restoration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropo...m)#Rediscovery

Quote:

Only a few scenes – about eight minutes overall – were not included in the new cut because they were too badly damaged to repair or still missing; this gives the film a running time of 145 minutes.

The original premiere of the film ran 153 minutes.

Re: RIP, the movie film camera

Considering digital is far cheaper and easier, this is not surprising at all.

Re: RIP, the movie film camera

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mabuse (Post 10968604)

I am thrilled to be the one to tell you Nick; they found the missing reels of Metropolis two years ago and fashioned a complete version. It's available on DVD and Blu Ray.

I own the Blu Ray. The recently found footage had been copied onto 16 mm film (using cheap processing) in the 1970s, and the original reels were discarded. We're left with a scratchy, blotchy print that has the side of the frame cut off.

Re: RIP, the movie film camera

Yeah, but beggers can't be choosers and all that... If they found Welles' cut of magnificent ambersons on 8 mm would you dismiss it?

Re: RIP, the movie film camera

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jay G. (Post 10964937)

Robert Rodriguez already did that with his Grindhouse segment Planet Terror.

eBooks may be "vastly superior" to you, but that's not true for everyone , or every situation. The DRM on them means that ownership is a lot more limited. If Amazon ever goes out of business, you could potentially lose your entire Kindle collection. When you die, you can't pass on your book collection. There's no reselling of Kindle titles. Even lending is more cumbersome and limited.

Not that any of that applies to movies. We've been living with owning digital copies of movies at home for a decade now, and even before that the vast majority of people never owned a 35mm copy of a film. For film, it's more an aesthetic value, in how images captured on film are always going to look different than images captured on digital video, even with steps to make digital video better approximate film. It's more akin to the vinyl vs CD debate, or using analog recording equipment even if the end product is likely going to be mostly bought digitally.

Film also has a sort of simplicity as a storage and viewing format. You shine light through it, and you see an image. Digital relies on a variety of different media and codecs. Nowadays we're still finding lost films from the early years of cinema, and able to view them with little difficulty. I wonder if, 50 years in the future, someone comes across a NTFS formatted SATA harddrive holding a series of .mts files containing video encoded in REDCODE RAW, that we'll have the hardware and software available to actually recover the movie within.

Dude! I hear you. That's an idea that's been bugging me for years. I had so many files corrupt/ hard drives died through time that I think I'm inclined to hold analog media with more longstanding value.

Re: RIP, the movie film camera

Ebert conflates home video, consumer grade HDTV, and theatrical digital projection a bit in that article, but he never the less hits the nail on the head (as usual).

I'd never stoped to think about it, but the ascent, victory, and domination of digital media was incredibly fast, brutal, and complete. Look at 1985. 25 years ago the pro-grade video formats all had less than 550 lines of resolution and the consumer grade home video formates were even poorer (VHS, Beta, even Laserdisc would never give 35 mmm a run for its money). No one would have expected those formats to every replace film. Ten years later, nothing had changed. But just a couple years after that HD cameras and broadcast started chipping away at the market. And here we are today.

Celluloid served us very well. Yet the digital victory has been so complete and the death of film has been mostly ignored. I feel like film deserved a dignified death and a viking funeral, but instead it was shot in the gut, left to bleed out, and kicked into the gutter.