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The practical result of this is that a digital film archive needs to invest heavily in data migration to maintain its assets. Every five years or so, each film needs to be copied to new media, in a constant race against magnetic-tape degradation and drive obsolescence. This requires time and money: new tapes, new drives, staff to copy and verify the data. It’s worth it to studios, as long as they continue to make money from their libraries. But a studio that stops migrating its data will lose it quickly. If the last decade has taught us nothing else, it’s that our system rewards executives who make horrible long-term decisions for short-term results. (See Jamie Dimon.) In the analog world, most of the cost of preservation is paid when the archival print is created. But for a digitally preserved film, the cost of migration shows up every five years. Postponing it is going to be tempting, especially during buyouts, changes in management, or any of the near-constant corporate turmoil that puts huge short-term pressure on cost-cutting. Films that continue to make money are probably safe, but for bombs—whether they were genuinely terrible or interesting failures—the incentives are all wrong. Putting a significant part of our cultural heritage in a system where a five-year gap in funding means catastrophic, irrevocable loss seems to guarantee we’ll lose some of it.

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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. Even if they found a way to crack the encryption and extract the data, the DCP is compressed—like Blu-Rays and DVDs, not all of the image information in the DSM is present. There’s a failsafe: currently, studios also store a 35mm print, either a color negative or a black-and-white YCM color separation. This doesn’t preserve all of the information as perfectly as the digital copy, but if properly stored, this copy can last 100 years before it begins to deteriorate. However, producing the film copy is already expensive, and as the laboratories capable of producing film prints disappear, costs will continue to rise. It’s a matter of years, not decades, before the digital copy is the only copy, and that means assets can be permanently lost on a very short timeline.

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