Hollywood’s move from celluloid to digital brings some issues regarding the long term archival of digital motion pictures. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released a report entitled “The Digital Dilemma” which describes problems such as the high cost of digital film storage, the obsolescence of digital file formats and the equipment that can read it, the lack of standards, ‘bit rot’ in CD-Rs etc.
The cost of storing a digital film costs about $12,510 per year, compared with $1,059 for celluloid. DVDs are estimated to be usable for about 15 years. And equipment upgrade cycles are arriving more quickly. The dilemma involves how best to move ahead with storing digital movies so that they can be used in 100 years.
Digital crisis: Motion pictures may fade to black – Computerworld, February 8 2008
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I’m surprised by this; I thought one of the main sellig points for digital films was that they’d be much easier to store. You could save a whole bunch of them on the same disk, couldn’t you?
Maybe storing them on the cloud is a solution. Or maybe they could store these films in George Lucas’s basement.