Hollywood: Digital Movies Are Great, Digital Storage Not So Great

From The Online Reporter Edition # 570
Publication Period January 5 through 13, 2008

Hollywood: Digital Movies Are Great, Digital Storage Not So Great
The digital age is new, shiny and looks amazing. For the movie industry, it is also potentially decaying, according to a report from the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences called “The Digital Dilemma.” The yearlong study looked into the effects and practices of digital movie archiving and storage.
The most surprising fact in the report is that the cost of storing a digital master record of a movie is about $12,514 a year, versus $1,059 that it costs to keep a conventional master film. It actually gets worse when a movie is purely digital, being produced with an all-electronic process involving no film, with a yearly storage cost of $208,569.
We know, digital was supposed to make everything better. It makes the movies look sharper, the TV picture clearer and the music sound perfect, but it also fades quickly like a shooting star. Without occasional use, a hard drive can stop working in as little as two years. According to the report, only about half of a consumer’s DVD collection will survive for 15 years. There’s also the digital “brick wall” that this stuff hits when it degrades. Tapes used to become grainy and scratchy with some warping over time, but digital media simply becomes unreadable.
The report has a somewhat bleak outlook, and the study shared this pointedly. “If we allow technological obsolescence to repeat itself, we are tied either to continuously increasing costs — or worse — the failure to save important assets.” Think of the 1975 Viking space probe, the one NASA tried to read information from in 1999. The digital data stored from the Viking was unreadable because of degradation, and its format became obsolete soon after its launch.
Film, shipped out to a nice cool salt or limestone mine, can sit and wait for the 25th anniversary special of the movie, quietly and comfortably without changing much. The film and any extra shots can wait easily and without much fuss. Digital media requires much more pampering, and movies like “Beowulf” or “Superman Returns” tend to create more storable material than older films, all of which comes in the nice, expensive digital format. Why would anyone throw something out that could be the next big special feature? It could help drive sales and pay for that expensive extra storage, but it probably won’t.
Global Media Intelligence reported that movie companies rely on this kind of a storage library for about a third of their $36 billion in revenue each year. With the industry needing their libraries that much, and with the cost of storage going up with each new digital addition and magic trick, the consumer’s only hope to avoid yet another increase at the box office and DVD counter is a universal standard for storage, and an easy way to keep that storage alive and running.