From Film to Delivery.

[PDB]

A look at Kodak Vision 3 film, the last 35mm film still being produced:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orUX-be9Qfg


Edit: And the return of Ektachrome, a favorite from my still shooting days

https://youtu.be/hIWp8TlmQLA

[zoidberg]

Thanks for posting this PDB.

What's interesting is the video seems to think that negative stock exists purely to be scanned and graded digitally, however the complete Vision 3 system is to print to one of the positive stocks (either Vision or Vision Premier), this is why the colour masks are in the negative/intermediate stocks. Interestingly Kodak do make a special intermediate stock for film-outs of DIs, which tailors the response curve to the output of the film recorder better than conventional intermediate stock for analogue printing.

In any case it's good that film is still being shot and processed, even if so little is actually printed these days. In the long run a negative is going to be easier to maintain than petabytes of data, which needs to be routinely moved about to avoid loss or corruption from disc failure

[stwd4nder2]

In the long run a negative is going to be easier to maintain than petabytes of data, which needs to be routinely moved about to avoid loss or corruption from disc failure

Film requires a special storage facility, whereas an AWS bucket is relatively cheap and affordable for a large studio. Even archival formats like tape are much more efficient to store as well as easy to duplicate and not likely to fail.

[zoidberg]

Even if a studio did decide to farm out the storage to a third party (which seems to me to be a bad idea), someone still has to host/maintain the servers and the storage media which is much less straightforward than a climate-controlled vault, which is all developed filmstock requires (along with up-to-date archiving and inventory). The big studios have these kinds of vault already for the countless films made over the decades.

In any case, a movie shot on film (which is the subject of this thread) will have the OCN and the scanned raw digital files/finished DI to deal with. The best of both worlds, so to speak

[PDB]

A surprisingly really good resource on the subject is the Keanu Reeves' doc: Side By Side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFGJY_NJwwg

Digital is not great for long term storage as of yet. The main problem is that digital formats and medias change all the time with advancing tech. Fincher even discusses not being to look at old projects he has because he can't access them. You have to keep transferring to new formats and medias in order to preserve the movie and there is always a translation cost. And that is assuming the studios are on top of that. Secondarily, no matter what digital media you have, optical, tape, HDD, SSD, none are really, real world rated for over 30 years. Optical was always a bust. I have CD-Rs that were suppose to last over twenty that barely made it to 5. Tapes have to be run in order to keep the mechanics and tape surface clean and working. Even then they are finite. HDDs have to be run to keep the heads working but run them too much and they fail. SSD never lived up to the promise. Certainly better then HDDs but I've had too many fail to call that any sort of long term solution.

Film is a proven format for over 100 years. We still have access to films over 80 years old in their original (read: negative) format. Digital has yet to get anywhere near that. No server farm, no media has yet to have that track record. Think about how many times the same film negative has been scanned over and over again because the scanning tech improved but the print has remained the same. That's amazing.

Don't get me wrong digital will get there but for now it doesn't have the proven record that film does. Maybe holographic memory?

[zoidberg]

I watched Side By Side many moons ago, it informed a lot of what I said previously with regards to digital storage. I can't imagine a huge amount has changed since the release of that documentary.

You would like to think that the big studios have learned from their own history some of the pitfalls of long-term storage during the celluloid years (deterioration of media, loss/misplacement of negatives, destruction by fire), and would be keen to avoid this in the digital era. I guess we will find out in the long run

[alleycat]

I watched Side By Side many moons ago, it informed a lot of what I said previously with regards to digital storage. 

Thanks for the recommend Zoidberg/PDB, just finished watching Side by Side. Great doc and yes I don't expect much has changed. I just wish they'd have got Tarantino on it as another advocate for film.

[dwalkerdon]

A surprisingly really good resource on the subject is the Keanu Reeves' doc: Side By Side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFGJY_NJwwg

Digital is not great for long term storage as of yet. The main problem is that digital formats and medias change all the time with advancing tech. Fincher even discusses not being to look at old projects he has because he can't access them. You have to keep transferring to new formats and medias in order to preserve the movie and there is always a translation cost. And that is assuming the studios are on top of that. Secondarily, no matter what digital media you have, optical, tape, HDD, SSD, none are really, real world rated for over 30 years. Optical was always a bust. I have CD-Rs that were suppose to last over twenty that barely made it to 5. Tapes have to be run in order to keep the mechanics and tape surface clean and working. Even then they are finite. HDDs have to be run to keep the heads working but run them too much and they fail. SSD never lived up to the promise. Certainly better then HDDs but I've had too many fail to call that any sort of long term solution.

Film is a proven format for over 100 years. We still have access to films over 80 years old in their original (read: negative) format. Digital has yet to get anywhere near that. No server farm, no media has yet to have that track record. Think about how many times the same film negative has been scanned over and over again because the scanning tech improved but the print has remained the same. That's amazing.

Don't get me wrong digital will get there but for now it doesn't have the proven record that film does. Maybe holographic memory?

Optical discs like the Sony Optical Disc Archive, Panasonic and Sony's Archival Disc and the upcoming High Capacity 5d optical discs are all long term rock solid formats for preservation of movies in this digital era.

[zoidberg]

The 5D quartz sounds interesting as a long term storage method. Hopefully the technology will become more accessible in the future.

One of the more popular (and most long-term) storage method for finished features/restorations is the colour separation master, whereby the R/G/B is printed separately onto special B&W stock (in much the same way as 3-strip Technicolor image acquisition worked). Black and white stock uses silver grain as opposed to colour dye clouds to form images and so will never fade

[CSchmidlapp]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg--L9TKL0I