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The end for Kodak?

OzJohn said:
Technicolor originals may be archived as B&W separations but I doubt that anything originated on neg colour stock like Eastmancolor would be.
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But they are.
Those who argue against digital archiving of images tend to overlook that, once scanned, it is possible to periodically copy large digital archives entirely without human intervention ie there is no expensive labour cost
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None? How?

Separations of important movies are stored in former salt mines which are impervious to fire, flood, etc.

EDIT: Separations of many important movies are stored in former salt mines which are impervious to fire, flood, etc.
 
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Actually, GEH stores their archived films in an air conditioned underground vault nearly the size of an airplane hangar. Most of it is nitrate original, for which nothing much can be done. The rest has been copied and in the case of color exists as 3 color separations. Hollywood does much the same. Three color separations in one location and the ECN originals in another. No one is so foolish to have only one copy nor to store both in the same place.

PE
 
Digital long time archiving/storage is currently still a myth and will remain so for quite some time. The costs for archiving digital material are up +10x higher than conserving classic archival materials (paintings, photographs, handwriting, etc...). Digital seems to be a synonyme for better to some people apparently even on apug.

Dominik
 

Blu-Ray rip + BitTorrent = more copies of many films in HD spread across the globe in so many places that only the end of civilization could end their existence.
 
Aristophanes said:
Blu-Ray rip + BitTorrent = more copies of many films in HD spread across the globe in so many places that only the end of civilization could end their existence.
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That or time.

They are going to degrade at the same rate, so how many there are won't matter.
 
Aristophanes said:
Blu-Ray rip + BitTorrent = more copies of many films in HD spread across the globe in so many places that only the end of civilization could end their existence.
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I'm guessing the masters are just a *little* higher quality than some amateur rip that was compressed massively so that it can be transferred in a reasonable amount of time.
 
PhotoJim said:
I'm guessing the masters are just a *little* higher quality than some amateur rip that was compressed massively so that it can be transferred in a reasonable amount of time.
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1. Given the resolution of the HDTV...you could never tell.

2. They're busy slinging 50GB files around now. Compression is passé.
 
Ok folks lets go back to center, yeah we know the trad film makers are transforming to be more digi (ie Kodak, Fuji) and if they can transform successfully or not (up for debate); but do we really need to talk about how they are doing it (compression algorithms, file sizes, etc)? I think this discussion is going too far off center.
 
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Given the resolution of film vs digital at this time, we could tell! Let any DVD sit for 10 years then compare it to a similarly kept print on ECP and we sure could tell. Chances are, the DVD will have begun to deteriorate visibly.

However, this will change rapidly over the next few years as DVD technology improves as well as digital sensing.

Right now, IDK what you mean by 50 GB files, but analog could produce some pretty big files. - Per Frame!

PE
 
Blue Ray HD resolution equals about 16mm on a bad day most movies are shot with 35mm that's 2x to 4x the resolution an Imax movie has again at least twice that resolution. The ripp offs are probably deleted as soon as the data thief change/buy their/new computer, the pirate server are likely to delete their files it's even more like that their files are being deleted by the copyright owners. And lxdudes argument is quite valid.

Btw. Am I still on Apug or on the why digital is better forum

Dominik
 
MDR said:
Btw. Am I still on Apug or on the why digital is better forum

Dominik
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Surely posts that seek to contrast analog and digital practices are still at least about photography. Have a look at how many posts there are in this thread about business school economic theory and American politics - these have nothing to do with photography of any stripe. IMO Kodak is just another corporation in financial difficulty; the market and possibly the courts will determine the final outcome. This thread has drifted so far off topic on so many occasions that almost any subject that does not invoke the word 'digital' seems to be considered fair comment. OzJohn
 
Well, the thread is titled "The end for Kodak?"!
 
lxdude said:
That or time.

They are going to degrade at the same rate, so how many there are won't matter.
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Why do people think that digital files are never re-copied? If I have a valuable file, I keep it on magnetic media (disk and/or tape) as well as optical (CD/DVD), and I make backup copies of the disk drive, as well as making periodically making new copies of the CD/DVD's. I don't just make one copy and let it sit on a shelf until the rats chew holes in it.

Are businesses and governments keeping everything on paper, or are they keeping multiple digital copies?

These arguments against digital media are getting ridiculous.
 
Moose;

I have a lot of files in Apple ][ and Apple /// format as well as in HPFS format. And, they are all backed up on tape and on Bernoulli systems which are pseudo SCSI. None of them work with today's systems and there was no easy way to move between systems. This happens. I have friends with Heath PCs and IBM PCs and they can't read DOS disks. I have 8" disks with lots of backups.

I cannot read them and cannot exchange data between these old computers.

I have a friend with a lot of stuff on a LISA! Wow does he have problems.

PE
 
Moose they use amongst other things film and of course the aformentioned magnetic tapes as well as at least five severs on 5 different earthquake zones. The files are constantly converted to archival file formats meaning images to TIF and the rest to PDF/A unfortunately film (motion pictures) doesn't currently have a worldwide digital archival standard but several that change every year. Converting a file to PDF/A reduces it to a read only file format links don't work etc... Germany, Austria and maybe the US store a lot of digital data on film. The Rosetta Stone project would be the best solution but way to expensive. The most expensive thing to preserve in an archive is digital data everything including film storage is cheap compared to digital long term preservation. A lot of digi guys and archivst have to go to specialised fleamarkets and buy 20-30 year old computers to be able to view and migrate their data. Some of they digi Archivs have to costume build adapters to use old data storage devises on their computers they also have to program emulators to be able to view the data.

But again I don't think APUG is the right place to discuss these things.

Dominik
 

DATA STORAGE: FROM DIGITS TO DUST
Surprise--computerized data can decay before you know it
Bloomberg Businessweek, April 20, 1998


"Up to 20% of the information carefully collected on Jet Propulsion Laboratory computers during NASA's 1976 Viking mission to Mars has been lost."

"The data lost from the Viking Mars mission, for example, was trapped on decaying digital magnetic tape, forcing NASA to call mission specialists out of retirement to help the agency reconstruct key data."

" 'Digital information lasts forever, or five years--whichever comes first,' says Jeff Rothenberg, senior computer scientist at RAND Corp."​


Granted the article is dated, but I am aware of no standardized mainstream technological solution that has been implemented in the years since it was published. To the contrary, every source I read says the problem has only become worse. And the loss of the Viking data is a done deal. I don't even want to imagine what that little miscue cost taxpayers. NASA's bits are some of the most expensive--and often impossible to do over--in the world.

Ken

(And the reason this is on-topic is because real film and paper (of all kinds, see the final paragraph in the above article) are considered by many acknowledged experts to be superior to virtual digital archiving methods for many types of information. And that gives us a reason to continue to be...
 
Verbatim was also about the only company that could make decent recordable DVDs that wouldn't go blank in six months. Yeah, I spent way too much time over on videohelp.com.

ME Super
 

What I said was a direct response to a post, and specific to its claim.

And as has been said already, repeated re-copying is costly.
 
lxdude said:
What I said was a direct response to a post, and specific to its claim.

And as has been said already, repeated re-copying is costly.
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It's getting far cheaper as basic supply economics kicks in. Kodak became Kodak by driving down the arcane structure and costs of film developing, and the exact same is occurring in digital with massive storage technologies and redundancies.

I find repeated copying to be very easy now that storage costs are plummeting (sans Thailand's floods...a temporary blip). Optical media is out. It's all about cheap magnetic hard drives and cloud services.

Digital copying gives the most bang for the buck by far, but with the caveat about readable file formats. Sticking to the photo theme, JPEG and PDF are ISO standards with long-term projections of functionality of 100+ years.

But only a fool sticks with one archival system for visual media. We do know that paper if stored properly is very durable. I advise all friends and family to print their works (acid free paper in photobooks is excellent; with a PDF of the layout) as well as digitally backing up locally and offsite. But the cost of printing can be very expensive, so it's best left to some edited amount of data. It can never be a complete record.

Data protection is all about redundancy. Digital is easier at redundant but more difficult for long term compatibility. Analog has options for long term archiving, but requires substantial editing to be cost-effective and has single site storage vulnerabilities.

Interesting from the article I linked to that Kodak and others were working with archival stakeholders on solving these problems as best and economically possible. It's another shame in the management of Kodak that some of this initiative was not made a core part of their business profile. It would never be a huge revenue generator, but Kodak had some brain power applied to it, and it seems all that business data went elsewhere.
 
There are many lossy ways to duplicate digital files that are quick and easy; to duplicate a digital media file with high fidelity is more difficult and expensive. If you want the very best archival storage, I believe the very best approach is probably to record redundant copies side by side on the same storage device with digital encoding ... on film. I am not 100% sure how the Fuji system works but that's what I suspect. Anyway, here is a fine example of Fuji doing the right thing to use its film technology. Other examples include privacy screens for laptops.
 
Jpeg is a non archival standard sorry Jpeg 2000 is considered somewhat archival but not by much classic Jpeg is in fact one of the worst image data formats ever. Tif is the standard because it still works after a bitfailure which happens quiet often, a bit failure in a jpeg file and the file is toast. For Cloud computing is pretty new and there still a lot of legal issues. Again Standard PDF is not considered a long term digital preservation file PDF/A is.

Dominik
 
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