Over the last 6 months, I have been busy transferring video tapes to DVD and at lunchtime, the question of the life of various recording media came up.
Say a TV company had a copy of an old film, what would be the process to ensure it lasted for infinity and what would the professional media be?
I ask this so that I and others can record and keep old memories available for some years to come.
TIA
Dave
Plenty to keep you busy here:
I would say scan it digitally, and put the original back in the fridge/salt-mine or whatever, and then duplicate onto at least three computers using hard drives: any time a drive goes down, put a new one in and restore from one of the other two backups.
When some better digital medium than disks comes along, archive onto it.
formats, compression modes, 'codexes' and a seemingly infinite number of other factors that I've probably never head of. Once a film has been scanned - by any one of a large number of methods and machines - there are then an infinite number of processes almost anyone can inflict upon the transcription, and every time it is saved it will get further away from the original, and each time it is compressed, more detail will be lost and more noise added. On the other hand, if your original tape was of poor quality, you might be able to improve its appearance somewhat, but not get back any real detail that has been lost: you could paint or patch some in though, and for a film with many similar frames this is obviously going to be more feasible than in an individual image. So to make the physical object of an old film last to 'infinity', is one thing, and to make the content available to infinity, another.
The place to have a real dialogue about this would be
Storing video uncompressed isn't difficult these days. Even in HD a film would only be just over a terabyte. 1Tb drive can be found for £50 ish. No need to scan as many films are made digitally in the first place.
But thereby gaining the op little over his existing tape spacewise, and costing an awful lot more. And still you have a number of recording modes to deal with. It's hard enough already getting discs recorded on one recorder to play on another, if my experience is anything to go by. Then with hard drives you throw in the USB/Eide/Sata/External/Internal permutations to go through. Maybe the op actually already has the best mode, and should just be looking for more storage space...
S
This was my suggestion, but it was knocked down because of the life of a hard drive being as little as 5 years. (The drive I have got at the moment has been in constant use now, for ten years, and shows no sign of dying. (perhaps I shouldn't have typed that.))
What I do with my g children's photos is to put them on 3 disks and do as you say; one goes down and you make a copy from on of the two remaining and keep an eye on the older copies.
My question was based on what do the pros back up to.
Thanks
Dave
there and miss something vital.
Thanks
Dave
Impossible. A long time, FSVO "long", is possible.
TBH good old actetate or polyester film stored in good conditions has a long life. I don't think there is enough known about the longevity of the dyes etc used in "home burnt" DVDs to provide any real answer. Lots of stories about some discs being unplayable after just 12 months but other fine many years later.
As others have said storing on multiple hard discs and doing regular copies to new discs is probably the safest. You also a get a bit accurate copies. I have a feeling there is built in error correction on DVD's used to store "video" rather than "data" that masks the inevitable errors.
One would also do the transfer at the highest resolution and lowest (aka no) compression you could.
Wheres the best/cheapest place to get HDDs now? Novatech's prices have gone way up
NT
You're not going to like the answer.
One problem with any format is will the equipment still be around to play it in tens of years time? You presumably had the same problem - you had tapes you made but nothing to play it on - so had to go to a specialist. Same can apply to pro formats. Of course you could just copy it to the latest one regularly. That's fine with digital - but older analogue degrades at each copy. That's why many early TV progs (colour) look so bad - they've gone down too many generations. And of course copying things you may or not want in the future is costly.
As regards that film? Film properly stored is the longest lasting medium - way longer than tape. Recordable DVD is poor too. Commercial DVDs use a different process and may have a pretty good life - but that process is too expensive for just a few copies.
One system that was being developed used 16mm B&W film stock - quite cheap
- and recorded colour on that digitally. A bit like Dolby digital sound. Dunno what happened to it, though.
The present HD standard isn't the equal of 35mm film - let alone some of the larger formats.
Don't know, but Maplin have an external 2Tb drive for £120 and ebuyer is usually worth a look too
No, I know, I was just using HD as it's familiar to most people. Some movies are being made at HD resolution but usually 4:4:4 rather than the
4:2:2 of 'uncompressed' HDCamSR. Even at RGB 4k (which is considered enough for 70mm) the amount of data you'd get from one film isn't so great that it couldn't easily be stored at home.
Aye, "HD" as in a broadcast format, that's only a piddly 2 mega pixel image.
There is great debate about how many pixels are required to capture the best 35mm frame and not lose anything, that probably requires 10 mega pixels or more. A less than optimum 35mm frame (focus, grain, etc) and 5 mega pixels will do.
Are you sure it was digital? I remember one where they recorded croma and luminance as separate tracks on B&W. I don't recall anyone doing it digitally.
What the 'pros' do and what's viable domestically aren't necessarily the same. They have much more data so will be constrained by that. FWIW we use tape based systems at work (DAT, DLT, LTO, Exabyte) and keep copies of important stuff in off-site locations in case of fire. Data gets copied to new formats periodically as they evolve.
That's not true if you want to capture the nature of the film, i.e. the graininess, etc. Just adding more fuzz by using lower data rates is probably not a good idea.
However, depending on what you are used too, a 6 megapixel SLR can easily produce better pictures than most 35 mm film, but they are different and better varies from person to person.
It was being developed at the ITCA labs at Teddington Studios when Thames TV owned them. So early '90s. Saw some very impressive demonstrations. Dunno what happened to it after then. But the idea was brilliant. Thames never junked any progs - unlike the BBC. Hence all those old Sweeny and Minder etc. But they may have junked a lot in the interim.
Absolutely. In an ideal world, everything made for TV would be kept on a format with no compression, etc. Because who knows if it may be useful in later years? But the amount of data is mind boggling. Let alone having to copy it all every so often.
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