Tuesday, May 1, 2007

You Can't Stop Progress

My man Chris Bellamy recently tipped me off to an article in Variety by David S. Cohen (presumably not the same one who wrote for "The Simpsons" and "Futurama") highlighting the challenges of digital archiving..

You see, a collection of digital data may not degrade, but the media that it's stored on sure can, and how! Not that many Hollywood films have been shot on digital, but those that have are a real bitch to maintain. While you can just store an archival film print in a proper environment and ignore it for decades, nine-month-old digital files already had dropped frames. Luckily, one company found a simple way to solve the problem:

Their solution takes the data from a digital intermediate and turns it into three-color separation negatives.

In other words, they take the digital movie and turn it into good old-fashioned film.


Or they could shoot on film to begin with and save some money and worry.

Bravo.

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