"It's a Silent Fire": Decaying Digital Movie and TV Shows Are a Hollywood Crisis

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/digital-preservation-film-tv-shows-archives-1235851957/

by CharlesW • 2 years ago

50 56 2 years ago

russfink• 2 years ago

Similar to a peeve of mine - old TV shows incorrectly “up rendered” for HDMI. There is pixelation, color problems, lots of things. Maybe it’s just my cable provider.

cowmix2• 2 years ago

Yup, the quality in how these programs get upscaled for HD is all over the map. There's a lot of examples of people on Youtube and archive.org who are ripping their personal collections of old content who are doing this, I would say, correctly.

Here's one of my favorite examples of archiving being done "right":

https://archive.org/details/@the_vista_group

CharlesW2• 2 years ago

Any HN folks know of resources/guides for doing this “right”? I’ve had great luck restoring images and would like to try my hand at video. My dream is that there are tools which can take advantage of temporal changes to get better results.

IndySun• 2 years ago

Have to agree. Along with the practice of cropping original 4:3's to 16:9/Letterbox.

bitwize• 2 years ago

Me to my wife: "Is this show old? Like from the 90s? I can see the dithering on it."

rchaud2• 2 years ago

For some shows like Seinfeld, the widescreen "HD remastered" version show extras standing in for the shows star in some scenes. There is no way to remove this, as the original narrower 4:3 aspect ratio would only show part of their hair.

Finnucane• 2 years ago

Make hard copy backups on film.

phone8675309• 2 years ago

Film decays if not stored properly.

harvey9• 2 years ago

We need to end entropy. https://www.theonion.com/christian-right-lobbies-to-overturn...

webwielder2• 2 years ago

Culture is ephemeral. Some things are preserved, others are not. It's fine.

Larrikin• 2 years ago

Why is it fine?

History, paleontology, anthropology, cosmology, and other fields have highly educated people spending their entire lives dedicated to recovering the past when it couldn't be preserved or when people tried to purposefully destroy it.

Knowing about the past adds to our understanding of the universe and guides us into the future. There is no downside for our current culture to know about the past.

Plus sometimes it's just interesting.

cowboyscott2• 2 years ago

Sure, everything is ephemeral, but these works have impacts on people's lives and ambitions. How many folks are named after movie or TV characters? How many people got into software after watching The Social Network?

I follow a couple of small communities of amateur VHS archivists. Through this I randomly watched the marketing material of an 80s/90s era MLM, which finally put into context a similar MLM that my mom had fallen for when our family was at a financial low point. This random bit of preservation helped me to better understand a part of my family and upbringing; far better than I could reading a Wikipedia article about the company in question.

cowmix2• 2 years ago

We all die alone. God is dead. Etc.

Andrex2• 2 years ago

At the end of the day we're just a bunch of atoms, I suppose.

everyone2• 2 years ago

I actually agree. I dont think art needs to be supported. Not that I'm against it or anything, it simply doesnt need support imo.

As long as there are humans around, they will be creating great art on a regular basis, it's just like pooping or eating to us.

whywhywhywhy2• 2 years ago

Torrents solve this

Andrex2• 2 years ago

Not really, unless you're suggesting production companies either adopt torrenting internally themselves (which does nothing if the company goes defunct), or publicizing all their internal material including works-in-progress (a nonstarter for most serious creatives).

c0pium• 2 years ago

The lack of a period on their thought fragment implies it’s incomplete, allow me to supply the second half.

…assuming we lived in a completely different world where money doesn’t matter.

whywhywhywhy2• 2 years ago

I believe distributing media for archival purposes should be legal and that unpaid enjoyers of the media are more likely to correctly preserve the media than the rights holders.

This has been proven over and over, where the rights holder copy of a movie is low quality with poor sound, has cut content and poor translations and the unpaid archivist copy is closer to the directors intentions.

mrandish• 2 years ago

The article doesn't discuss it but pervasive DRM is also reducing the chances of some media being preserved for the future. A key problem is that newer digital distribution formats make it trivial to enable DRM by default as part of the compression process. One example is the new ATSC 3.0 UHDTV broadcast format, where we're now seeing even smaller local broadcasters transmitting all their content with DRM active, even though the majority of their content has no contractual or practical reason to be DRMed. It's just easier to leave the "encrypt" switch on 24/7.

This is a problem because many smaller broadcasters do not archive their feeds for more than a few months, especially locally-produced live content. Today, a large portion of the 70s and 80s-era local TV content we have is thanks to a few obsessive home recordists who would record 6 and 8 hour blocks of certain local channels on VHS. Today's pervasive default DRM eliminates this avenue of preservation.

yunwal• 2 years ago

It seems to me that we could just as easily record DRM’ed content (e.g. by taking screenshot videos), we’re just not as obsessed with recording it anymore

rchaud2• 2 years ago

Is there a streaming app that doesn't block screenshots?

crtasm• 2 years ago

How are topical TV shows getting around this? They rely on having a setup recording many TV channels so they can quickly find and reuse clips.

Is there a lower resolution available without the DRM?

RajT882• 2 years ago

On a Macro level, I've been exploring M-DISC as a solution to archiving my own media which is irreplaceable. (Documents, photos, videos, etc.)

It seems like M-DISCs are getting harder to buy for some reason.

wkat42422• 2 years ago

It's because they're so expensive and don't offer a lot of storage for modern standards.

People that want to store a little use cloud or other stuff like Flash. Of course that degrades over time but for a few bucks you have multiple. People that want to store a lot use tape. There isn't really much room in between.

loeg• 2 years ago

People that want to store a little use cloud or other stuff like Flash. Of course that degrades over time but for a few bucks you have multiple. People that want to store a lot use tape. There isn't really much room in between.

Traditional rotating platter drives?

gojomo2• 2 years ago

You can tell this is authentically the industry insiders' own stunted understanding of the problem by the fact that the words 'copyright' and 'intellectual property' never appear as aspects of the challenge.

Storage is cheaper than ever before. Accumulated shared wisdom about older format, & open tools for forward- and up- conversions, keep growing. Communities of enthusiasts can now find each other & coordinate effectively on arbitrarily niche and old media.

Hollywood's policy of monopolizing the right-to-copy works, enforced with aggressive legal prosecutions and fragile proprietary technical-complexities, puts cultural history at extra risk.

unethical_ban• 2 years ago

Spot on. I got about 2/3 of the way through looking for the specific problem, wondering if it was codec issues, backups, etc.

No, just mystical hand wringing about losing digital works. It's a procedural problem driven from the top.

KerrAvon2• 2 years ago

Stipulate for the discussion that you’re correct; what would your ideal preservation scenario look like? Hollywood DCP servers open to enthusiasts to allow copying of terabytes of movie data to other archives?

vmladenov• 2 years ago

That and 6k (21MP) or 18k (63MP) film scans where applicable. Modern formats can’t quite handle that yet but soon, and mixed reality/projection displays will open up screen formats

bdw5204• 2 years ago

A reasonable solution would be to recognize abandonware as a legal category under copyright law. If a company decides to tax write-off a work or let it go out of print (including print on demand for an obscene price) then revoke the copyright and put it in the public domain. Tax write offs that weren't ever released like Warner Bros has become infamous for of late should additionally be required to be publicly released. Uploading it to something like a "Warners Bros Tax Write offs" Youtube channel would be sufficient for preservation purposes.

If you do that, the preservation problem will take care of itself between organizations like The Internet Archive and the various piracy groups. This might also make it easier politically to crack down on the pirates who insist on distributed unauthorized copies of new releases by making them less sympathetic.

chx2• 2 years ago

Well yes.

Bring back the 28 year copyright term. Or something similarly sensible.

How much money would Disney lose if Independence Day, the top earning film 28 years ago would become free to replicate this year?

gojomo2• 2 years ago

Good question! Things that'd help:

• a founders-duration copyright term – at most 28 years from date-of-creation

• absolute statutory & precedential immunity for any copies made, or DRM-circumventing-technologies created/used, solely for non-commercial preservation – that is, only competing witht the rightsholder in the commercial market would be prosecutable

• whatever extra protections/enforcement options available with formal copyright-registration also come with the duty to deposit/escrow full-quality unencumbered versions with multiple responsible preservation institutions, from the Library of Congress to NGOs, who are free to release those versions at end-of-copyright

qingcharles• 2 years ago

Storage is cheaper, but as the article states, the problem is mostly Indies who have no money. As someone who produced a film that was purchased by Netflix, I don't even know if any of the original RED camera footage exists. I think First Wife has an original Blu-ray burnt from the first director's cut with the original music that never made it into commercial production. It would still be pricey to store all the original footage (which is what you want to archive) in a 3-2-1 backup scenario for most small productions.

cowboyscott2• 2 years ago

It's apples to oranges, but it's interesting contrasting this with community-driven efforts in the gaming preservation space. It's a relatively simple matter to find, say, a full archive of the vast majority if not all commercially released games for the Sega Genesis, along with a smattering of unreleased prototypes that have found their way into community hands. Many, like myself, are hobbyist digital archivists, curating collections of data and hardware for exploring the medium.

Film and TV are harder for a number of reasons. Video is just bigger, and the vast majority of works have their primary versions on film and tape that take far more effort to preserve (physically or digitally). Having said that, I believe Hollywood shot themselves in the foot by so aggressively going after piracy (the same can be said about music) in a way that the video game industry didn't (Nintendo's recent efforts notwithstanding). They spent fortunes on lawyers and lobbyists to protect short-term profits (and, realistically, how many ticket sales did they save?), at the expense of locking away our shared cultural history.

KerrAvon2• 2 years ago

Person at the end of the article is missing the point because they don’t understand that bitflips and other corruption can happen with digital storage.

bun_terminator• 2 years ago

it's exceedingly rare. Rarer even than the usual numbers thrown around imo

whartung• 2 years ago

An archival quality format can take this into account with error correction data and logic. Nothing says you have to use the common formats (which may be more vulnerable to data corruption) for the archives.

bombcar2• 2 years ago

It's worth noting that there are three levels here:

1. Preserving the "final copy" - so many old films literally do not exist in any format whatsoever. A DVD or Blu-ray or Laserdisc meets this.

2. Preserving the "best copy" - some things we have in Laserdisc only. It's not the best version ever made, and it's potentially not perfectly preserved.

3. Preserving the "master/source" - this is much more difficult, because these are never released outside the studio, and can be much more than just the "Final Cut" - source files, 3D models, the software used, etc.

CharlesW2• 2 years ago

You might call the “best copy” level “intermediate masters” or “DIs” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_intermediate), and there may be a bunch of these for different editions, versions, and frame sizes/rates.

bombcar2• 2 years ago

I'm more familiar with audio - but yeah, things like source tracks after mixing but before compression, etc.

andersa• 2 years ago

Preserving the source for every movie would be absurdly expensive. That can easily be many terabytes each. Textures and models are huge if any CGI was used. Not to mention all the raw footage... Wouldn't be surprised if most studios just throw that stuff away a few years after release. Why would you need to re-render the movie?

TigeriusKirk• 2 years ago

Ballpark, how much would you estimate it to cost?

allturtles• 2 years ago

They still had source negative film for Star Trek: the Next Generation in 2012, 18 years after it went off the air. They used it to do an HD remaster for a show originally mastered on video tape [0]. I don't know if this is common or rare.

[0] https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2012/07/remastering-star-tr...

everyone2• 2 years ago

Filesharing to the rescue? A torrent will last as long as someone is seeding.

Animats• 2 years ago

We used to have the solution to this - require a deposit copy for copyright. It's the "no formalities" rule that killed archiving.

"It's a Silent Fire": Decaying Digital Movie and TV Shows Are a Hollywood Crisis

Related Stories