Film vs Digital / Video, Archive edition
Lets forget about quality for this thread and focus on archiving.
there is no doubt in my mind that the video out of my a6000 is vastly better than my canon 814 super8, and is a fraction of the cost per minute of footage.
I recently read an article stating that Hollywood is going back to film because it costs less in the long rung, storing film is cheap and the technology to play it back doesn't get obsolete like software. While archiving video requires constant transfer to newer and newer formats, with the possibility of quality loss in each recoding.
Is film worth looking at for the average joe for archiving, are all our digital pictures and HD video just as doomed to time as VHS and Zip-disks?
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Oh god no just when Bolex-Pailliard Super 8 stuff was getting affordable hipsters are going to drive the prices of them back up again.
Fuck my life I didn't want one anyway
>>2739755
I thought video formats were pretty stable by now?
For horrible examples of improper archiving you should look at early digital audio formats. Actually, even some later digital audio formats.
Tfw some of your favorite movies from 2014 and last year were shot on film. Heck even starwars was on 35mm
When I worked restoring + digitizing old negatives, every once in a while would show up 50+ years old negatives stored in a envelop or drawer -- with no signs of deterioration. B/W film that was been well developed is very very stable. Color negatives are not. Reversal film is also very good, but will fade if it's not stored away from light.
Cost-wise, sometimes it's cheaper to shoot 16mm b/w than renting modern equipment + color correction. But that's not for amateur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8yg2m08oHU&ab_channel=Topsafe
>>2739755
>storing film is cheap and the technology to play it back doesn't get obsolete like software. While archiving video requires constant transfer to newer and newer formats, with the possibility of quality loss in each recoding.
extremely bogus.
The entire point of digital data storage at a very basic level is that there is no degradation from copying. That's in stark contrast to analog formats which inherently degrade with each generation. It's arguable whether or not digital or film is better for the initial production (I like film) but the argument that digital archival is somehow more difficult than film storage is absurd.
>>2739930
>the argument that digital archival is somehow more difficult than film storage is absurd.
It isn't, in a practical way. Though theoretically you're correct; historically the best methods of archiving film are very well known and tried for true, and also, they're comparatively very cheap. On top of that, digital has seen a series of formats being deprecated in short time-frame; and the technologies used in digital archiving are generally dependent on the manufacturers of the media, and manufacturers increase this dependency every new generation; while that, film archival procedures are widely spread and easily replicable. It is not a matter whether one technique is inherently better than the other -- it's about the current state of things. I'd guess no studio wants to be dependent on a technology they don't own, to access their own material.
>>2739755
Film can be stored for a hundred years forgotten in a box and then still played back, but once it degrades, it's gone for good.
Digital images are subject to much faster format and media degradation, but if they're taken care of, they can literally last forever with no loss of quality.
So pick whatever suits your needs. Super8 is awful in general, though.
>>2739941
If you're serious about archiving digital footage, you're gonna convert it to a simple royalty-free uncompressed lossless format. You can even include a text file with instructions on how to decode the format.
That way, even if your files are found by aliens 5000 years into the future they'll be able to play it back perfectly.
Digital archiving also has the redundancy advantage: you can store the exact same copy in different media (tapes, hard drives, DVDs) and in different places at the same time.
>>2739943
Better than the vertical smartphone videos.
>>2739755
the storage argument is bullshit. you still could store the digital master on film, if you want. this would still be cheaper than shooting the entire movie on film. even if you want to keep some outtakes etc.
besides, there are some very stable options for digital data storing. like cristals etc. and the format transcoding is a joke. if you use an uncompressed pixel-map format, every script-kiddy in any future can write a script to transcode it without any loss.
so, I tell and guarantee you this, the only reason high-end studios considdering film is BECAUSE it is more expensive, and they can get more distance to the mid-tier producers, who nowadays can easily afford to produce with the same quality equipment .. when it is digital.
like someone said: analogue is the new bio .. which just means it will be a high-class technology in future, because you must be able to afford it.
If you don't use film, you are scientifically proven to be an attention-whoring, instagram-filtering pseudo photographer.
Name a single digital """photographer""" who can hold up against Ansel Adams of Brian Duffy
>>2740474
At least with a 4:3 aspect ratio you're not as a big of a screwup if you hold the camera sideways.
I usually just ask for a telecine conversion and say shove the negatives where the sun doesn't shine to appeal to digi/filmfags so there's no salt.
>>2740490
>this would still be cheaper than shooting the entire movie on film.
I haven't worked on high-end studios, probably never will, but for small-to-mid-sized productions, sometimes is cheaper to shoot film than to rent top-notch digital equipment + color correction. With b/w film, once you develop it and telecine it, you're pretty much done. And film equipment is very cheap these days...
>>2740490
It isn't because the storage is stable or the file format, it's the nature of the media itself. Even just talking hard drives, filesystems have changed, OSes have changed, hardware interfaces have changed and the hard drives themselves have changed.
You can update this stuff, but that costs money.
>>2740474
Even Hitler is better than vertical smartphone videos.
>>2740532
No, you can't into computer. It's possible to store the data in a raw format that's independent of filesystem or OS and could trivially be reverse-engineered by any future technician.
>>2740609
Not really. A format specification can be filesystem independent, but actual saved data can't be. You have to have something to map the data to discrete files, unless you want to use separate physical media for each image.
And sure, it wouldn't be very technically difficult to re-implement a documented but obsolete filesystem, but it would be extremely expensive to actually hire someone to do it.
>>2740609
You know jack shit about computers. I don't even know where to start in responding to your post, since it's so incredibly clueless.
First of all, a computer isn't your fucking camera, so through your notions of 'raw' out the fucking window. If you mean uncompressed, you can also fuck off. Compression doesn't even mean what you think it means.
I don't know how you expect to store files in a filesystem independent way, since a filesystem provides the way to actually access the files. And this isn't even including the hardware access, which is a completely different story.
And here's another tip. You don't want anything to be 'reverse-engineered', as that's fucking retarded. You fucking document the file format like a fucking champ so the next 'technician' down the line doesn't have to try to figure out what 'intuitive' way that you organized the data. This is why standards exist, you fucking ass nugget.
>>2740762
It sounds like you're not capable of understanding, but let me try to give you some hints.
Do you know what happens if you write directly to an address on a storage device?
Do you know what happens if you read back that address?
Do you know what's different between doing that with the storage device formatted or unformatted?
Do you even understand how a utility like dd works?
