From: Freya (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Aug 21 2005 - 21:36:53 PDT
Hiya Jeff, while your idea seems nice in theory, it
would seem to mostly make things worse rather than
better with regard to archiving material.
One big upside with regard to the idea is that if
Canyon or somewhere was to burn to the ground
tommorow, then we could still extract copies of films
from the distributed hard disks, however, the
distributed hard disks will probably contain more
popular works, and I expect it is the least popular
works that are most in danger of being lost.
You would still also need the original films somewhere
in order to scan them. You would probably also need a
hell of a lot of digital storage, although I suppose
that might be a matter of time.
You mention having a stack of DVD's and I guess that
might work better. I don't know what kind of storage
would be needed to store a movie in your suggested
format but if it could be put on a blue ray disc then
maybe the films could be distributed on glass mastered
blue ray roms, which might then last a while and be
less ephemerol than the contents of a hard disk.
The thing is that this whole system becomes more
complicated and more nasty (from an archival point of
view) than 16mm prints are at present although in time
we are sure to need this system.
> You'd scan films at a resolution of 1200 x 1600 (vs.
> the 1080 x 1440
Would this really be enough to capture all the
resolution in a standard 16mm film? Is that about a 1K
scan?
Theres a lot of discussion about as to whether a
telecine of S8 to High Definition tape is pointless as
the resolution of S8 is not that much more than that
of standard definition. Nobody is really sure if this
is
true or not in practice tho. I suspect a scan at High
Definition would be better myself, as I have seen a
DVD projection of a film at a multiplex (they played
it at the wrong aspect ratio too!!) and you could
really see the pixels. If it was a high definition
scan then it seems like you wouldn't see the pixels as
easily, just film grain which is obviously much nicer.
You might argue from the point of view of the medium
being part of the film, that the grain is part of the
information too and that it would be nicer to capture
it better! ;)
I expect what you are suggesting would just about
capture standard 16 films and wouldn't be enough by a
long shot for S16 or 35mm.
Film is actually a really good medium for storing lots
of information over a long period of time, but of
course I don't need to tell you that, as I'm sure you
know a lot more about this subject than I do! :)
I feel the longer we can hold onto the films the
better as the technology for capturing the information
digitally will get better and cheaper over time.
OTOH I'm personally really glad that Pip is making
Blue Ray disks of Kenneth Anger because that means
that maybe there will be lots of high resolution
copies of those films out there which will help them
survive if something happens to the actual films or if
people forget that the films of Kenneth Anger are
special.
It's a shame that it is too late for most of the films
of Theda Bara.
love
Freya
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