IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2014 - 43

not just in the movie world but also in government, medicine,
science, and the oil-and-gas industry. Not surprisingly, the report concluded that each of these enterprises faces similar issues with digital data, and nobody has yet come up with a good
long-term solution. A follow-on report in 2012 examined digital
archiving for independent filmmakers, documentarians, and
nonprofit archivists, who are in even worse shape because they
lack the financial wherewithal and organized infrastructure of
the major studios.
This is not the first movie-preservation crisis. Before the industry switched to fire-resistant "safety film" in the 1950s, motion
pictures were shot on highly flammable nitrate-based film, which
generates its own oxygen while burning and is therefore nearly
impossible to extinguish once ignited. Early movie producers didn't really care about archiving either. Stories abound
of nitrate-film bonfires on studio lots because movies had no
perceived long-term value to justify the cost of storing them.
According to researchers at the Library of Congress, less than
half of the feature films made in the United States before 1950
and less than 20 percent from the 1920s are still around. The
early films that did survive did so largely through the efforts of
private and institutional collectors.
Attitudes changed with the introduction of home video-VHS and
Betamax, followed by DVD, Blu-ray, and now Internet streaming-
which gave movie studios a strong economic incentive to make
their content last. Older material could be sold to new audiences
every few years, and titles with a narrower appeal could remain
profitable. And so the major Hollywood studios began investing
heavily in archiving facilities, on their studio lots and in deep,
underground temperature- and humidity-stable caverns throughout the United States. These days the studios tend to save everything, including various versions of finished movies, as well as the
original camera negative film, original camera data (for digitally
captured movies), original audio recordings, still photographs
taken on set, notated scripts, and more.
As the days of analog film draw to a close, moviemakers and
archivists now must confront a host of new issues. Most of them
spring from the fact that the digital information stored in a master copy of a movie represents the movie only indirectly. Many
layers-the storage medium, the hardware and software interfaces between that medium and the computer used, that computer's operating system and its file system, the digital image and
sound file formats, the imaging and sound application software-
all need to work in concert to turn the 0s and 1s into what we
think of as a movie.
This complexity isn't a big deal over short time horizons, but
for archival purposes-considered to be 100 years or longer for
motion pictures and "the life of the Republic" for records deposited in the U.S. National Archives-it becomes a real concern.
Most computer hardware is designed for a useful life of no more
than three to five years, and most software-operating systems
and applications alike-is superseded by upgraded versions every
few years. Remember 8-inch and 5.25-inch floppy disks? There
is still some legacy hardware and software around that can read
them, but for practical purposes, those dinosaurs are extinct.

MAKING A
MOVIE, STEP
BY STEP

MOTION-PIcTurE PrOducTION has always
required many different elements to create the film
prints (and now digital files) that audiences see in
domestic and international movie theaters. Shown
here is a high-level view of these elements, colorcoded according to longevity (yellow is for working
files, gray for archived elements, and yellow with a
gray border for working files that are also archived).

Visual
effects
elements

Original
on-set
production
footage

Master files
of completed
movie for
domestic
release

Lo-res
production
footage copies
for picture
editor

Master files
of outtakes

Master files
of completed
movie for
international
release

Compressed
files of
completed movie
for domestic
distribution

Master files
transferred
to film for
preservation

Screen tests
and
outtakes

Other
elements for
production of
international
releases

Production
footage
backup

Also, digital storage requires active management. That is, the
data must be checked regularly for errors, multiple copies must be
maintained in different locations, technical staff must continually
refresh their skills to keep abreast of new technologies and techniques, and the electricity bill always needs to be paid. Digital
data, unlike film, cannot survive long periods of benign neglect.
The rapid obsolescence of digital technology has forced all of us
who use it into a continual process of data migration-regularly copying data collections from old media and file formats to new. You
can do that fairly easily when you replace your old laptop with
a new one, but the process does not scale up well to collections
measured in tera- or petabytes. Copying and reformatting masses
of data that size quickly becomes impractical.
To give a crude example, just moving a petabyte of data (that's
1 billion megabytes) over a gigabit Ethernet connection takes
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