Re: Hollywood's Digital "Film" Storage Troubles.

On Dec 24, 4:16 pm, Romeo Rondeau <evey...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

This is why you need to plan, Scott... When IDE drives get scarce
(actually when nothing can read USB 2.0 or firewire, those external
boxes will outlast IDE internals), you copy them to the new format.

You always need a plan. When quad video recorders get scarce, you copy
to C-Format or U-Matic. When U-Matic gets scarce, you copy to S-VHS.
When S-VHS gets scarce, you copy to DV or maybe to a pile of DVDs. The
problem is that things get scarce too soon, so the cost of maintaining
the archive keeps rising. It's not enough just to pay for the air
conditioning in the vault, you have to pay for new media, new playback
equipment, and the labor for making fresh copies.

And the issue wasn't about whether it was possible to keep an archive,
it was about the cost of doing so.

Or you could pay a company to store them
for you that will be able to deliver copies at will. It's a service and
it has value, just like when you transfer an old format to a new one.

And that's where the money goes. It doesn't matter who does the work
or owns the equipment, the one with the content to be preserved has to
pay the bill.

If it's not that important, then don't keep it. Nothing different from
transferring an LP to CD, just different gear.

That's the part that's hardest to accept. We keep it because we can.
And we restore what we can. Today you have people with master tapes in
their close that their band recorded 30 years ago and they get an urge
to hear them again, or make some CDs. So they go on eBay and buy a
consumer tape deck with the wrong format heads and maybe the wrong
speed, don't align it, and go on rec.audio.pro and ask if it's OK to
play back their 15ips half track tape at 7.5 ips on quarter track
heads and pitch shift it, and, oh, is there a way to get the channels
balanced again, and what's a good noise reduction algorithm? and does
anyone make a Dolby plug-in?

The $500-$2000 per reel shops have all that stuff and know how to use
it, but the guy with the band in 1970 will quickly decide that it's
not worth that to hear his old tapes again. Maybe he still has a copy
of the LP or cassette.


.

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