Digital archiving dilemmas

Michael Cieply of the NY Times today writes about the challenges of archiving movies shot in digital form.

From the piece:

One of the most perplexing realities of a digital production like “Superman Returns” is that it sometimes generates more storable material than conventional film, creating new questions about what to save. Such pile-ups can occur, for instance, when a director or cinematographer who no longer has to husband film stock simply allows cameras to remain running for long stretches while working out scenes.

Much of the resulting data may be no more worth saving that the misspellings and awkward phrases deleted from a newspaper reporter’s word-processing screen. Then again, a telling exchange between star and filmmaker might yield gold as a “special feature” on some future home-viewing format — so who wants to be responsible for tossing it into the digital dustbin?

For now, studios are saving as much of this digital ephemera as possible, storing it on tapes or drives in vaults not unlike those that house traditional film. But how much of that material will be migrated when technology shifts in 7 or 10 years is anyone’s guess. (And archiving practices in the independent film world run the gamut, from studied preservation to complete inattention, noted Andrew Maltz, director of the academy’s science and technology council.)

AMPAS on Archiving

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just issued a report on archiving digital material. From The Hollywood Reporter's piece:

We are already heading down this digital road ... and there is no long-term guaranteed access to what is being created," said Milt Shefter, who is the project leader on the AMPAS Science and Technology Council's digital motion picture archival project. "We need to understand what the consequences are and start planning now while we still have an analog backup system available." In fact, the council already has identified instances where digital content could not be accessed after only 18 months.

Variety also has coverage. David S. Cohen writes:

The document, distributed to a variety of filmmakers and decisionmakers with a letter from Academy prexy Sid Ganis, calls for industrywide cooperation in creating storage and archiving systems that are even better than film, and in establishing unified standards for what is archived and how.

Hmmm... no sign of the document on the AMPAS site. Why not share this report openly, so that we can all work together on solutions?