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Topic: Venice Film Review: ‘Cinema Futures’
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Harold Hallikainen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 906
From: Denver, CO, USA
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 10-02-2016 11:50 AM
I put this in digital cinema instead of reviews by members since it's a review in Variety and deals with digital cinema and archiving film.
Harold
http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/cinema-futures-venice-film-review-1201874115/
The significant problems accompanying the analog-to-digital revolution (or coup) are voiced far better by interviewed experts than the director’s own narration.
It’s good that Michael Palm joins the ranks of directors making documentaries highlighting the significant problems accompanying the analog-to-digital revolution (or is it a coup?), but it would have been better had he allowed someone else to do the voice-over. Or even the writing of the voice-over. “Cinema Futures” is rich in excellent interviews, stuffed with important information, and bursting with unanswerable questions that need to be asked. Yet the film lacks one major element: the pleasure factor. Barely anywhere in the more than two-hour documentary is there a spontaneous, unanalytical emotional response to the joys of cinema, and without this, Palm’s doc becomes a passionless compendium that raises alarms without stoking the fire.
...
Much is made of a photo from the late 1990s showing a group of industry people gleefully advertising the death of film stock in anticipation of the premiere of “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” though it’s unlikely anyone in the picture had any idea of the scope of the revolution to come, when Yoda himself would become a mere digitized simulacrum after once being played by Frank Oz. Pity that Palm doesn’t mention Ari Folman’s criminally underrated “The Congress,” with its hard-hitting approach to this very subject.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 10-02-2016 01:19 PM
This is a better article than many I've read on the subject, though I still think it misses some valuable points.
quote: Article
The decline of Kodak is addressed, and the very real concern that, despite the company’s reassurances, the continued manufacture of film stock may not be financially viable in the near future considering how few directors continue to shoot on celluloid.
Not just the manufacture of film itself, but the chemistry, equipment and expertise needed to process it. We're now down to just one release print stock (2383) and one commercial lab (FotoKem) producing color release prints in this country. It's a very fragile supply chain. I've heard rumors that the reason we're seeing small 70mm print runs of some very forgettable movies recently is an informal industry agreement to keep that supply chain ticking over so that the ability to print 70 is still there for archival re-releases and the next Nolan or Tarantino large-scale project. If that's true, it great that this is happening, but it shows just how fragile the infrastructure is.
quote: Article
Perhaps the biggest value of “Cinema Futures” is that it makes viewers aware that digital files need to be migrated and updated every five years or they lose cohesion, whereas acetate can last over 500 years when stored in the right conditions. What still hasn’t sunk in for the general public is that, as hypothesized by conservation student Laura Alberque, the rate of digital deterioration combined with the lack of understanding that files need to be migrated means that we’ll have far fewer watchable home movies in 20 years than our grandparents had. Yet apart from a handful of Cassandras, no one appears to be screaming about this.
Firstly, most film is not stored in optimum environmental conditions. The cost of doing so, in real estate, HVAC plant and energy, is as expensive if not more so than the cost of continually migrating a digital asset, which will dwindle over time, in real terms, due to Moore's Law anyway.
I don't know if anyone has done any objective studies on this, but if they did, I suspect they'd find that digital audio-visual archival assets are not being lost due to neglect at any faster rate than film-based are. So far at least, the dire predictions of what Paolo Cherchi Usai called a "digital dark age" simply aren't happening. Even for the lowly consumer, the cost of archiving your home videos and photos on a NAS is probably no more than $50-100 a year. I'm sure that as many if not more Super 8 home movies got lost because they took up too much space in a closet, hadn't been looked at in 10 years and so were tossed.
And can anyone cite any widely distributed "born digital" theatrical movie, for which the digital asset equivalent of the cut camera negative has been lost?
quote: Article
Even if nitrate were projected (as it is at George Eastman Museum’s annual Nitrate Picture Show), the projectors themselves have changed, and it’s impossible to fully reproduce carbon arc lighting. We can look with fond nostalgia at the shimmering dust particles caught in the bright light of the projector’s throw, but in truth we’ll never be able to replicate the filmgoing experience of the past, also because photochemical emulsions are unstable. That gives them their warmth and beauty, argue Tacita Dean and Christopher Nolan, but also makes it impossible, as pointed out by Eastman curator Paolo Cherchi Usai, to pretend that any print is exactly how it was meant to be.
Excellent point and, without wanting to sound smug, one I've been making for many years. If you want the authentic experience of a 1930s movie show, you'd also need 600 people all smoking in the theater, too.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 10-03-2016 06:11 PM
quote: Leo Enticknap
I don't know if anyone has done any objective studies on this, but if they did, I suspect they'd find that digital audio-visual archival assets are not being lost due to neglect at any faster rate than film-based are
When film degrades there is at least some chance of trying to recover the imagery, depending on how bad the film negative or print has deteriorated.
With most forms of digital technology if a file has degraded at all it's often corrupt and can't be repaired. The physical volume holding the file, be it a hard disc, data tape, optical disc, etc. can also degrade from the very same storage issues that cause film to degrade. I have lost quite a few data files to both of those issues.
Another thing working against digital is proprietary file formats and proprietary applications and operating systems needed to access the digital content. I have old computer graphics files from just 20 years ago that are basically "dead" even though the data is still intact. The last 2 versions of CorelDRAW I've used (versions 17 and 18) won't open files made before version 5. Other applications wind up dying themselves. I have some Aldus Freehand art files that I can only import with very mixed results into CorelDRAW. Adobe bought Macromedia, who had Freehand at the time, and killed off Freehand development since it was a rival to their own Adobe Illustrator application. Adobe even removed Freehand import capability in their applications not long ago. There's plenty of other examples of this stuff, like the mistakes in backward compatibility Apple made with Final Cut X.
If someone wanted to do a new 4K or higher resolution update of a classic CGI effects movie like Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park they wouldn't be able to do so without re-creating many of the effects from scratch. Any effects incorporating human actors, like Robert Patrick, would be impossible to re-create since Patrick now looks quite a bit older and heavier than he did 25 years ago.
It's almost impossible to pull up the original effects assets in their original software to do anything with them. Silicon Graphics went of bust officially in 2009 and its IRIX OS was effectively dead years before that. Softimage was bought and sold a couple different times before Autodesk bought it and ceased development on it last year. Autodesk also bought Alias|Wavefront, who made Power Animator. Its DNA is the only thing still surviving today, in Autodesk Maya. It would take a lot of engineering work to port together something that would work at reviving those 20+ year old CGI assets. It's doubtful there's still enough working SGI IRIX gear to be productive in such a restoration and upgrade process.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 10-04-2016 01:50 PM
Chester Carlson's work on the photocopier took place mainly in Rochester, but I didn't know that it used any significant Kodak technologies. On the contrary, he ended up in Rochester as the result of a business partnership with one of Kodak's much smaller rivals in town.
As for Bobby's points, I agree that the preservation of hybrid movies that were mainly originated on film but included CGI intermediates from the birth of the technology could be problematic. But my understanding is that all the CGI components were filmed out at the end of the process anyway, and therefore the final result of the post-production process was an o-neg, that can be archived - and, if desired, 4K scanned - in the conventional way anyway.
But in terms of the total sweep of movie history, we'll only be talking about a small number of productions.
My question (has any major digital movie been lost?) had a production that was entirely originated and post produced digitally in mind.
The software and format/codec obsolescence issues to which Bobby refers are, I suspect, the equivalent of people simply not understanding either the long-term cultural significance of moving images, or how easy it is to lose them, during the first half of the twentieth century. That is understood now, and people making digital movies who care about their long term future know what they need to do to safeguard that future, just as they do with film.
The "digital dark age" predictions are based around the idea that we will lose a greater proportion of our moving image heritage (or a greater proportion of that deemed culturally important enough to be worth saving) once digital media becomes the dominant origination format than we will when film was. I'm sorry, but we're at least a decade past that tipping point now, and I see no evidence of that happening or being likely to happen.
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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 10-04-2016 07:56 PM
quote: Leo Enticknap
people making digital movies who care about their long term future know what they need to do to safeguard that future, just as they do with film.
Exactly! That is what is so intensely frustrating about all this hand-wringing over digital permanency: you almost can't have the conversation to begin with without assuming everybody is a moron.
I feel pretty good that my great-grandchildren will be able to see movies like Frozen, Inside Out, Ice Age et. al. for years after I am gone, because these are digital assets that will have continued value, and you can bet that there is an archive plan in place for them already, either through data migration or by transfer to a more permanent media (m-disc?), or, yes, perhaps creating a film inter-positive or b/w separations in the manner of the Fujifilm Eterna-RDS system. I would say the same thing for pictures like The Revenent, Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi, Russian Ark, Skyfall, Gravity, Avatar, etc., digitally shot films that are historically significant to cinema. Really, if many classic 70mm titles are going to go farther into the future, they will have to go as digital files; I believe that it has been established that the photochemical elements of shows like Lawrence of Arabia and My Fair Lady are not in good enough condition to take further printing. To allow the digital permanency of these titles to lapse would only be the result of a carelessness that I don't believe exists on the level of which we are speaking.
quote: Leo Enticknap
(or a greater proportion of that deemed culturally important enough to be worth saving)
On the other hand, you can go ahead and erase Dirty Grandpa, Movie 43, Kick-Ass 2, Nine Lives and Warcraft right now.
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