Dangers of Digital Technology

[Ektagraphic]

To Quote the Wilhelm Imaging Research book, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs

"....Number of Years before "Just Noticeable" Fading will occur....."

KODACHROME FILMS
Temperature in degrees Fahrenheit 80 75 40 35
Years of storage 65 95 1300 1900

Some places like the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum store all of their film at zero degrees Fahrenheit. Those Kodachromes will last for a long while!

[VideoFred]

that's great i can sleep tonight

I bet your dreams are in Standard8 Kodachrome, at 16fps

fred -don't mean to make it a battle

Yes, I see now.. Sorry for mentioning this. :oops:

Enjoy your films, Standard!

Fred.

[VideoFred]

This issue is a strong motivator to use open source programs and codecs.

Yes it is!

Over the years I have downloaded lots of open source stuff.

I have made a special 'videotools' folder. It contains all kinds of open source progs, players and codecs like MplayerClassic, Huffyuv, ffdshow, Avisynth, virtualDub etc.... The size of this folder is 2,39GB and it contains everything I need.... For free! It takes me only a few minutes to copy and install this stuff on a new computer.

Fred.

[VideoFred]

Some places like the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum store all of their film at zero degrees Fahrenheit. Those Kodachromes will last for a long while!

Yes, you have a strong point here of cource. Kodachrome is the best indeed. All the others are slowly fading out. I have here lots of 1970's Fujichrome and it already begins to fade out...

Fred.

[8mm]

I just thought of paper prints. The photographs that is at my home photographed in the 1970´s and 60´s have as long as I can remeber when I started looking on them always been reddish, and they dont seem to have faded any more in the last years. But the paper prints from the 80`s and 90´s, that now are as old as the prints from the 70´s were in the 90´s, don´t seem to have faded anything yet. Can it be so that some photographs regardless if they are prints, slides or films only fades to a certain degree and don´t fade anymore after that? Just something I have be thinking on, correct me if I am wrong.

[Ektagraphic]

Paper prints are a whole diffrent animal. Current ones should last a while, but ones of 20 years ago...not so much. Ilfochromes/Cibachromes have always lasted.

[mr_x]

i use and enjoy digital all the time, especially when sharing imagery over the internet, but no longer take it quite as seriously as i used to - all my edit software has 'bad days' now and then, burning up hours of time, but at the end of the day to me it's just excellent cybertech, because i have the real thing - acetate film and real film cameras! - thank goodness! ;)

R

[adamgarner]

Here's the white paper on cd/dvd longevity and it's non-acceptance as an archival format.

http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs ... gGuide.pdf

technology inherently progresses. With progress comes new algorithms and storage media. The argument that one simply transfers data to the next format is flawed. Consider a film transferred from celluloid, to VHS, to DVD, to Bluray. The bottle neck is that you've got a VHS image (yuck), compressed to .mpeg2, uprezzed to H.264. Can you image the soup you'd end up with?

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

The argument that one simply transfers data to the next format is flawed. Consider a film transferred from celluloid, to VHS, to DVD, to Bluray.

Well that has obviously nothing to do with copying data. The VHS tape is, and has always been, a format that is not digital and cannot be copied with the same accuracy as a digital copy.

You should compare copying the digital content from a DVD to another DVD, or to a Blu-ray disc.

[adamgarner]

Fair enough. The point I was trying to make is that digital typically uses some compression algorithm.

Moving from from algorithm to algorithm will inherently cause data loss.

If your "best" copy of a film is DVD quality, it will be compressed to mpeg2. Any further format copying (say to holigram-DVD) will be stuck at mp2. If you copied that to bluray, now you've got mp2+h.264 algorithms. More data loss.

All this is to say that an analog copy has more longevity.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology special publication 500-252 illustrates this point nicely. This is an excerpt, but the whole white paper is a value to read to understand the "archival" issue in it's entirety. Love this discussion!


"Among the digital media, prerecorded and write-once optical discs are more stable than digital magnetic tape. Neither optical discs nor magnetic tape, however, is as stable as microfilm or paper. With proper care, microfilm and non-acidic paper can last for centuries, while magnetic tape lasts only a few decades (Van Bogart 1995). Just as film types can vary in years of usefulness, one disc type can also last longer than another. Temperature and humidity conditions can markedly affect the useful life of a disc; extreme environmental factors can render discs useless in as little as a few days.

Media deterioration is but one aspect of the preservation challenge. A potentially more immediate threat is technological obsolescence. Technological advances will no doubt make current optical disc types obsolete within several years. If the software currently used to interpret the data on optical discs becomes unavailable, a migration or emulation technology will be needed to access the data. Also, if the current disc-drive technology becomes unavailable, and if disc drives produced in the future lack the backward compatibility to play today's discs, the information on the discs will likewise be inaccessible. Film and paper are much more stable in this regard, as human language does not change as rapidly as computer software, hardware, or the media format. “Ink on paper,” for example, has been used for centuries, and film has not changed significantly over the years.

The importance of ensuring that information can be read by future generations cannot be overstated. It is vital to have in place a preservation strategy that guarantees the sustainability of the collection for as long as possible. The computer-user “industry standard” for data storage on removable digital media has changed considerably over the past few decades (TASI 2002). As shown in Figure 1, digital media used as recently as 20 years ago are already incompatible with most of today's systems."

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

Fair enough. The point I was trying to make is that digital typically uses some compression algorithm.

Yes, uncompressed is just huge.

Moving from from algorithm to algorithm will inherently cause data loss.

If your "best" copy of a film is DVD quality, it will be compressed to mpeg2. Any further format copying (say to holigram-DVD) will be stuck at mp2. If you copied that to bluray, now you've got mp2+h.264 algorithms. More data loss.

But if you stay in the same algorithm you won´t loose anything, no data loss.

You don´t need to convert to H.264 for Blu-ray, you can keep the same mpeg compression without fully re-rendering or re-compressing to mpeg2 for Blu-ray (if you have proper DVDs to begin with).

I actually tried it just now, just to be sure. No re-compression was needed. :mrgreen:

[adamgarner]

True in itself, yes, that digital to digital copies lose no data.

But over the course of only 20 or so years we know that the "best" and most "state of the art" compression algorithms expire.

One can't assume that a perfect copy of a DVD in 100 years will be readable as the compression will be a century old, as will the media format. So how do you future proof it?

I guess copy it to the next "new" accepted digital format of the times. Therein lies the issue. Yeah?

[mr_x]

Here's the white paper on cd/dvd longevity and it's non-acceptance as an archival format.

http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs ... gGuide.pdf

technology inherently progresses. With progress comes new algorithms and storage media. The argument that one simply transfers data to the next format is flawed. Consider a film transferred from celluloid, to VHS, to DVD, to Bluray. The bottle neck is that you've got a VHS image (yuck), compressed to .mpeg2, uprezzed to H.264. Can you image the soup you'd end up with?

'storage ok for 30 years' at page 13 - that's pretty ironic in light of that Domesday project: researchers still use Domesday as an important reference for place name etymology and so forth, am item compiled by hand over 900 years ago: digital archiving says something to us about our culture in the late 20th/early 21st century?

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

But over the course of only 20 or so years we know that the "best" and most "state of the art" compression algorithms expire.

Yes, the "state of the art" compression algorithm of today will not be the hottest option the year 2050.

But I am pretty certain that future computers will still be able to read and decompress mpeg2 compressed material, and movie-DVDs (the file structure and menu system). Why? Because we have such a huge amount of DVDs today, and adding a decoder to a computer should be pretty easy. There will be a demand for it.

One can't assume that a perfect copy of a DVD in 100 years will be readable as the compression will be a century old, as will the media format. So how do you future proof it?

I guess copy it to the next "new" accepted digital format of the times.

Yes. I wouldn´t assume that I can read the actual disc in 100 years, but I do assume that I will be able to play the content from the DVD (if I copied the content to the next container, be it Blu-ray, hologram-ray or a flash drive the size of a fingernail with 1000TB space).

Mpeg and jpeg are so widely used today that future computers really should be able to play/decode the files. I mean a computer that cannot read jpeg files... would probably not be a huge sale success.

[mr_x]

trouble is - when dinosaurs and ciné film ruled the earth, folks probably thought that technology would go on forever as a form of 'mainstream' - now folks are finding basic things like belt drives are becoming non-existent. i have jpegs from 2000 which will not open - the furthest i got was a message telling me the files were 'truncated', whatever that means? i have also edited dv where frames have become unstable or corrupted (whatever that means?) - when i spot something dodgy like that i just delete the whole section straight away before it floors the entire project - the digital age is a wonder but it can also be a nightmare at times