Film industry pros sweat the possibility that many digital files will eventually become unusable — an archival tragedy reminiscent of the celluloid era.
Martin Scorsese: “The preservation of every art form is fundamental.”
For the movie business, these are valuable studio assets — to use one example, the MGM Library (roughly 4,000 film titles including the James Bond franchise and 17,000 series episodes) is worth an estimated $3.4 billion to Amazon — but there’s a misconception that digital files are safe forever. In fact, files end up corrupted, data is improperly transferred, hard drives fail, formats change, work simply vanishes. “It’s a silent fire,” says Linda Tadic, CEO of Digital Bedrock, an archiving servicer that works with studios and indie producers. “We find issues with every single show or film that we try to preserve.” So, what exactly has gone missing? “I could tell you stories — but I can’t, because of confidentiality.”
Specialists across the space don’t publicly speak about specific lost works, citing confidentiality issues. So, only disquieting rumors circulate — along with rare, heart-stopping lore that breaches public consciousness. One infamous example: In 1998, a Pixar employee accidentally typed a fatal command function, instructing the computer system to delete Toy Story 2, which was then almost complete. Luckily, a supervising technical director who’d been working from home (she’d just had a baby) had a 2-week-old backup file.
Experts note that indie filmmakers, operating under constrained financial circumstances, are most at risk of seeing their art disappear. “You have an entire era of cinema that’s in severe danger of being lost,” contends screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, a board member of the National Film Preservation Foundation. His cohort on the board, historian Leonard Maltin, notes that this era could suffer the same fate as has befallen so many silent pictures and midcentury B movies. “Those films were not attended to at the time — not archived properly because they weren’t the products of major studios,” he says.
Excerpt from:
“It’s a Silent Fire”: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis
BY GARY BAUM, CAROLYN GIARDINA. MARCH 15, 2024
Can you imagine digitising the Mona Lisa painting and destroying the original? The Magna Carta? The British North America Act? 1798 Act of Parliament to create London District? The answer to maintaining records is not paper or digital – it is both!
Committee To Establish a Middlesex County Archives
Digitisation is for accessibility, not preservation.
Therefore, in what form should archival records be maintained? Paper or digital? The answer is simply both!
If there are paper copies of the digitized records, they must be maintained in proper archival conditions. Even digital records must be properly maintained with proper archival conditions.
Paper records historically have been the original records. Despite conditions, over centuries, paper records have survived. The Middlesex Centre Archives has letters that date from the 1820s. They are fragile but still readable. Minute books from organisations such as the London Township Agricultural Society (1851) are very readable. It is important to keep and maintain these paper records in proper archival conditions. Someday digital copies may be made, but retention of the paper copies is important.
Paper or Digital?
One of the greatest arguments for this case is the 1921 Canada Census records. In 1955, the Public Records Committee authorised the Dominion Bureau of Statistics to microfilm the original paper records and destroy the originals. Only a microfilm copy exits. The microfilming was not of a consistent quality and resulted in some unreadable images. One cannot refer to the original paper records for clarification. The scanned images found on the Library and Archives Canada website are copies from the microfilm with the unreadable images still unreadable. In hindsight, always 20-20, the original paper records should have been maintained inorder to have both copies available.
Arguments have been made that only digital copies are required, especially in today’s digital world. They can be backed up to the Cloud or maintained in some form on a computer data system. History has taught us that having only one system available is always fallible. Nothing is for certain. As fires, floods and neglect have destroyed paper records in the past, technology is the greatest enemy of today’s digital world. It is not a matter if hardware will crash, but simply when! Think of changes in different record-keeping devices that have occurred over the past 50 years. Digital records need to be constantly backed up, and when the document programme is changed and/or upgraded, all backed-up copies need changing too. Have you tried recovering information from a 5-inch floppy disk? Not even the Cloud or other backup systems guarantee access and security. What happens when a power outage occurs or if the backup system fails? As we watch world events of hacking and wars, it is entirely possible.
Written by the Committee To Establish a Middlesex County Archives, March 2022