Will Your Digital Film Survive 100 Years of Storage?This article is unique in two significant ways. First, I am not the author of what you are about to read; and secondly, this is very important information to anyone interested in a Film career in this present Digital Age.
The publication I hope to convince you to read is titled THE DIGITAL DILEMMA, which provides what in my estimation amounts to a Film School level education regarding Film Media with an emphasis on Digital Film Media and what it will take in cost and equipment to Archive our Films for a hundred years without loss or corruption of data or quality.
Quite frankly, if you are just getting started on your path towards a Film career, you will learn a great deal about a large body of things relevant to the industry by reading this document, information that could have otherwise taken you many years to obtain. Though it was released in 2007, the information contained within this publication is current and pertinent to this very day, and will remain pertinent for decades to come.
THE DIGITAL DILEMMA is the result of a study performed by The Science & Technology Council, a branch of the American Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, the Oscars people). A printed version would cost you $20.oo, but if you click on the Link I’ve provided for you below, it will take you to a page on the AMPAS Website where you are given there the opportunity to Download a colorful book-quality PDF version at no cost.
When you get to that page you will see that you have to Register in order to Download a copy. The Registration process is immensely simple, taking me less than twenty seconds to accomplish. This is a truly rich document, providing detailed information mixed with Film Industry History important to any Filmmaker no matter how long they’ve been in the business.
Here is just a sample of what you will find there:
“.....the goal of a digital preservation system is that the information it contains remain accessible to users over a long period of time. The key problem in the design of such systems is that the period during which such assets need to be accessible is very long – much longer than the lifetime of individual storage media, hardware and software components, and the formats in which the information is encoded.”
“Archiving of digital assets is a new challenge for the studios.”
“There is also much concern about the trend to create digital masters at 2K (only slightly better image quality than HDTV), which contains significantly less visual information than the film masters created today, or even those created 40 years ago. The fear is that projection and display technology will continue to improve, but the archived source material will produce nothing better than what can be seen on today’s display technologies.”
Excerpts from “The Digital Dilemma,” pages 13 & 14, The Science & Technology Council
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GlobeofBlogs 
Thank you sir for pointing me in the direction of this information. What I've learned in The Digital Dilemma has really opened my mind to the pitfalls of Digital Filmmaking and storage.
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