Is the future film?
It was only the other week that I was writing about my music format crisis, but it seems there is a wider technological crisis going on that I hadn’t even thought about. This time it’s in my other love, cinema.
This article in the New York Times explores the impact of digital technology on our filmed heritage. In a nutshell, film stock keeps well and is cheap to store, and digital isn’t. It costs about US$12,514 a year to store a digital master compared to US$1,059 to keep a conventional film master.
The article suggests that the heady combination of cost and inevitable technology shifts (basically not being able to easily upgrade digital film back-ups) could mean that in the future it might be easier to access easily preserved pre-digital films than current ones.
Obviously there is an upside to this (we’ll always have Jimmy Stewart but not neccessarily Tom Hanks) but it means that huge swathes of our current culture could one day be ‘digitally extinct’. Pity really.