Variety Article on Digital Film

Perhaps the digital revolution was not all it was cracked up to be? This article in Variety about the problems facing the storage of digital cinema reveals a chink in the digital armor.

An excerpt:
As far as movies are concerned, digital, like diamonds, was supposed to be forever.

No more dyes to fade, no more film stocks to decay or catch fire. Just pristine digital data, preserved for all time, and release prints as clear and sharp as the images caught by the camera.
Just one problem: For long-term storage, digital is -- so far -- proving to be a time bomb, more permanent than sand painting but not much else.

Simply put, there's no generally accepted way to store digital "footage" for more than a few months. After that the industry is using a hodgepodge of improvised solutions, some rather costly, others not very reliable.

That looked like a small problem when digital film making was limited to low-budget indies, animation houses and tech pioneers like James Cameron and George Lucas.

Now, though, that small problem is growing geometrically as the major studios shift away from film to digital capture. Such recent releases as "300," "Apocalypto," "Zodiac" and "Superman Returns" were shot on digital. Their digital masters could be seriously degraded if the problem isn't addressed quickly.

In fact, the problem is so severe that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' Science and Technology Council warned in 2005 that within just a few years films shot with digital cameras could be lost.

Generally I have supported the spread of digital film because of the ease of production and post production. What before required a great deal of equipment can now be done, in a simpler form, on home computers. This is rapidly democratizing the film medium and make the form available to all, in much the same way as clay or paint are now available to all. That does not mean that the next Scorsese or Spielberg is going to emerge on YouTube, since studios provide the means for large scale production and distribution, but digital film does allow for more people to dabble in production and this experience will make them appreciate good films.