I fully agree! Film needed storage centers with quite some technical support too, like constant temperature and humidity, to be preserved to the degree we know today.

Compare this to a piece of Super 8 from your (grand)father you found under the roof, having been exposed to heat and cold and high humidity and maybe even some rain coming through…

The latter is more like the single hard disk with your project on it.

film is not fragile... digital is... can you read computer data from the 80's? well if you go ebay you might find some crappy spectrum computer and have a try... will you have an sd card reader and h.264 in 40 years... i doubt it.. but film will always be a physical transparency. when they say film can last 100 years... they mean without ANY LOST AT ALL. .just the same as it is today.. they don't say 200 because we don't know it yet...maybe... we'll have to wait and see. We have wood from old egypt! maybe some might find citizen kane in the future.. and realize there are images... do you think they would understand your ultra fast class10 sd card in the year 4000?

@Fulgencio

It is ill logic.
I have all necessary files from before 1990. I can also read any 3.5 or 5.25" (btw, many of my 5.25" discs work ok).
No one will be storing digital data on old medium, as this is DIGITAL DATA. So you can copy them any time and have many EXACT copies.

@JPB1138 Man, it's hard to believe Ernest Borgnine is still going strong. Me personally I saw him resurface in the movie "Red" (I think) and I was like What? been seeing him pop up every now and then since (91 years old).

Anyways...@50% digital screenings of last year's Hollywood movies I give film at least 5 years before it goes the way of the Do-Do Bird.

But how many films from modern cinema are copied to three color-separated B/W silver halide negatives?The best way of long term storage for motion images known of today. Sweden does it for some of Bergman's films…

In practice, conservation of cultural values is not a technical, but an economical and/or political question. Maybe our culture isn't worth it, if we don't value it. How much of all the Youtube noise will be worth to be readable in 500 years? Even for the best movies of today, who decides what to copy and who pays?

@nomad Good point. At the BBC, a lot of stuff wasn't archived (I'm talking radio as well as TV) simply because at the time it was recorded, people didn't know what would be of interest to future generations. So for example, the BBC doesn't have much interview material of "ordinary" people complaining about shortages during World War II because it wasn't thought of as "interesting" so it simply got junked. Unfortunately, often the ordinary stuff about everyday life is the most interesting and also the least likely to be kept. If I ever find an old newspaper, to me it's the adverts that give more of a clue into daily life, than the news articles - and probably the reverse of what people at the time thought would be interesting.

In radio, most stuff goes out live and is never recorded. In television, a lot of early video tapes got recorded over to save money (because it costs to store stuff as well as buy new recording media). However, at the end of the 1990s the BBC made a decision to use D3 (digital video tape) as their archive format of choice. Within a few years the format became obsolete.

Other stuff was stored on film, but only transferred to electronic media if requested (and paid for by a production department). Hence, production researchers will tend to use what's already been transferred by other departments, because it's more expensive, risky and time-consuming to speculatively transfer from an old format when there's a more convenient alternative already available. As a result we see the same old clips.

As well as planned archiving, some of the stuff we now have is purely accidental - for example, we have recordings of the early live TV experiments from the 1930s because Baird's "live" TV was recorded on film, developed and fixed and then scanned mechanically and transmitted. It was delayed 54 seconds by the developing / fixing process, but thanks to that very complex system, we do still have film of that early stuff.

You can't keep everything - and it comes down to economics, together with a bit of guesswork, luck, and the occasional person who records something that later becomes of interest to people.

The other important thing about archiving is that you have to be able to find the stuff. So if you haven't tagged it well with metadata, you won't find it easily. In other words, the quality of what you have in an archive also depends on the quality of the metadata you tagged it with, because if you can't find it, it might as well not exist. Quite often the metadata might not be that useful because the person responsible was in a hurry or moved on to another project.

Finally whether you store stuff physically or on a bunch of servers, someone has to pay for the power and security to keep that data available long-term.

I realise this is not about "film" but I hope it raises some of the issues around archiving.

film is dead, we are to reproduce better results on digital formats.

Not sure when Rodriquez gave this talk but Once Upon a Time in Mexico was released in 2003 so figure it was around there. He's been on the vanguard of this since then and going back to El Mariachi, his technique has been about finding new ways to do things.

Ultimately...film won't die until there's not enough DPs or directors ordering film to keep making it's manufacture profitable. Just going by gut instinct...I'd say 25 years and no more film will be produced because the number of orders will no longer be enough.

LA Weekly has some emotional comments on it http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood/

Movie Studios Are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film. But the Consequences of Going Digital Are Vast, and Troubling By Gendy Alimurung Thursday, Apr 12 2012

Shortly before Christmas, director Edgar Wright received an email inviting him to a private screening of the first six minutes of Christopher Nolan's new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. Walking into Universal CityWalk's IMAX theater, Wright recognized many of the most prominent filmmakers in America — Michael Bay, Bryan Singer, Jon Favreau, Eli Roth, Duncan Jones, Stephen Daldry. If a bomb had gone off in the building, he thought, it would have taken out half of the Directors Guild of America. (snipped)

I rememeber when I bought Nolan's Dark Knight on Blu Ray...I thought, "Man I got my 42" 1080p TV...this is gonna be great." Then I saw the movie and it looked....bad is too harsh, but it didn't look as good as I remembered in the theater. It was most evident in the Joker confronting the Mafia group....it looked bad. I thought, "Why does this look so bad?"....grain....35mm film grain. I HATED that noise in the picture. By contrast, all the Imax footage looked spectacular. Won't miss film once it's gone.

As for "small theaters"...the Alamo Drafthouse started as ONE screen in Austin, TX around 10 years ago and they now have over 20+ screens in Austin alone with franchises in 3 other cities with a New York location opening soon. How are they expanding when other theaters are closing? Because they are run by movie lovers for movie lovers and while they have film projectors at some of their theaters, the newest Austin location is all 4k digital projectors. They create an environment that you want to experience, while most other theaters are at best adequate and usually annoying.

When I saw Mission Impossible 3 at another theater...they didn't move the curtains to the side for the 2:35:1 ratio and I had to go out and tell them THREE times before they moved the curtains. That would never happen at the Drafthose. Those that can adapt, do, those that can't die. Won't miss them when they're gone either.

Fox has just announced they will be ending all 35mm film distribution within two years. The beginning of the end continues...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cinemacon-2012-fox-35mm-john-fithian-chris-dodd-distribution-digital-exhibition-315688

A few months ago, I believe ARRI announced that they stop making film cameras in a few years (6 iirc), and they mentioned I think 15 odd years of service and parts beyond that.

here is a link to an article about the announcements http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/film-fading-to-black

That's not the article I originally read .. and it may have been aaton or another manufacturer .. that mentioned service periods

this thread: film is out and digital is in.. because it suits me and because I said it (I've never touched film, but never mind that)