What happened to the "1000 year DVD?"[1] MDisc sells ceramic DVD blanks and a drive that can write them. Blanks are about $2 each, and the drive is under $100. Many newer drives can write them.[2] Any drive that can read the format can read them. Capacities to 100GB. A U.S. Navy test says it works, while all the other "archival" disks didn't survive.[3]<p>[1] <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-1000-year-dvd-is-here/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-1000-year-dvd-is-here/</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.mdisc.com/m-ready/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mdisc.com/m-ready/</a>
[3] <a href="http://site.produplicator.com/downloads/Manuals/China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://site.produplicator.com/downloads/Manuals/China_Lake_F...</a>
Archivists are in the business of preserving the past and like most people, they tend to overvalue what they are familiar with. But most old art, like all art, is mediocre and very much of its time. After that, it quickly loses its value. And therefore preserving old art is only somewhat useful. Some works are good enough to stand the test of time, but those are in no danger of disappearing, because continuing interest means that natural commercial forces keep producing copies from generation to generation.<p>Even if all the archivists of the world lost their minds for a generation, we would be in no danger of losing the works of the Beatles, Hemingway, and Scorsese. What we might lose are large numbers of works by their less accomplished contemporaries. Would that be a real loss? Yes. A big one? No. And that's why it's simply not that important that the archivists succeed in preserving everything.
Hollywood archivists must be pretty bad at their jobs then. The data they archive, if digital, has a fixed size. Cost per byte to store digital data goes only one direction, far, far down. Thus, cost to store digital data which is fixed in size, goes only down.<p>Exception may be film where you may want to scan with better scanners every once in a while to extract more detail. Even in this case, storage cost goes down faster than scanning technology increases in resolution.<p>12TB 255MB/S read/write 3.5" drive is $700 currently. (HGST HE12) That's currently state of the spinning disc art.<p>backblaze.com is storing over 250 million GB currently.<p>Thus, regardless of the complications of redundancy and detecting bitrot, Storage shall always outpace archival for all things digital. For one's getting cheaper every day, and the other is fixed in size.<p>You could open source it and run a torrent seed, I bet the world would be more than happy to help store, remix, improve what you've archived. minus those pricey software editing tools of course, because the studio may not own those.
> He quickly realized, though, that film “didn’t have the sensitivity to capture the scenes we were trying to shoot, especially the things we shot at dawn and dusk,” as he told an interviewer.<p>Sounds like he simply didn't have the right cameras. As far as I remember Barry Lyndon was shot without electric light; but Kubrick had to use some rather special lenses (ex-NASA i think).