Future Shock The Digital Revolution – Let’s See What Survives the Next 25 Years By Mark Woods Director of Photography ©2000

First off let’s get something straight, electronic image acquisition is not, I repeat, is not filmmaking. It is something else. “Movie,” I’ll buy, but not filmmaking. That settled, it would be a good idea to think about what it is. Electronic acquisition generally is digital now, and certainly will be in the near future. On some productions, it seems to bring out a certain unpleasant attitude and a more disorganized approach to storytelling. I think the unpleasant attitude steams from the director feels s/he can eliminate the team approach to traditional filmmaking (like ditching the Director of Photography) and truly be the auteur. And the disorganization comes from the same individual’s lack of ability to clearly communicate his/her ideas. In spite of that, it seems to be an emerging art form, and it’s very hip to predict its success. One thing it isn’t, is a replacement for the business of filmmaking, or film itself. There are too many paradigms in place for the business people to want to change. In some ways, this is the upstart pimply-faced kid who occasionally produces something interesting and maybe even art, but ultimately, disposable art. It’s very much like email. This reality doesn’t change the hype and advertising that promotes the thinking that “film is dead.” If film is dead, then we’ve lost a great tool that allows us to see not only the films of the past and present, but the old home movies that are a window to the past. In the electronic realm, that simply isn’t possible without content migration, ideally of uncompressed files.

I think many people confuse content origination with non-traditional distribution, i.e., the Internet and the spin-off configurations we’re moving through on our way to convergence of TVs and computers. At the moment, the biggest eye opener is AOL being the senior partner in the merger with Time-Warner. At one time, Time-Warner could’ve bought AOL for chump change, no more. This type of paradigm shift makes many people uneasy. That’s understandable, particularly in the onslaught of hype and advertising telling us the future is digital. Image origination must be digital too. Stands to reason, but sadly (for the electronic suppliers) it isn’t true. One of the trade magazines first hailed, “Film is Dead” in a headline in 1957. This has been going on a long time. Wired’s opinion might be construed as, You mean film still exists???

On the Newsweek.com website, an article “You Oughta Be in Videos,” dated January 24, 2000 sums up the attitude quite well. It begins with reference to the hubbub in Park City, “the synergy-mad suites at Sony Pictures…” The main points of the article are the access these “filmmakers” have because DV cams are so cheap. It covers both sides of the “raise the bar attitude,” and the “release a tidal wave of amateurs” theories. But buried in there is the cautionary note that many of the electronic imaged productions lack distribution, and some producer’s worry that their possibilities for distribution are slimmer because the image is originated on tape. Many big name directors are mentioned as being fans, and of course, George Lucas leads the pack. But the one area that was not balanced was the statement that “The advantages are so many…. They start multiplying exponentially when you start with the big one, “you don’t need to light it.” I shot a DV feature, and we used a lot of lights, big lights, on the interiors and night scenes, and we didn’t have enough light for the few day exteriors we did. The day exterior contrast was way too much for the camera to handle. (BTW, you can shoot film the same way with faster emulsions, better lenses that are just as quick, with small cameras, and have a better, longer lasting image with better contrast.)

Many people, particularly directors and producers, who say that film is dead are enamored with the immediacy of the electronic image. There is a faux reality where if it looks good on a monitor, it’s okay (just don’t have more than one color monitor on the set). They feel more in control and released from the “tyranny of the cinematographer.” A member of the CML (Cinematography Mailing List) overheard this last comment, by a panelist at Sundance last year. Then there is the Dogma movement that espouses no equipment other than a light mounted on the hand-held camera that glazes producers’ eyes over with the bottom line savings on grip and electrical rentals and crews. There’s nothing wrong in shooting a production this way if it benefits the script, if there is a script. This approach is hardly new. The TV show “Cops” has been doing it for years. This is “reality” TV, or a documentary. With a script, it’s a Dogma style production. There’s nothing wrong with electronic production. But there are many short falls that I will try to clear up if the producer insists on electronic imaging. Unfortunately, like the Titanic, most of these producers only see the tip of the iceberg, the other costs are hidden.

“Big Brother,” “Millionaire,” “Real World,” “Marry A Millionaire,” “Cops,” etc. are all examples of “now” programming. We know that all programming isn’t created equal. But when the “now” programming hype and low production values encroach on mainstream films as the future, I feel many producers not only don’t understand their business, but don’t want to understand that their programs are their future assets, you might say their retirement. When this “now” programming is coupled with hype, like that surrounding George Lucas and Star Wars’ electronic origination, the digital image acquisition must appear irresistible. Many of the producers are in the “me” generation who create the “now” programming with no thought to the future. I’m sure many feel their decisions that affect the future won’t affect them since they will probably be long gone when the digital time bomb goes off. This mindset, beyond lowering the bar for what is acceptable quality, creates a buzz for the whole industry to embrace the new because it is new. And if it’s new, it must be better. It’s a sad fact that they appear to be susceptible to sales hype and “buzz” the same way they hope the audiences respond to the buzz on one of their new releases.

With “now” a programming attitude, DV acquisition is much like email. It’s disposable communication, expendable commerce, or at best, disposable art. Many of these producers and directors don’t understand what the Cinematographer along with the rest of the crew brings to a production, and that they should be treated with the respect their skills demand. On a project I shot with a director I’d known for years, he suffered a digital lobotomy, forgetting the past two 35mm production experiences we had on set. This project was one close to his heart that he couldn’t get funded, so he used one of the strengths of DV – the relatively cheap access it provided him to do his project. DV does allow more people to tell stories in a visual medium, and this is a refreshing democratic reality. But we shouldn’t confuse DV, whose original tapes will only last as long as some Treasury Bills, maybe less, with a film based industry whose libraries are worth billions, and billions more in the future. Just think about “I Love Lucy.” If Ricky Ricardo hadn’t made the choice to shoot the production with three cameras on film, it wouldn’t be in syndication today. Or consider Ted Turner and how he took the MGM library and launched all the Turner enterprises, and has ended up with AOL – a truly digital company that recognizes lasting content and production. The films and images they own can be used in any number of ways for many, many years into the future. I do love Lucy.

I look forward to the proliferation of HDTV sets since all the problems with the lower resolution of electronic acquisition will be evident. Film has a great latitude, resolution, and color representation – all qualities HDTV is designed to present. Digital projection in theatres is still some time off for a number of reasons. One is the distributors fear piracy of a digital copy. Another involves the business plan of who is going to fund the installation of the projectors. Finally, there is the pressing issue of maintenance. Anyone who is familiar with digital post-production facilities knows the number of engineers it takes to keep the machines working smoothly.

35mm film captures 6 times the resolution of HDTV and can be transferred to any future format that will have better resolution. Film isn’t a hardware dependent medium. Film has been called future-proof because it can survive a long periods of time in a state of benign neglect, and can be transferred to different future presentation technologies from the original negative, answer print, intermediate, dupe negative, or release print (if that’s all that survives). This isn’t the case for the current NTSC and PAL video formats, the added information simply doesn’t exist. A process may be developed to electronically add definition to low resolution images video images for future presentation by HDTVs – who knows, it’s possible. The DV cams don’t come close to resolution of film, although some people are of the opinion that it’s “good enough.” The next generation of HD cameras still don’t have the same amount of resolution that film does, and no one knows if their technology will be compatible with even more future technologies. Just because the image is HD and digital does not mean that it’s easily copied from one format to another. If there is any compression involved, there is the distinct possibility that the algorithms in one format won’t be compatible with algorithms in another. This issue of future technologies and formats takes us into what is achievable.

Dear Abby, on February 2, 2000 in the Los Angeles Times, ran a letter in response to “Harriet from Tampa.” The letter was to “remind (the) readers that magnetic media are surprisingly fragile. Recording artists and engineers have gone back…to discover that tapes made as recently as 30 years ago are flaking away and worthless.” Abby’s response was, “Technology has taken a giant leap in the last 100 years. It’s ironic, however, that the most reliable way of preserving the information is still on paper – a ‘technology’ that was perfected 2,000 years ago.” It is only in the popular media related press, heavy with electronic advertising, that there is a debate about how to record and preserve the material you value. My dad’s Super 8mm movies of our family growing up are still great fun to watch, while the videos he’s taken of the grand kids already suffer degradation. If you think about the electronics industry, they epitomize planned obsolescence. Their products really symbolizes the throwaway mentality in our culture – if it’s newer, it must be better.

On February 13, 2000 the Los Angeles Times had a front-page article about the Benedictine monks of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. For the past 35 years, these monks have sought out all of the medieval manuscripts in Europe, the Mid-East, and North Africa that were made before the invention of printing to archive them on film. So far they’ve done 25 million pages. There is a nice bit of tradition in this. Father John Kulas explains that the copying of manuscripts was relegated to monks, “Here you have the work of a monastic scribe who copied this text (in medieval days). And here you are, 1,000 years later, another monastic scribe recreating the manuscript in another medium so it can survive another 500 years.” They started their archival project before the digital revolution, and clearly weren’t impressed enough with it to change their archival medium. Perhaps they have a different perspective on time, and what will survives over time, than the hip people hyping digital acquisition with no thought to the future. Even if the quality were equal, there is no current method of archiving other than film. (Although there is a company, Cobblestone Software, who will digitize your project and print the results out on paper. The product is called PaperDisk and lasts as long as archival paper. But even this method, since it’s digital, is still machine dependent to “read” the paper record, while a future viewer can simply hold their images up to a light to view them.)

Finally, the Los Angeles Times Calendar section, February 15, 2000, reviewed a tape of silent film shorts based on some of Shakespeare’s plays, titled “Silent Shakespeare: Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On…” (Milestone Film & Video). The article states that over 300 shorts were made between 1899 and 1911, although only 30-40 still exist. One of the shorts, “King John,” was filmed in 70mm with the resulting excellent images. Since the shorts were on film, they’re still viewable, and were transferred to tape to be viewed on TVs.

Another article from a source within the industry is a real eye opener, “Extending Video Content Survival Beyond 25 Years – When All Odds Seem Stacked Against It,” by E. H. Zwaneveld, SMPTE Journal, Oct, 1999. The author currently chairs the Association of Moving Image Archivists Preservation Committee, is a member of the International Federation of Television Archives Project Group on “Future Television Archives” and “Metadata” amongst other committees. His point is that tape won’t last. What is important is content survival. If people persist in originating their projects on this volatile medium, there has to be a systematic approach to content migration. This is the movement of the intellectual assets off the current degrading tape onto anther tape, then it must be moved again to another tape before the current tape degrades, ad infinitum. He states that “in the quest to maximize only shot term production value, the future is often shortchanged. Instead of total tape lifecycle costs (my Italics), only the initial cost to record tape is considered.” What an insightful statement! Think about the Shakespearean shorts above. If the half-life of videotape is 15 years, and these shorts had been shot on tape, the material shot in 1899 would be approaching its half-life in 1911, and certainly not viewable, i.e. retrievable, now.

Producers who want to originate electronically are usually only looking at the bottom line, tape is (initially) cheap. But they don’t realize, or perhaps don’t care about the slippery slope they’re going down in terms of managing their visual entertainment assets. Forget the hardware issues, think about the simple fact of tape deterioration – in the best circumstances. Do you think these producers are going to archive the tapes in the manner prescribed, or even use the highest quality tapes that may survive a little better and a little longer? I know my grandfather who was a low budget exploitation filmmaker in the 1930’s didn’t care about his negatives and prints. They languished in garages for years (yet you can still retrieve the images, i.e., see them). How many producers store their tape masters in a hot closet in the office? Or at home in a non-air-conditioned garage? More than we might think. I know more than a few producers who are more concerned with the security of the storage area than the environmental aspects. Finally, how many of these people, who are in the position to decide the future, are even aware of the term “content migration?” If they work with electronic acquisition, this term will become a huge factor in their future vocabulary, if they want to maintain their programs for future revenue streams. And with technology moving forward and new forms of packaging and the convergence of the Internet and TV, there will be huge future streams of revenue from those programs that do survive. And, the programs with the highest resolution will be able to move up to the future higher resolution reality. I do love Lucy.

The aspect about all of this that amazes me is the a huge segment of the industry that’s marching blindly into the void while there is nothing wrong with the option that still works, film. Donald Waters, the past Director of the Digital Library Federation, calls the problem “a time bomb whose full impact will register only in the future.” The true believers of the DV cameras simply confront this problem with the statement that when it’s a problem, “there will be a solution.” If you think about the 20th Century, it really is the century of the engineer, there have been solutions for so many things that we have come to expect them. But this is one situation where to consign our heritage into a solution that doesn’t exist, and in fact is a volatile technology, is extremely risky.

In the future, Zwaneveld states that we can expect more fragile digital recording mediums. Have we learned anything since the disappearance of the programming originated on 2” tape? How many 1” masters are still pristine with no dropouts? According to Zwaneveld’s tutorial, most tape manufactured before 1990 is not stable because of the polyurethane binder. The number of things that can go wrong with tape is truly mindboggeling. He mentions “tribology…the science of friction, lubrication, and the wear of interacting surfaces that are in relative motion. Tribos means rubbing and rubbing must function as designed to assure reliable signal retrieval.” This is clearly not the case with film. Nothing should touch the image area on a correctly maintained image retrieval system. But even if a frame is scratched, the image is still viewable – not so with digital tape. In fact, if the tape degrades in any number of ways, the signal is not retrievable. Some of the ways tape degrades are magnetization loss, edge oxidation, tape wear, and other issues that indicate the “proximity of end-of-tape life.” Van Bogard and the U.S. National Media Lab states that through testing, the magnetic media survival, best case scenario, is 20 years – this is the best!

This is the good news. The digital intermediate is the popular name for scanning the negative into the electronic realm, ideally in a 4K file, (film is equivalent to a 5K file) to take advantage of all the electronic possibilities. Even though most productions currently scan film in a 2K file, the possibilities are really endless. These are the aspects that excite me, the ability to control color locally in the frame (think of Power Windows), or wire removal, or blending reality with surreality. This technology may become affordable enough for the mid-size budget films to use instead of a hazeltine to time and subtly shape the final film images. This is a wonderful application of the digital technology. But even this has its drawbacks. With past films, if the elements existed, they could be recomposited, “Star Wars” did it. In the digital intermediate arena, there are the same archival problems as in origination. I know of CGI artists who can’t show their work, or access it, because of platform obsolescence.

This is a time to be excited about and not be intimidated by. We need to look at the present with an effort to determine what we can offer to the future. If we choose the purely electronic, the disappearance of our contributions may be just a blip in history. There will be a void that will be filled in by inference of what existed before and what existed after. BTW, please don’t think about the sun spot storms that wiped out everything stored electronic (at a smaller scale this has already happened). In the scheme of history, it’s of very little consequence. But I’m saddened by the realization that the producer’s digital thoughts don’t understand that the papyrus their scripts are written upon will last longer than their finished programs, and our work will be lost forever.

March, 2000

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