Digital movies in hollywood vaults at risk?

[gaastra]

Kind of scary.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/busin ... 235851957/

[Ben]

This is an ongoing risk. I’ve had several projects where creative files are no longer readable or even openable, and another company I work with had a drive failure that means some master files on a couple of episodes of something are "stuck" on a drive that doesn’t want to work. This is why, if it can be done, film outputs are still the best backup for any master file, especially for film.

Tape is also secure, if it’s stored right, but there’s a lot of work goes into things that are just kind of put on a shelf and thought to be safe if they don’t get touched, and that can actually be the death-knell for them. Solid state storage was said to be the solution, but so far that’s been expensive, and still not sure on the longterm effects or reliability,

Of course now we have replicas and clones, and discs and streaming versions, but in terms of actual masters, It is a pretty scary situation to be sure.

[pamelapitts]

The trouble is unless they can see decent profit potential from it no one really cares that much about older stuff. We had the same with early movies, loads were gotten rid of or set of fire because storage costs money.