[game_preservation] iPhone Game Preservation

[Henry Lowood]

Andrew,

Boy, I am coming across as a wet blanket in this discussion, but ...

Andrew Armstrong wrote:

>

>

> Films also have the future advantage of going all-digital, which will 

> cut the preservation costs there down significantly.

Actually, in the near- to mid-term, this is significantly RAISING the 
cost of preservation.   I have seen a report by the archivist of AMAS 
(from about two years ago), which put the cost of industrial-strength 
management of current-gen digital-film masters in the seven figures 
range -- for one title!  I think he was using the example of the most 
recent Spiderman film, which generated a digital master that was 
something like 2 TB in size.  The bit-depth of theater-quality film, 
plus various tracks of audio and other information, results in a huge 
bitstream.  His point was that studios are likely only to bear these 
costs while films make money, so there is real danger of loss.

Comparatively, storing a canister of film is cheap.  Even archives of 
nitrate masters (and I have been to a couple) in what are essentially 
concrete warehouses seem inexpensive by comparison, at least on a 
per-title basis.

Henry
-- 
Henry Lowood, Ph.D.
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
 Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004
650-723-4602; lowood at stanford.edu; http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood 
<http://www.stanford.edu/%7Elowood>
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