[game_preservation] iPhone Game Preservation

[Andrew Armstrong]

Really? fair enough, they need the quality of massive files.

I'd love to see a breakdown of it, although it's barely something that 
related to the videogame world since even cutscenes are no where near 
the space of the digital-print quality needed as Jerome mentioned, and 
even if they were they are a few minutes in length. Is it 2 Terabytes? 
that's not that much space, did you mean petabytes? :)

In any case, I am sure situations will change - well, they must do, 
since the film studios need some way to make future copies of a film. A 
shame games, then, are so small, even if original art assets, files and 
code is included with the final game files. ;) Blessing perhaps rather 
then a curse.

Andrew

Henry Lowood wrote:

> 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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