[game_preservation] iPhone Game Preservation

Henry Lowood lowood at stanford.edu
Wed Jul 29 14:52:17 EDT 2009


Andrew,

2TB is a lot for professionally managed storage solutions, which have
expensive per-kb costs, because until recent years, the primary group of
customers was law firms. They can afford to pay a lot per byte, and
their documents are small by comparison to high-resolution moving image
collections; so there is an issue of scale.

Henry

Andrew Armstrong wrote:

> 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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--
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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