[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>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> game_preservation mailing list
>> game_preservation at igda.org
>> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_preservation
>>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> game_preservation mailing list
> game_preservation at igda.org
> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_preservation
>
--
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>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/game_preservation/attachments/20090729/b9620614/attachment.htm>
More information about the game_preservation
mailing list