[game_preservation] iPhone Game Preservation

[Henry Lowood]

Wow, so that's even a huge jump from the figure that was given two years 
ago.   I suppose part of the reason is that the bit-depth of the 
high-end digital film keeps going up, plus the addition of tracks for 
various purposes.  My God, 100TB.  I'll take the 50MB machinima pieces 
in the archives, thank you.

Oh, btw, the AMAS archivist also passed out a chart showing the 
incredible number of digital video formats that have been used for 
production in the movie industry.  It was literally in the dozens for 
just the past decade or so.   So that's another issue.

Henry

Andrew Armstrong wrote:

> Fair enough. Funnily I was looking up some numbers, and saw Monsters 

> versus Aliens was at the 100TB mark for production storage. Ouch, if 

> you wanted to store that at the "insane managed storage solution" price.

>

> Andrew

>

> Henry Lowood wrote:

>> 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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-- 
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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