Film Lover's Lament

Jeremy wrote:

"Nicholas O. Lindan" wrote in message news:nyCTf.7708

If the backup is a slide then the image is no longer digital and
no longer relevant in a discussion about backing up _digital_
data.


Kodak has made a very good case for microfilm backups of digitized
documents--particularly those documents that are being archived for the long
term.

There are one or two small oversights in Kodak's scenario, if its
reported correctly.

They note two risks with digital archiving:

1: The image file formats now in use will almost certainly be replaced, and
the current formats may be difficult to decode in, say, 50 years.

Any responsible archive-keeping regime for digital files will naturally
be keeping track of new and potentially better storage systems, and in
that 50 years will certainly have migrated the files to new media. It's
not realistic to think that the data will be untouched for 50 years, and
then somebody will suddenly say "let's look at this here file - oh, we
can't read it"

2: The storage media will be replaced as time progresses, and the ubiquitous
CD or DVD may be difficult to read because of the unavailability of
appropriate hardware.

The same argument applies. If the storage media is replaced at
intervals, it will naturally be replaced with the then current
technology. It won't be a case of being unable to read optical media by
then if the techniques have advanced.

Microfilm stored under proper conditions has a projected life of 500 years,
and it requires only a light and a magnifier to enable it to be read. And,
the microfilmed images can always be re-digitized into whatever image
formats are currently in use at any time in the future. So an analog backup
may in fact be better for long-term storage to ensure that the file's
contents remain readable long after media and file formats have changed. We
simply do not know what the landscape will be like in two centuries. What
we take for granted today, in terms of file formats, may be virtually
unreadable then.

A mistake often made is to imagine that data will sit stored without
being accessed until, way in the future, somebody will try to read it.
In reality, somebody somewhere is always accessing stored data, and
usually wanting copies or printouts. The problems with analog backups
are obtaining hard copies, and distribution, the image or data
degradation encountered with successive copies. Hard copies require an
optical printer of some sort on hand, and the quality of the printout is
mostly rubbish, hard to read, often in the negative form (white on
black). You just have to look at the state of tens of thousands of
microfiche produced by the Latter Day Saints and others for their
genealogical records. They have so many downstream copies of copies
that many of them are practically unreadable. Further, they have to be
physically mailed around the globe, as nobody has come up with a scheme
to distribute microfiche down a phone line as yet. Despite actually
having immense amounts of data on film, the LDS are redoing everything
into a digital format, for reproduction and dissemination reasons, not
to mention searchability and extraction of specific data. Another major
problem with physical storage is accidental or deliberate physical
damage to individual copies and even outright stealing from fiche
centres. It's difficult to see what isn't there, and it's not until
somebody realizes that a fiche has vanished that the loss is
discovered. Of course that can't happen with properly managed
datafiles.

It would be interesting to know the date when Kodak made their case for
microfilm. I wonder if they would hold the same views today.

Colin D.

PS: I'll be well gone from Earth in 50 years hence, but how about a
scenario where there is established a huge computer databank system
underground on the moon, with tera-giga-moo-cow bytes of storage
capacity and unlimited gigabyte or terabyte links to Earth, accessible
to every nation. The total gross amount of information currently held
in earth-bound computers could be stored up there. Of course, there
would be a two or three second latency, but that could be taken care of
by forward-reading algorithms that anticipate what the user would want
next ... Hmmm, where's the Patent Office?

Colin D.

no_name wrote:

JimKramer wrote:

Bandicoot wrote:

"Tony" wrote in message
. com...

There is nothing like the security of a piece of medium that has to go
through a chemical bath process run by a minimum wage kid more interested

in

oogling the better looking customers than keeping an eye on his machine.


But if security of the medium is your interest, then that isn't the sort of
place that you get your processing done, now is it?



Peter


But, here at least (Chapel Hill/RTP/Raleigh/Durham), it is hard to find
anyone but that to do the processing, I've been through all of the
local labs including the "professional" ones and I still get obvious
drip marks and scratches on my slides and mis-mounted slides. If I pay
a premium rate I expect a premium service and that doesn't seem to be
available here.

Jim


That's not been my experience with JW Photo Labs or with NC Tricolor.

It has been mine - or strictly, my daughter's. A number of Fuji
transparency films she took on a visit to Alaska, irreplaceable, were
processed through C-41 at a Fuji Image Plaza. The result was about 200
grossly contrasty negative images, every one of which I inverted and
massaged in PS to get passable but not good prints. Trouble was, she
took slides deliberately for lecture purposes at her uni.

My old dad used to say "If possible, always retain the initiative. If
you give it to somebody else, you have lost control." Boy, he was
right.

Colin D.

"Colin D" wrote in message
...


Jeremy wrote:

"Nicholas O. Lindan" wrote in message news:nyCTf.7708

If the backup is a slide then the image is no longer digital and
no longer relevant in a discussion about backing up _digital_
data.


Kodak has made a very good case for microfilm backups of digitized
documents--particularly those documents that are being archived for the
long
term.

There are one or two small oversights in Kodak's scenario, if its
reported correctly.

They note two risks with digital archiving:

1: The image file formats now in use will almost certainly be replaced,
and
the current formats may be difficult to decode in, say, 50 years.

Any responsible archive-keeping regime for digital files will naturally
be keeping track of new and potentially better storage systems, and in
that 50 years will certainly have migrated the files to new media. It's
not realistic to think that the data will be untouched for 50 years, and
then somebody will suddenly say "let's look at this here file - oh, we
can't read it"

2: The storage media will be replaced as time progresses, and the
ubiquitous
CD or DVD may be difficult to read because of the unavailability of
appropriate hardware.

The same argument applies. If the storage media is replaced at
intervals, it will naturally be replaced with the then current
technology. It won't be a case of being unable to read optical media by
then if the techniques have advanced.

Microfilm stored under proper conditions has a projected life of 500
years,
and it requires only a light and a magnifier to enable it to be read.
And,
the microfilmed images can always be re-digitized into whatever image
formats are currently in use at any time in the future. So an analog
backup
may in fact be better for long-term storage to ensure that the file's
contents remain readable long after media and file formats have changed.
We
simply do not know what the landscape will be like in two centuries.
What
we take for granted today, in terms of file formats, may be virtually
unreadable then.

A mistake often made is to imagine that data will sit stored without
being accessed until, way in the future, somebody will try to read it.
In reality, somebody somewhere is always accessing stored data, and
usually wanting copies or printouts. The problems with analog backups
are obtaining hard copies, and distribution, the image or data
degradation encountered with successive copies. Hard copies require an
optical printer of some sort on hand, and the quality of the printout is
mostly rubbish, hard to read, often in the negative form (white on
black). You just have to look at the state of tens of thousands of
microfiche produced by the Latter Day Saints and others for their
genealogical records. They have so many downstream copies of copies
that many of them are practically unreadable. Further, they have to be
physically mailed around the globe, as nobody has come up with a scheme
to distribute microfiche down a phone line as yet. Despite actually
having immense amounts of data on film, the LDS are redoing everything
into a digital format, for reproduction and dissemination reasons, not
to mention searchability and extraction of specific data. Another major
problem with physical storage is accidental or deliberate physical
damage to individual copies and even outright stealing from fiche
centres. It's difficult to see what isn't there, and it's not until
somebody realizes that a fiche has vanished that the loss is
discovered. Of course that can't happen with properly managed
datafiles.

It would be interesting to know the date when Kodak made their case for
microfilm. I wonder if they would hold the same views today.

Colin D.

PS: I'll be well gone from Earth in 50 years hence, but how about a
scenario where there is established a huge computer databank system
underground on the moon, with tera-giga-moo-cow bytes of storage
capacity and unlimited gigabyte or terabyte links to Earth, accessible
to every nation. The total gross amount of information currently held
in earth-bound computers could be stored up there. Of course, there
would be a two or three second latency, but that could be taken care of
by forward-reading algorithms that anticipate what the user would want
next ... Hmmm, where's the Patent Office?

Colin D.

I suggest punching the data into tungsten "IBM" cards, and then storing
these on the moon......

"Colin D" wrote in message
...


no_name wrote:

JimKramer wrote:

Bandicoot wrote:

"Tony" wrote in message
. com...

There is nothing like the security of a piece of medium that has to go
through a chemical bath process run by a minimum wage kid more
interested

in

oogling the better looking customers than keeping an eye on his
machine.


But if security of the medium is your interest, then that isn't the
sort of
place that you get your processing done, now is it?



Peter


But, here at least (Chapel Hill/RTP/Raleigh/Durham), it is hard to find
anyone but that to do the processing, I've been through all of the
local labs including the "professional" ones and I still get obvious
drip marks and scratches on my slides and mis-mounted slides. If I pay
a premium rate I expect a premium service and that doesn't seem to be
available here.

Jim


That's not been my experience with JW Photo Labs or with NC Tricolor.

It has been mine - or strictly, my daughter's. A number of Fuji
transparency films she took on a visit to Alaska, irreplaceable, were
processed through C-41 at a Fuji Image Plaza. The result was about 200
grossly contrasty negative images, every one of which I inverted and
massaged in PS to get passable but not good prints. Trouble was, she
took slides deliberately for lecture purposes at her uni.

My old dad used to say "If possible, always retain the initiative. If
you give it to somebody else, you have lost control." Boy, he was
right.

Colin D.

Exactly. - And this is one of the great promises of digital photography. You
can do the whole thing yourself. Take the photograph, fix it up in
Photoshop, and print it out on a decent color printer, and never be
dependent on anyone else for anything during the whole process.
A close second is to develop your own film, and run it through a scanner
into your computer, and thence to your color printer. Basically, it is the
same, although you are still dependent on the film manufacturer, and the
maker/supplier of your developing chemicals in the latter case.
But being independent of the teenagers at your local lab is truly a
great thing. And, you also don't have to worry about the tight lipped,
religious old lady at the lab destroying your negatives because they insult
her sensibilities........:^)

"Nicholas O. Lindan" writes:

"VS" wrote
"Tony" writes:
As I said - taking a picture of the screen.
It was obviously good enough for some high end purposes.

For making a slide to be projected.

If it fits the possible requirements of the end users for the
foreseeable future, why not? ;-)

Else why not run the picture data through the sound card and record
the result with a cassette recorder - a bit extreme of analogy.

Remember back in early to mid 80s when software for Commodore 64, Atari
Spectrum and similar computers was distributed just that way. :-)

To backup data to a slide you need to draw a pattern of dots on the
slide that correspond to the binary data in the picture file.

So it's just a matter of coming up with a snorter wavelength laser to
fit more data on the film? ;-)

I agree that film is not a medium of choice for archiving. But the
digital alternative is just as flawed.

Is this again a case of technology blinding people, and people not being
able to tell between what they need and what they want?

Cheers,
Saso

Colin D writes:

A mistake often made is to imagine that data will sit stored without
being accessed until, way in the future, somebody will try to read it.

If past is anything to judge by ... ;-)

Another major
problem with physical storage is accidental or deliberate physical
damage to individual copies and even outright stealing from fiche
centres. It's difficult to see what isn't there, and it's not until
somebody realizes that a fiche has vanished that the loss is
discovered. Of course that can't happen with properly managed
datafiles.

The key words there are *properly managed*. Properly managed physical
records don't just disappear without anyone noticing either. Properly
managed physical records have duplicates. Digital files that are
believed to be properly managed, by aren't, have the same fate as their
analogue counterparts.

Cheers,

Saso

"rafe b" wrote in message
...

"Jeremy" wrote in message
news:k1DTf.3061$hC.1878@trnddc08...

Microfilm stored under proper conditions has a projected life of 500
years,

So this is a "projection" you trust, without question?

and it requires only a light and a magnifier to enable it to be read.

Well, if you want a useable print, it takes a bit more than that...
There's a whole infrastructure of chemistry, for example.

And, the microfilmed images can always be re-digitized into whatever
image formats are currently in use at any time in the future. So an
analog backup may in fact be better for long-term storage to ensure that
the file's contents remain readable long after media and file formats
have changed. We simply do not know what the landscape will be like in
two centuries. What we take for granted today, in terms of file formats,
may be virtually unreadable then.


In two centuries, at the rate we're going, we'll have far
more serious issues to deal with.

There's no reason to presume that digital file formats will
necessarily disappear. There are so many good, and
*important* images now in JPG, TIF, and PSD formats
(to name a few) that we can assume these will last for
generations to come. The standards are in the public
domain, and thousands of implementations (eg. of TIF
readers/writers) exist.

The *media* on which the files are stored -- ah, that's
a very different issue. Personally, I think punched
cards of Solomonic gold are the way to go.

Personally, I try to assume as little as possible. I make
multiple copies of my images, on multiple media, and
spread the copies around. And every now and then,
I retrieve some of those copies and make sure they're
sill readable.


rafe b
www.terrapinphoto.com



1: My comments were centered more on document imaging than photos.
Microfilm is not an appropriate choice for photographs, although color
separations might be.

2: The US Government requires that certain classes of important documents be
stored on Microfilm, not as PDF files, for LONG TERM archiving. The
National Archives has had a number of well-documented problems with digital
image files being unreadable because vendors that offered proprietary
formats went out of business, leaving no sources for hardware to read the
tapes.

There was an article a few years ago in the New Yorker magazine that
described this in some detail, and it was truly an eye-opener. I had
previously thought, along with just about everybody else, that documents
saved in digital format were safe. It turns out that the long-term
prospects are very risky.

Everyone is working on this problem, but for now digital archiving remains
risky.

"Colin D" wrote in message
...

The same argument applies. If the storage media is replaced at
intervals, it will naturally be replaced with the then current
technology. It won't be a case of being unable to read optical media by
then if the techniques have advanced.


Actually, that is the problem. Libraries and archives, throughout all of
history, have never been required to migrate their collections over to new
formats. There are concerns that budgetary concerns might result in many
old files not being kept up. The US Government, especially the Defense
Department, does require that many types of documents be stored on
microfilm, in addition to whatever digital format that it might be available
on. And this includes documents that were "born digital."


It would be interesting to know the date when Kodak made their case for
microfilm. I wonder if they would hold the same views today.


This is not a marketing scheme by Kodak. Archivists around the world are
realizing that old formats and obsolete storage media are a huge problem.
The original Lotus 1-2-3 file format is no longer supported, and any
spreadsheets created in the original DOS version of Lotus cannot be decoded.
The original programmers, and their notes, are gone from the scene. Same
for a number of other word processor file formats that existed 20 years ago.

I read that there is not a specialty called "Digital Archeology," that
attempts to decode obsolete file formats! If this is where we are after
only three decades, where will we be in three centuries?



Colin D.

PS: I'll be well gone from Earth in 50 years hence, but how about a
scenario where there is established a huge computer databank system
underground on the moon, with tera-giga-moo-cow bytes of storage
capacity and unlimited gigabyte or terabyte links to Earth, accessible
to every nation. The total gross amount of information currently held
in earth-bound computers could be stored up there. Of course, there
would be a two or three second latency, but that could be taken care of
by forward-reading algorithms that anticipate what the user would want
next ... Hmmm, where's the Patent Office?

Colin D.

In article .com,
Scott W wrote:
Jeremy wrote:
"Nicholas O. Lindan" wrote in message news:nyCTf.7708

Of course Microfilm is not good for color images and little use for
monochrome ones.

Archiving on film is not all that pratical. First are you going to
archive to slide or negative film? If you are going to archive to
slide film you are going to loose a lot of the dynamic range in the
photo. If you archive to negative film the colors will be reinterpered
when the slide is scanned.

Any color media is going to fad some with time, long term storage of
color image on film just does not work that well.

Has it been decided yet what the purpose of these archives will be? Will
it even matter whether the colors go off? I don't think color versus B&W
pictures of dead presidents adds much to their historical value. But if
it's pictures of tissue samples with a medical interest, where the
coloration matters, that's something else.

And just what are people going to do with the film 200 years from now,
do you believe there are going to be working slide projectors, film
scanners, in 200 year? Do you really think it will be anything but a
real pain in the ass to get a print from a negative 200 years from now?
Or do you think people will be happy to just look at the bit of film
with their eyes?

Come on. It's an image. If they still have cameras of whatever kind 200
years from now, they can figure it out. A film scanner consists of a
digital camera with a macro lens. If they can't put together that much,
then they probably have more important things to worry about than what
some long-dead person's long-dead cat looked like, or whatever's being
archived.


Digital formats move forward in time with much greater ease then analog
formats. As an example I am struggling with converting a large
collection of 8mm film movies to DVD, this is not easy or cheap.

Take it to Walgreen's, they'll do it for you.


If you are going to pick a format for backup of images that is not
digital I would think prints is the better way to go. They don't seem
to fade as fast as film and they don't need any equipment to be viewed.

I don't think that substantially changes the line of argument, it just
changes the size of the box you'd need to store it in.


--
"One idea that is carried out, that is given body and form, one idea that
assumes definite, tangible form and bears concrete results is worth a
million ideas that are born but to die." -- Manual of the U.S. Army, 1911

"Gregory L. Hansen" wrote in message
...


Archiving on film is not all that pratical. First are you going to
archive to slide or negative film? If you are going to archive to
slide film you are going to loose a lot of the dynamic range in the
photo. If you archive to negative film the colors will be reinterpered
when the slide is scanned.


Just as the best practices for archiving one's digital images would suggest
that it makes sense to keep redundant copies of the files in
geographically-diverse locations, such as a relative's home located across
the country, the best way to ensure that images survive long term is to keep
them in diverse formats. Kodak has gone on record recommending that
consumers consider making prints of special shots, and keeping them stored
in archival albums, just in case their digital files are lost due to
corruption of the media they are stored on.

Classic B&W prints have longer life than do color prints, and that relative
handful of photographers that are still shooting B&W film and making their
own prints are probably creating the longest-lasting images of all (assuming
that they aren't lost in a disaster, of course).

CDs were not designed as archival storage media for long time horizons, and
it is still a major issue with digital photographers as to how to preserve
their precious images for future generations. For now, the best approach is
to keep multiple copies in multiple locations--and that is, admittedly, a
flawed approach. There is no assurance that your Uncle Louie in Omaha is
going to take good care of your disks . . .