How do they digitize it? 8K RAW and no Compression?
There's nothing wrong with compression, data can be lossless and still compressed. That's why a FLAC file can be three times smaller than an otherwise identical WAV file.
CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
41–50 of 71 posts
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#42This reminds me of Blade Runner 2049: "We had everything on drives, everything."
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#43Assuming that the digitization is done diligently, committing to long-term maintenance of the originals would be borderline hoarding.
If that is the case, lets take a picture of the Mona Lisa and shred the damn thing. All that maintenance and security is just a waste, right?
> shred the damn thing
If we did that, what would we have lost? Just curious...
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#44How do they digitize it? 8K RAW and no Compression?
There's nothing wrong with compression, data can be lossless and still compressed. That's why a FLAC file can be three times smaller than an otherwise identical WAV file.
The problem is that the compression algorithm may disappear or be faulty
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny that you mention that. Polyester film is widely used for long-term archival, precisely because it so stable.
You're right, but analog signal degrades, and humidity can cause mould. Digital data tapes have a nice layer of error correction on top. Better than film, but still requires some care.
Digital storage needs sophisticated hard- and software to read, which thus needs to be archived as well (and how would you do that; no hardware has that shelf life), or, you re-archive everything every ~10-15 years (as is done today).
In contrast, I can read anything from the Barbarastollen with a magnifying glass and sunlight, today and in 500 years.
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why do they want to keep it? Even old film has a low resolution, let alone magnetic media. Do they expect to be able to better digitalise the same media that will be in worse state (more decay) in a distant future?
For some media, this is absolutely the case. Particularly films that are slightly damaged, or seriously damaged, it's well worth holding onto the material in order to wait for better techniques to become available. Case in point, this recent restoration of Morecambe and Wise by BBC R&D: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-fi... They laser cut the film apart, then used X-ray microtomography to sc…
This is a great read about the restoration of a lost archive, but it is worth noting that in this case the source material was similar to what is being converted and destroyed now: analogue video tape recordings from a low-resolution source material. The source was recorded in PAL/NTSC/SECAM and the conversion process can be completely lossless and still end up with a copy that has every bit of information that was on the original.
In the case of the Morecambe and Wise recordings, this was video to film (with an additional step to try to lose information in the first conversion so that the scan lines were less visible) so the interesting technique here was simply in restoring a degraded source. Unlike scans of film negatives, there is no way a new process or technique is going to dig out information that the original low-fidelity recording system was simply unable to capture.
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Magnetic tape is hard to keep. Film is even harder, it is flammable and decays as well. Needs controlled atmosphere to keep well.
B&W film will live in a shoebox in the attic for 100 years and be retrievable just by shining a light through it. Digital media becomes inaccessible very quickly; I have floppy disks I can no longer easily or reliably read...
No.
The cellulise acetate used for 16mm films up through the 80s has to be kept in humidity and temperature controlled environments or it breaks down quickly into acetic acid which accelerates the process further.
Cellulose acetate film was introduced to replace highly unstable nitrate stock in the 30s. With in a decade of its introduction, archives were reporting significant degradation and it was realized that it needed to be stored in climate controlled conditions. It wasn't until the 80s however that serious efforts were put into preservation or development of better archival mediums.
Of course this was touched on in the article. Wikipedia had more information.
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#48Assuming that the digitization is done diligently, committing to long-term maintenance of the originals would be borderline hoarding.
No, digital preservation is much harder than most people think. Digital media degrade too. Hard disks, optical media and magnetic tape all degrade over time. Paper and film are fairly durable. They can be preserved without any maintenance for quite a long time. Format obsolescence means that it can be hard to read old files. Sometimes, you need to track down a precise version of a program. The more tricky issue is th…
In this case we are not talking about paper or film, but old analog video and audio tape. This is reel-to-reel audio and quad or u-matic analog video tape. It suffers from even more degradation issues than digital files as you need to maintain the original medium, have no error correction layers, and are faced with an increasing rarity of the specialized equipment needed to read the data. There is also no additional data that advanced techniques will be able to pull from the original low-fidelity source.
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#49What was that book where they were digitizing books by shredding them and then vacuuming them up and digitizing all the scraps as they passed through the vacuum hose to reassemble digitally and then OCR?
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#50What was that book where they were digitizing books by shredding them and then vacuuming them up and digitizing all the scraps as they passed through the vacuum hose to reassemble digitally and then OCR?
Are you thinking of “Double Fold” by Nicholson Baker?