[game_preservation] iPhone Game Preservation

[Jerome McDonough]

There is a *huge* difference between the amount of storage needed in  
production/post-production and what ends up in the final master for  
delivery to theaters.  Any movie will generate a ton of assets that  
don't make it into the final cut (although increasingly they do show  
up in DVDs post-release).

For 4K resolution digital cinema using a 4:4:4 colorspace and 36-bits/ 
pixel of color information (pretty standard for the serious movie  
folks), a single frame takes 39.81 MB.  At the standard 24 frame/ 
second "film" speed, one minute of video imagery takes 28.67 GB.   An  
hour will take about 1.72 TB; two hours 3.44 TB.  Add in audio  
information, then compress the whole lot and you've got about 2TB of  
delivered film.

I seem to remember that the effects people who worked on Spiderman III  
typically had about 50 TB of assets online that they were having to  
manage for rending scenes.  So, yes, the ratio of production/post- 
production storage needs and projection house storage needs are vastly  
different.  One of the big questions for the movie preservation folks  
at this point is the question of whether archiving the final product  
is enough, or whether they want to archive *all* the raw assets, along  
with the edit decision lists that determined the composition of the  
final film.

On Jul 29, 2009, at 2:12 PM, 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

>>>>

>>>> _______________________________________________

>>>> 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

>>

>> _______________________________________________

>> 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


Jerome McDonough, Asst. Professor
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, Room 202
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 244-5916
jmcdonou at uiuc.edu





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/game_preservation/attachments/20090729/dc1ac90c/attachment.html>