Will We Ever Be Future Proof?

[keithm]

All this talk of blue laser dvd and mpeg4 based DVD has me very worried. I mean, I can still play my VHS tapes from 1982 but will I be able to play my DVD collection in 22 years? Is it a waste of time transferring VHS to DVD when we don't even know if the format will survive?

The trouble is as technology marches on todays state of the art multimedia sensation is only fit for tomorrows scap heap: anyone remember digital audio cassette (and lets not bring up 8 track cartridges).

More to the point (and this is why this is to do with video editing!), will the supply of blank -r dvd disks still be available in the forseeable future?

[wkulecz]

We'll never be future proof unless progress stops -- which I doubt anyone really wants.

VHS recorders and tapes will remain in production for as long as it remains profitable to make them. Same for DVD-R blanks. Its still easy to find turntables and phono cartridges, I think some new music is still released on LP to supply the DJ market.

8-track tapes are a good example of needing to be aware of the media "trends" if you are intrested in "archiving" as it was easy to copy 8-track tapes to cassette or reel-to-real audio tape during the transition, but now working 8-track players are a rare find, but if you can find one, it'd be straitforward to copy to audio CD-R.

Once you've made your VHS tapes into DVD it'll be pretty easy to move to another digital format unless something incompatible with mpeg2 becomes the next big thing.

--wally.

[keithm]

As long as you can play your DVD disks!

[keithm]

And: what ever happened to digital VHS? It was proclaimed as the next step foward (being backwards compatible with VHS) but may be replaced by stand alone DVD writers. I have heard rumours that the stand alone DVD recorders aren't so good anyway so maybe technology should stand still until it can make a major leap forward. Bit of a rant and rave I know but it makes you wonder

[wkulecz]

Last I heard, D-VHS was being positioned as the way for home HDTV recording, but Hollywood objects.

No telling what will happen, but Hollywood is lobbying hard for laws to force every D/A converter to enforce "copy protection" to close the "analog hole".

See EE Times Sept 23 2002. Don't know if the article is on their website -- I get the dead tree edition, so I can read it on the can :-)

--wally.

[colinbr]

Reminds me of the BBC's Domesday Project disks - "the mother of all time capsules"

http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,661093,00.html

<<
It was meant to be a showcase for Britain's electronic prowess - a computer-based, multimedia version of the Domesday Book. But 16 years after it was created, the £2.5 million BBC Domesday Project has achieved an unexpected and unwelcome status: it is now unreadable...
By contrast, the original Domesday Book - an inventory of eleventh-century England compiled in 1086 by Norman monks - is in fine condition in the Public Record Office, Kew, and can be accessed by anyone who can read.
A crisis in digital preservation now afflicts all developed countries. Databases recorded in old computer formats can no longer be accessed on new generation machines, while magnetic storage tapes and discs have physically decayed, ruining precious databases.
For millennia, men and women have used paper to create everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Neville Chamberlain's 'piece of paper from Herr Hitler'. In the past few decades, computers, scanners, cassettes, videos, CDs, minidiscs and floppy disks have been used to replace the written word. Yet in just a few short years these digital versions have started to degrade.
>>


Lots more about the BBC Domesday project from one of the people who created it:

http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html

Colin

[Brian Ellis]

... And so it will continue until doomsday (pun intended )

Actually, don't think that hard copy is permanent either. There are virtually no books or other documents published from about 1870 onwards that can be considered permanent. Paper makers started to use alum (potassium aluminium sulfate) then to size the paper with white aluminium hydroxide. In time, one of the reaction products is sulfuric acid which actually destroys the paper (distinct weakening starting after about 25 years). This is exacerbated by the hygroscopicity of alum and the cellulose fibres which make up the paper. Archiving has thus become a nightmare and extensive use is made of impalpable magnesium carbonate powder which is held in suspension in an inert gas or liquid, to slow down the decomposition by neutralising the acid.

The Domesday book, of which several copies were made and only small parts have survived (the one at the PRO is Vol I, Essex and Norfolk and Suffolk with odd bits of Vol II added) was written on parchment, not paper. There are no surviving parts for London, Winchester or Northern England, so even this is relatively ephemeral.

[SpiralDragon]

fututre proof..... god i wish... knowing that all my 300 cds will be out dated sometime in the furture, interms of qulity and availability..... just like my 2000+ LPs

[keithm]

I suppose you realize that you can still play an album (be it a 78 or a 33.3 rpm) by spinning it and then using a cup with a needle to amplifier the analogue grooves! Try doing that with a bloody cdrom. Makes you wonder though, perhaps it time a future media for data archival was invented...Where is that stone and chisel.

[KRSESQ]

No coincidence that now you're seeing more and more "acid free" printer paper on the market. Now the problem is that the dyes used in modern printer ink fade too fast.

""perhaps it time a future media for data archival was invented...Where is that stone and chisel.""

Actually, micro-engraving text and images on a ceramic base would be a very good archiving process. All you'd need to read it is a good microscope, and it would last virtually forever...

Kevin

[Brian Ellis]

... unless you dropped it or it got crushed in an earthquake! (cf. Giotto frescoes in Assisi).

Actually, laser toner ain't bad, provided it has been well fused. With SOME inkjet inks on SOME papers, you can get a +/- sure lifetime of 50 years but 95++% of the combinations are not much good for more than 1 year in light and 5 years in the dark.

What is interesting is that CD/DVD media will long outlast the means to read them (excepting blank disks, which should be recorded within a couple of years or so of manufacture).

[keithm]

Just wrecked my spare vhs deck trying to play a 20 year old tape that shed so much oxide it killed the heads..So much for me saying I can still play my old tapes! Which now brings me to the horrible conclusion that I may not be able to transfer my aging vhs collection to DVD (unless I replace my VCR for evey tape).

[jeff b]

Hello All,

As an amateur videographer, I've found that my most reliable storage medium for finished projects so far is to archive DV format files to DVD data disks as the native files. For this purpose, I chop my projects into DV files that don't exceed what I can store on the DVD disks. If I need to recover them and run the project again, I just copy them back onto the hard drive, run off my copies from the MSP timeline, and it's prisitne.

Previously, I had archived first to super VHS, and later to DV tape. However, as time has passed, I find that these "masters" degrade pretty quickly, and I can no longer run off good copies of those older projects.

Archiving to MPEG-2 DVD is not an option that I would use, since the level of compression is so high that I would never be able to re-use any of the material without a tremendous amount of loss. As a finished piece, however, it's a nice format that will last longer than a tape, but copying it to any other format wouldn't look as good as restoring my original DV files and playing them off the timeline of MSP.

Jeff B

[keithm]

The Picvideo codec might be good for archiving, it's not lossless but it doesn't screw up the quality for editing like mpeg2.