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Comment by wcfields | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have any ballpark numbers on how the finished products are saved? Quick estimation of RED 4K at a _minute_ is about 2.5TB [1]. The file-vaults of studios then will eventually rival the NSA's data collection warehouse!

[1] http://www.hdslr-cinema.com/tools/filesize.php?w=4096&h=2304...

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From a recent IEEE Spectrum article: "If you were to make a 2-hour motion picture with an extended color range in 4K and at 48 frames per second, the raw (uncompressed) movie file would occupy more than 15 terabytes. For comparison, the total amount of data in all of the e-mails sent in the United States in one year has been estimated to be 10.6 TB." http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/las...

The email estimation seems off by several orders of magnitude. If you follow the link in the IEEE article, you get this:

> It's estimated that the average size of an email is 75 kilobytes. Say we decide that 75 kb average is way off the mark and bump it up to 200 kilobytes per email times 144.8 billion emails per day times 365 days per year and were at just under 10.6 terabytes per year (3 of those Seagate drives will do the trick).

But doing that math myself results in:

   200 000  *  144 800 000 000  *  365  =  1.05 * 10^19

In other words, 10 exabytes. 1,000,000 times more than 10 TB. So, 3,000,000 Seagate drives, not 3.

Uhm... so? 15 TB of storage cost way under $1k.

Out of the camera is more like 6 GB/min [1] and DCI is limited to ~2 GB/min [2]. Those are both lossy; lossless masters would be much larger but it's questionable whether they need to be preserved.

[1] http://www.red.com/tools/recording-time

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Initiatives

Well, the data for the final master copy is measured in terabtes but when you add up all the ingredients (unusued footage, VFX intercopies, safety copies, multi-layered VFX and audio stuff) a sci-fi blockbuster can hit a petabyte, easy.

I don't really get the every bit is precious thing when archiving film. Take the movie Casablanca, for example. Why would anyone care about more than the final cut, plus a few outtakes and screen tests? What's so precious about a blizzard of minute detail?

Well, suppose the master is damaged, and you need to go back to the original footage and reconstruct the scene using the same post-production methods that were available then? alternatively, suppose business conditions or personal conflict led to a truncated version of the original film being released, but the source materials allow the reconstruction of the director/ screenwriter/ producer's original vision?

The former has been the case with Fritz Lang's film Metropolis, with the complete version available today being a built (IIRC) from a mix of different masters and some raw footage, and the latter has been the case for another silent classic, Erich von Stroheim's Greed, which is a historical masterpiece but was heavily cut at release for both content and runtime. More recently, the version of The Good The Bad and The Ugly you get on DVDs now restores 19 minutes that were cut from the original...and I could cite a bunch of other important films (at least, if you're a film nerd) that only exist in their current form because someone knew the release version was compromised and went looking for the original production footage.

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