Show notes
On the April 3, 2024 episode of /Film Daily, /Film editor Ben Pearson is joined by /Film editor Brad Oman to talk about the latest film and TV news.
In The News:
Listener email from YiFeng from Boston, Mass:
I hate to bug you, but the recent podcast conversations about disc rot & backing up physical media have some misinformation that I'm hoping other listeners will write in and correct, but here are my corrections:
1. Hollywood/MPA issue commercial discs that are copyrighted protected by CSS, AACS, BD+, ROM Mark and probably many more techniques. You can't insert a disc into your computer and use a file explorer and just copy the disc - you will get an error.
2. If you want to backup ANYTHING from the disc, you will need to bypass copyright protection by using tools such as Redfox and DVDfab. Please note that at the time of this writing, US DMCA laws stipulates that you *DO* have a right to backup, but the tools used to rip discs are illegal, which is why all of them are from outside of America:
https://lifehacker.com/is-it-legal-to-rip-a-dvd-that-i-own-5978326
It's a bit of a gray/catch-22 type of scenario. Just a warning there.
3. Handbrake.fr is only a tool that will re-compress & shrink your disc files. For example a Blu-ray may contain a movie file that is 35 gigabytes, but you can use Handbrake to compress that down to 10 gigabytes - that is what the tool does. Handbrake and compression tools do *NOT* rip discs as they do not bypass the copyright protections put in place by the MPA.
4. Finally, regarding disc rot, the Library of Congress has a study on that from ~14+yrs ago but it's still relevant: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd_longevity.html#:~:text=Statistical%20analysis%20of%20the%20EOL,reach%20EOL%20within%2010%20years
Basically the net sum is it is extremely small and that study encompassed computer CD ROM (beyond just movie discs). If anything, the disc qualities of today's Quality Assessment far surpasses that. I'd wager to say it's probably less than 1% if the library of Congress performs a study today. Most of the time, if you read the study, the rot has to do with users storing in high humidity, non-environmentally controlled locations. If you care for it, the disc will outlast humanity. It is (after all) plastic and we all know now that plastic is basically not going to degrade for hundreds of years (green issue is another whole separate conversation). Are there manufacturing errors? Absolutely, but they are extremely miniscule. Here is an example from Criterion below, but they still offer the program to replace the discs:
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3317-exchanging-defective-discs
Hopefully, this clears up some confusion. Quick summary is you can rip but you'll need to bypass copy protection, and disc rot is basically a non-issue.
Actually, that brings up another interesting point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation
Let's say you are Warner Brothers and you have the full uncompress filmmaker files of the camera capture or dcp on your servers, THOSE FILES WILL ALSO ROT even if they are on server/enterprise-grade hard drive!
There needs to be a process of not just making backup copies, but double checking that the data they have and also the backup copies are still not impacted by the rot. CURRENTLY, most enterprise data technicians do NOT have a process to account for data-rot. 99% of the enterprise companies do not even think about that.
Yes, they have backups, but if your original is rotted and you back up the rotted data, both your originals and your backed up copies are all junk because no one is opening the files to verify if the backups are still legit and clean. Maybe AI will help to protect against this, it can be done... but there is an added cost to make this work. No one is willing to foot the bill for it.
In other words, even backed up copies of movie media are subject to rot, just like physical nitrate/film negatives!
All the other stuff you need to know:
- You can find more about all the stories we mentioned on today’s show at slashfilm.com, and linked inside the show notes.
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