For films, digital costs more to archive than "print"

[lonelyboy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/bu...ss&oref=slogin

"To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master."

"Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault."

[jd callow]

My wife is working on an international project whose goal is to define digital archive standards. There is a lot to a digital archive and it is and is likely to always be a moving target.