Film Industry Making the Transition to Digital

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Another advance for technology, another blow for the film industry…..literally the film industry. The resistance for the transition from movie film to digital format has been pretty high in most circles, but one of the bastions of the film industry has capitulated to the dark side. Martin Scorsese has embraced digital filmmaking as the future of the industry. Would you still call it filmmaking if it is digital? :D

It's a given that there's infinitely more range, depth, and texture with film, but you do indeed hope the technology will eventually get so good we ultimately won't know the difference.
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Im thinking they are shot on film and processed to digital. I like how they hope that digital eventually gets as good as film. I dont think digital will ever be better than analog but digital is easier to manipulate.
 
Its a double edged sword. With film you have the chance of artifacts on the film and the size of the camera, but you get near unlimited resolution. So even though a film was shot when 480i was standard and thats how released to the public at the time, the masters on 35mm can still be converted to 1080p no problem.

With digital the cameras can be much smaller and get a cleaner picture, but you are capped at whatever the resolution of the camera is. I think some of the early digital films (like Star Wars I & II) were actually shot at 1080p. So that means the masters are 1080p and thats the best they will ever be.
 
Film also deteriorates over time, though, so yeah, there are benefits either way.
 
BoogerBomb said:
Im thinking they are shot on film and processed to digital. I like how they hope that digital eventually gets as good as film. I dont think digital will ever be better than analog but digital is easier to manipulate.
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I'm really curious for someone to explain why film is better than digital. I don't know much about the industry, but from a casual observer, if you can get digital to film in a high enough resolution (4K 8K etc) then you would see no difference between. I know you can see difference in color from the type of film used, but how is that better vs just being less accurate than a digital representation of that color.
 
demingo said:
I'm really curious for someone to explain why film is better than digital. I don't know much about the industry, but from a casual observer, if you can get digital to film in a high enough resolution (4K 8K etc) then you would see no difference between. I know you can see difference in color from the type of film used, but how is that better vs just being less accurate than a digital representation of that color.
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Film captures what is sees. A digital camera captures what the user tells it to. Im saying that all things analog are better than digital due to the nature of the difference between the two. Analog is more than just yes or no, there is an inbetween that digital doesnt have yet.
 
Aren't most films shot these days with digital? You see all those RED 4k cameras in the making of big name movies.

I also thought studios preferred digital, for distribution purposes. Easier to track, and transport all over the world?
 
i only hope there is some sort of hard copy so that these pieces of art/work are not lost....due to a some sort of data loss/emp or what ever may cause a such a thing to happen.
 
MavericK96 said:
Film also deteriorates over time, though, so yeah, there are benefits either way.
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This. Even though theres a chance that all the hard drive copies go boom, it's next to child's play to have a perfect digital copy millennia from now, unlike analog.
 
I think the phrase "film making" will still be used even when it gets phased out. Even for home digital video, people say they're "filming" something. There are a few phrases that have, and will persist through time. I still say "roll up/down the window" for car windows even though our cars use electrical switches now. :p When my parents want a picture printed, they still say "wash the picture" in Vietnamese since it's related to dark room development.
 
I think some of these old film jockeys just don't want to change their ways. Digital is better.
 
BoogerBomb said:
Film captures what is sees. A digital camera captures what the user tells it to. Im saying that all things analog are better than digital due to the nature of the difference between the two. Analog is more than just yes or no, there is an inbetween that digital doesnt have yet.
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Analog is always ideal, sure. That said, analog media always has physical limitations which prevent the data they capture from being truly non-discrete. 35mm film; magnetic tape; vinyl records — all plagued by physical limitations.

For an image recorded to film to have infinite resolution, the negative must be infinitely big. It's bound to the same constraints as digital in this respect. In the end, the data representation is not all that different between the two, and digital has numerous practical advantages.
 
wonderfield said:
For an image recorded to film to have infinite resolution, the negative must be infinitely big. It's bound to the same constraints as digital in this respect. In the end, the data representation is not all that different between the two, and digital has numerous practical advantages.
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Yes. Anyone who says analog is better than digital, has never worked with digital recording. The generational differences being 0 make it a no brainer.
 
tinfoil hat time. With digital someone can remotely break into storage and erase the film forever. This is already happening where a Jesse Ventura show on true tv (I think) was remotely wiped off of people's DVR's presumably by the US government. Also think of the whack jobs that claim there was no holocaust. With film procured in a vault there is proof, with 1's and 0's you are a remote wipe away from you version of history. End tinfoil hat time.
 
halo000008 said:
tinfoil hat time. With digital someone can remotely break into storage and erase the film forever. This is already happening where a Jesse Ventura show on true tv (I think) was remotely wiped off of people's DVR's presumably by the US government. Also think of the whack jobs that claim there was no holocaust. With film procured in a vault there is proof, with 1's and 0's you are a remote wipe away from you version of history. End tinfoil hat time.
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What about if I have an HDD in a vault vs an analog copy in a vault? The film is likely going to rot in between 1-100 years, depending on atmosphere, storage conditions etc. during that period. You don't see many film archives storing digital film on reels! :D

As long as you keep a copy in a decent format (some digital archives were kept on crappy DVD-Rs) and backed up occasionally to new disks. It should last forever. Whereas analog will soo rot into oblivion, tin foil hat or not. :p
 
Well there are some serious concerns with digital storage such as ease of alteration , ease of theft , data corruption which can happen even under the best circumstances and the resolution problem.

Going all digital is happening , its a relentless tide that won't be halted. Having a theater download a movie directly from the studio server will say each major movie release millions of dollars in place of printing a reel and sending it off. Studios have it download to a computer that sets everything up , its entirely encrypted and it doesn't require a projectionist to hang around saving the movie theater money as well. Its harder to steel and R5 copy from (think "screener" pirated copy) so all around for the studios its a win and for the theaters its a win as well.

The real problem is that image resolution is restricted at the moment to 4k , very few movies get an 8k transfer and honestly that resolution is only going to increase over time both at the theaters and at home. Digital copies absolutely fail in this regard. The amount of digital information is ALL the information contained within a data file , you can't simple scan it off and enhance the resolution over all. With 35mm film and 70mm (think IMAX) you have tons of information per frame that is only limited by the quality of the optics in the projector and the film stock.

You can talk Casablanca and do a 4K scan and it'll come out looking simply incredible considering its age. When you take a 40 year old 1080p digital file and attempt to upscale it , it'll look like blurred junk on a big theater screen projector that runs at a much higher resolution. Think of how a DVD looks in your Blu Ray hooked up to your 50 inch LCD , it looks fucking ugly most of the time because the digital information that is missing is being duplicated by the scaling chip in the player or the TV and it just doesn't work. Even when you start using high end studio scaling that costs 10's of thousands of dollars per transfer you simply can't pull information from a finite digital source. This is what will become the big issue.

We also have no idea if Magnetic media which is often sited as our most reliable , will even last 100 years. There are 100 year old prints in the Hollywood vault that you could take out , spend a couple million doing a full negative transfer and scale to and it'll come out looking incredible and you'll have a brand new negative to store in the vault when its over that will last another 100 years. With a digital copy you may end up with a big old "ERROR" message when you attempt to boot up the data. Its just too damn risky to put all our eggs in one basket. We should be shooting in analog and digital honestly , analog for storage and digital for ease of use.

It reminds me of when the BBC use to copy over all its tapes of early shows , they would and I'm not joking , just copy over the ONLY existing original copies of shows on there network without giving it a second thought. And it almost happened to the ENTIRE Monty Python TV series collection until Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam bought the original copies from the BBC a day before they had planned to simply "reuse" them for a new series. The point is that we have NO clue as to how long we can store data in digital form and until enough time has past and we know for sure we should not stop using a format we know can stand the test of time.
 
My roommate used to process film and because of the switch to digital she's been out of work for over a year now.
 
MavericK96 said:
Time to get some new skills, I guess? :p
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While she was on employment insurance some of the courses she had to take included such difficult things as creating a gmail account and how to find work on craigslist. True story.
 
No way to know if current digital format standards will be around for 100 years.Since you still need to store digital information on some sort of physical media there is no way to know if that the media will last that long and the future generation of equipment will even read the old digital information. Recorded DVD's are using dyes that can fade anyway in time. Print made from ink-Jet printers again using dyes can bleed and fade also. The old photographic silver prints will outlast any ink-jet prints currently made today.
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
I think the phrase "film making" will still be used even when it gets phased out. Even for home digital video, people say they're "filming" something. There are a few phrases that have, and will persist through time. I still say "roll up/down the window" for car windows even though our cars use electrical switches now. :p When my parents want a picture printed, they still say "wash the picture" in Vietnamese since it's related to dark room development.
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Just like I still "dial" a phone number.
 
Digital filming is especially useful for directors as they can immediately see the results of their work with many post-processing effects after a shot is taken, to know how it will really look after it's all finished. Currently they often shoot multiple takes of the same thing "just in case", and can only see their results at the end of the day when the film has been processed up some. They can even go so far as to add real-time rudimentary special fx to further understand how their scene will appear to audiences, rather than hoping for the best 6 months later during editing.
 
demingo said:
I'm really curious for someone to explain why film is better than digital. I don't know much about the industry, but from a casual observer, if you can get digital to film in a high enough resolution (4K 8K etc) then you would see no difference between. I know you can see difference in color from the type of film used, but how is that better vs just being less accurate than a digital representation of that color.
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Regardless of resolution, Film has fantastic dynamic range. And even the best digital cameras like the RED Epic, ScarletX, Arri Alexa, still have issues with overblown light sources or capturing detail in the highlights.

Other thing is that film is a single sheet, digital is dealing with millions and millions of single pixels, and we need to work on the microlenses and mirrors to help reduce aliasing still.

I'm a huge digital person, but I still love film.

Stone Cold said:
I think some of these old film jockeys just don't want to change their ways. Digital is better.
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Plenty of it is stubborn people I'm sure, but Film has definite advantages to digital still.

Godmachine said:
It reminds me of when the BBC use to copy over all its tapes of early shows , they would and I'm not joking , just copy over the ONLY existing original copies of shows on there network without giving it a second thought. And it almost happened to the ENTIRE Monty Python TV series collection until Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam bought the original copies from the BBC a day before they had planned to simply "reuse" them for a new series.
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I almost threw up.
 
This.
Also 35mm frame has the equivalent resolution of a 10-20 megapixel photo. Which might not seem big, but its 5-10x larger than most digital video camcorders can record at. The biggest issue with digital sensors is the dynamic range. At best, the red and it's competitors can only have 14-16 stops of dynamic range. Film has at least Tripple that. That's why film rocks for indoors and night shots.

Wish we had 1000x more people like godmachine on the boards.

Godmachine said:
Well there are some serious concerns with digital storage such as ease of alteration , ease of theft , data corruption which can happen even under the best circumstances and the resolution problem.

Going all digital is happening , its a relentless tide that won't be halted. Having a theater download a movie directly from the studio server will say each major movie release millions of dollars in place of printing a reel and sending it off. Studios have it download to a computer that sets everything up , its entirely encrypted and it doesn't require a projectionist to hang around saving the movie theater money as well. Its harder to steel and R5 copy from (think "screener" pirated copy) so all around for the studios its a win and for the theaters its a win as well.

The real problem is that image resolution is restricted at the moment to 4k , very few movies get an 8k transfer and honestly that resolution is only going to increase over time both at the theaters and at home. Digital copies absolutely fail in this regard. The amount of digital information is ALL the information contained within a data file , you can't simple scan it off and enhance the resolution over all. With 35mm film and 70mm (think IMAX) you have tons of information per frame that is only limited by the quality of the optics in the projector and the film stock.

You can talk Casablanca and do a 4K scan and it'll come out looking simply incredible considering its age. When you take a 40 year old 1080p digital file and attempt to upscale it , it'll look like blurred junk on a big theater screen projector that runs at a much higher resolution. Think of how a DVD looks in your Blu Ray hooked up to your 50 inch LCD , it looks fucking ugly most of the time because the digital information that is missing is being duplicated by the scaling chip in the player or the TV and it just doesn't work. Even when you start using high end studio scaling that costs 10's of thousands of dollars per transfer you simply can't pull information from a finite digital source. This is what will become the big issue.

We also have no idea if Magnetic media which is often sited as our most reliable , will even last 100 years. There are 100 year old prints in the Hollywood vault that you could take out , spend a couple million doing a full negative transfer and scale to and it'll come out looking incredible and you'll have a brand new negative to store in the vault when its over that will last another 100 years. With a digital copy you may end up with a big old "ERROR" message when you attempt to boot up the data. Its just too damn risky to put all our eggs in one basket. We should be shooting in analog and digital honestly , analog for storage and digital for ease of use.

It reminds me of when the BBC use to copy over all its tapes of early shows , they would and I'm not joking , just copy over the ONLY existing original copies of shows on there network without giving it a second thought. And it almost happened to the ENTIRE Monty Python TV series collection until Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam bought the original copies from the BBC a day before they had planned to simply "reuse" them for a new series. The point is that we have NO clue as to how long we can store data in digital form and until enough time has past and we know for sure we should not stop using a format we know can stand the test of time.
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I was watching the extras on one of my James Bond Bluray discs and they were showing the restoration of the films. They did 4 or 8K scans of the original optical prints (the film that was in the camera) and showed how they store the digital information on a bunch of hard drives in a briefcase looking box.
they said that they refresh/re-copy the drives every 6 months or so.
I'll watch it again tonight to refresh my memory.
btw, if you are a James Bond fan, the Bluray versions look incredible. I already pre-ordered the 22 movie collection that comes out in September.
http://www.amazon.com/Bond-50-Compl...TF8&qid=1341251338&sr=8-1&keywords=james+bond
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Film is more future proof. No unsupported codecs and all that in the future. Film has a infinite resolution for future generations to scan. Film can last almost forever while digital storage media lately still isn't as reliable as analog still. If something better came out in the future they won't have to blow up the image and stretch it out unlike digital. Ever took a 240p video on youtube and made it full screen. Thats what i mean.
 
Crest said:
Regardless of resolution, Film has fantastic dynamic range. And even the best digital cameras like the RED Epic, ScarletX, Arri Alexa, still have issues with overblown light sources or capturing detail in the highlights.
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Completely correct, and a major issue with digital filming. However, this issue is steadily being improved with each generation of digital sensors. By 2020 or so digital dynamic range should be close enough to film to make no difference at all. In the meantime it is already close enough that it is not usually a major concern.

Other thing is that film is a single sheet, digital is dealing with millions and millions of single pixels, and we need to work on the microlenses and mirrors to help reduce aliasing still.
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Actually we don't need to work on aliasing anymore. The need for anti-aliasing is caused by the outdated design of Bayer filters. There are already a few digital sensors in commercial use that don't use an AA filters and yet also don't suffer any more moire issues than current Bayer + AA sensors. End result is more detail captured without any of the problems caused by Bayer filters. Another benefit of the newest such sensor design is a considerable improvement in noise handling, dynamic range, and color accuracy. Now that we know this is possible it is only a matter of time until all digital cameras do not need AA filters, instead of just the very few that don't use them at this time.
 
Conker said:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm
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Ken Rockwell???? ROFL.

He is the last person you want to use to support your point.

Your point is correct though. Analog, if stored correctly and not used regularly, is indeed more reliable. Optical technologies like DVD's and Blu-Rays start deteriorating as soon as they are made and it is only a matter of time (under 50 years) before they will be partly unreadable, even if stored in a hermetically sealed environment. Magnetic technologies fail even faster and so have to be backed up regularly. However, the ease of doing so does make them pretty reliable when handled properly. But I suggest you never again use Ken Rockwell to make a point. He is basically the Rodney Dangerfield of Photographers.... He gets no respect.
 
Godmachine said:
You can talk Casablanca and do a 4K scan and it'll come out looking simply incredible considering its age. When you take a 40 year old 1080p digital file and attempt to upscale it , it'll look like blurred junk on a big theater screen projector that runs at a much higher resolution. Think of how a DVD looks in your Blu Ray hooked up to your 50 inch LCD , it looks fucking ugly most of the time because the digital information that is missing is being duplicated by the scaling chip in the player or the TV and it just doesn't work. Even when you start using high end studio scaling that costs 10's of thousands of dollars per transfer you simply can't pull information from a finite digital source. This is what will become the big issue.
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Actually it probably won't be an issue. 40 years from now increasing the resolution of a 1080p film 8x to 8640 while genuinely gaining detail that wasn't there before will likely be entirely possible. Right now what essentially happens when an image is upscaled is that the pixels in an area are averaged and then spread through the new space (much more complex than that, but that is the basic principle). Obviously this works okay if it is only a small increase in size, but for a large increase it obviously looks horrible, even with fractal resizing. But 40 years from now studios will not need to rely on essentially stupid programs to upscale films. They will probably be using Semi-AI's that are able to look at each frame with full understanding of what the image consists of, and what it should look like with more detail, and then they will be able to create that detail where it never existed before. It sounds outrageous, but it is possible and even likely. Humans can actually do this today if working with few enough pixels, like turning a 20x20 image into an 80x80 with more detail than originally existed (I can't do it, but some artistic types can). There is every reason to believe that as we get close to true AI level computers we will be able to get them to do the same thing but on a much larger scale.

Besides, the Red One films at 5120x2700. It will be a long time until we need more resolution than that in the consumer or projection market, and long before then the cameras will be filming at twice those numbers.

Heck, a couple years ago I would have said it is impossible to take a photo with missed focus and make it acceptably sharp, but Adobe has figured out how to do it. There are bugs still being worked out to make it work every time, and limits to how out of focus the original image can be (obviously), but it can be done and probably in 5 years nailing critical, or even particularly good focus will no longer be a requirement of photography. It will just be something that saves you a bit of time and effort in post processing.

Don't count out the technological capabilities of the future.... Ever.
 
arentol said:
Ken Rockwell???? ROFL.

He is the last person you want to use to support your point.

Your point is correct though. Analog, if stored correctly and not used regularly, is indeed more reliable. Optical technologies like DVD's and Blu-Rays start deteriorating as soon as they are made and it is only a matter of time (under 50 years) before they will be partly unreadable, even if stored in a hermetically sealed environment. Magnetic technologies fail even faster and so have to be backed up regularly. However, the ease of doing so does make them pretty reliable when handled properly. But I suggest you never again use Ken Rockwell to make a point. He is basically the Rodney Dangerfield of Photographers.... He gets no respect.
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Here are some negatives on archiving digital film. Costs more to archive than standard film. Movies could be lost much easier in digital.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business/media/23steal.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

DIFFICULTIES of that sort are compounded by constant change in technology. As one generation of digital magic replaces the next, archived materials must be repeatedly “migrated” to the new format, or risk becoming unreadable. Thus, NASA scientists found in 1999 that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975; the format had long been obsolete.
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To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.
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This answers those who say film can't last.
At present, a copy of virtually all studio movies — even those like “Click” or “Miami Vice” that are shot using digital processes — is being stored in film format, protecting the finished product for 100 years or more. For film aficionados, the current practice is already less than perfect. Regardless of how they are shot, most pictures are edited digitally, and then a digital master is transferred to film, which can result in an image of lower quality than a pure film process — and this is what becomes stored for the ages.
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http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood/
But not too long ago, studios simply threw films away. Paramount planned to burn its old nitrate. MGM was set to dump its original negatives — including those for Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz — into the ocean. What did they need those for, they figured? They'd made copies.
Luckily for the studios, archivists at UCLA and Eastman House took the prints instead. Because, years later, MGM wanted to digitize its old movies and needed the originals back. The copies they'd made, on Kodak stock, had faded.
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Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, calls the challenges of preserving them "monumental." Digital is lousy for long-term storage. The main problem is format obsolescence. File formats can go obsolete in a matter of months. On this subject, Horak's every sentence requires an exclamation mark. "In the last 10 years of digitality, we've gone through 20 formats!" he says. "Every 18 months we're getting a new format!"
So every two years, data must be transferred, or "migrated," to a new device. If that doesn't happen, the data may never being accessible again. Technology can advance too far ahead.
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Migration, alas, is a laborious process. Professional labs have automated the process of migrating data from one storage tape to another with robots that shuttle tapes into drives. But a big collection requires a big robot. Then you need someone to maintain the robot.
"Digital snowballs on you," says engineer Shawn Jones. "It starts simple. Then as you grow and use more of it, your costs quickly escalate."
And it's not like studios are making less data. There's always more coming in.
Even worse, it's extremely easy to lose data. "If I spend," Horak says, "as we did on one restoration, $750,000 to preserve one film digitally, and then it goes into a computer somewhere and it disappears, that money's gone."
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Five years after the first Toy Story came out, producers wanted to release it on DVD. When they went back to the original animation files, they realized that 20 percent of the data had been corrupted and was now unusable. Granted, digital was new at the time. Surely advances have made digital storage much less problematic?
Not really.
Fast-forward to Toy Story 2, which was almost erased from history. Pixar stored the Toy Story 2 files on a Linux machine. One afternoon, someone accidentally hit the delete key sequence on the drive. The movie started disappearing. First Woody's hat went. Then his boots. Then his body. Then entire scenes.
Imagine the horror: 20 people's work for two years, erased in 20 seconds. Animators were able to reconstitute the missing elements purely by chance: Pixar's visual arts director had just had a baby, and she'd brought a copy of the movie — the only remaining copy — with her to work on at home.
In the digital realm, the archivist's mantra, "Store and ignore," fails. If you don't "refresh," or occasionally turn on a hard drive, it stops working. You can't just stick it on a shelf and forget about it. As restorationist Ross Lipman says, "You're shifting from a model focused on a physical object to data. And where the data lives will be constantly changing."
Because of all these factors, the notion that digital is cheaper is a myth. And that, too, is a worry. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences recently released a study, "The Digital Dilemma." It discovered that it's actually 11 times more expensive to preserve a 4K digital master than film.
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http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood/6/
Moreover, most filmmakers surveyed for the study were not aware of how truly perishable digital content is. Digital technology makes it easy to create movies, the academy concluded, but the resulting data is much harder to preserve.

Meanwhile, all film needs is a cold, dry place to spend eternity. Under these conditions, archivists say, a black-and-white print on polyester-based film stock can last 1,000 years.
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Into the Vault
The temperature inside the main film vault at the UC Southern Regional Library Facility on UCLA's Westwood campus is a nippy 57 degrees. Humidity hovers at 50 percent. This is where the UCLA Film & Television Archive keeps a large portion of its vast collection. Inside the preservation vault — a kind of vault within a vault, for rare negatives — it is even colder. A thermostat on the wall reads 46.8 degrees. With metal walls and concrete floors, the room is basically a big refrigerator.

As the vault's librarian explains, nitrate is "a different animal."
It's kept in a state-of-the-art facility in Santa Clarita in self-contained chambers with a fire-suppression system. Within a year, archive chief Horak hopes to also have a small digital-asset management program in place there. But he has no plans to digitize the archive's 350,000 titles. His strategy for dealing with the digital dilemma thus far has been "baby steps."

The main vault stores newer movies as well as old. UCLA's archive is the second largest in the country (only the Library of Congress is bigger). And it's growing. If a director belongs to the Directors Guild of America, for example, a print of his or her film automatically comes here for safekeeping. Plus, analog donations are up. Where once he'd get 20 or 30 films, Horak is now getting offers of 5,000 titles from distributors keen on purging their own vaults in favor of digital.

Here, films in their flat metal cans are piled neatly atop rows of metal shelves that recede into a vanishing point far into the distance. The cataloging system, based on container size rather than the alphabet, makes for strange juxtapositions. You can find Close Encounters of the Third Kind sitting near Robin Hood: Men in Tights, La Dolce Vita rubbing shoulders with Monkey Shines. It seems somehow both tragic and funny that Macbeth will spend the next thousand years sharing shelf space with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Motion-controlled lights in the vault flick on and off. Mostly, they're off. The archive is closed to the public, and even staff don't visit much. But that could soon change. With studios ceasing to loan prints, nonprofit archives like UCLA's likely will be seeing increases in requests.

It is also possible, however, that the public may never experience some movies here in their original print format again. "They won't let us show the nitrate," Horak says of a studio he declines to name. "These are films in our vault, and we're still not allowed to show them. It was never an issue before. Never an issue." He sighs. "My gut tells me that this is part of a policy of killing the 35 mm market altogether. Even for classic repertory cinema."

For the moment, many other prints are free to come and go. Near the entrance, a half-dozen 35mm reels of Blade Runner have just returned and are acclimating back to chilly vault temperature on a wooden dolly.

As for Breakfast at Tiffany's, the movie Cinefamily's Hadrian Belove tried in vain to show on Valentine's Day, it's gone. The spot where it normally sits — right under Dances With Wolves — is empty. The librarian apologizes. Someone else has checked it out.
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