{"id":103064,"date":"2019-11-04T14:34:11","date_gmt":"2019-11-04T14:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.microsoft.com\/?p=435063"},"modified":"2019-11-04T14:34:11","modified_gmt":"2019-11-04T14:34:11","slug":"project-silica-proof-of-concept-stores-warner-bros-superman-movie-on-quartz-glass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/11\/04\/project-silica-proof-of-concept-stores-warner-bros-superman-movie-on-quartz-glass\/","title":{"rendered":"Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. \u2018Superman\u2019 movie on quartz glass"},"content":{"rendered":"

Turning digital data into physical artifacts<\/strong><\/h2>\n

With a nearly 100-year history in film and television, Warner Bros. owns one of the world\u2019s deepest and most significant entertainment libraries. Re-releasing older films in new formats or for new audiences is an important part of the business. It\u2019s also a tremendous cultural responsibility to preserve some of the world\u2019s most beloved stories in perpetuity, Colf said.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine if a title like the \u2018Wizard of Oz\u2019 or a show like \u2018Friends\u2019 wasn\u2019t available for generation after generation to enjoy and see and understand,\u201d she said. \u201cWe think that\u2019s unimaginable, and that\u2019s why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company has redundancy plans in place to handle multiple worst-case scenarios: an earthquake or hurricane that strikes one of the coasts, a fire where the suppression systems don\u2019t kick in or a climate control failure that allows moisture to build up and ruin film stock.<\/p>\n

The goal is to have three archival copies of each asset stored in different locations around the world: two separate digitized copies, along with the original physical copy on whatever medium a film or television episode or animated cartoon was created.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, original film negatives will last for centuries if stored in the right conditions. But for some older television shows \u2014 think episodes of \u201cAlice\u201d shot in the 1970s \u2014 the original physical copy has a limited shelf life that requires migration to newer formats. And for today\u2019s films and television shows that are shot digitally, the archival-quality third copy has a very short migration cycle of three to five years, which is challenging to manage.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s say a TV show is pushing directly into our digital archives; there\u2019s nothing physical,\u201d said Steven Anastasi, Warner Bros. vice president for global media archives and preservation services. \u201cThe digital file is going in but I don\u2019t have something I can put in a vault or in a salt mine or anything physical coming into the building.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Researcher
Microsoft Project Silica researcher Youssef Assaf drops a square of silica glass in a kettle of boiling water to demonstrate its durability. The team has baked, boiled, microwaved, demagnetized and scoured similar pieces of glass with steel wool \u2014 with no loss to the data stored inside. Photo by Jonathan Banks for Microsoft.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Warner Bros. is potentially looking at Project Silica to create a permanent physical asset to store important digital content and provide durable backup copies. Right now, for theatrical releases that are shot digitally, the company creates an archival third copy by converting it back to analog film. It splits the final footage into three color components \u2014cyan, magenta and yellow \u2014 and transfers each onto black-and-white film negatives that won\u2019t fade like color film.<\/p>\n

Those negatives are put into a cold storage archive. In these highly managed vaults, temperature and humidity are tightly controlled, and air sniffers look for signs of chemical decomposition that could signal problems. If they need the film back, they must reverse those complicated steps.<\/p>\n

That process is expensive, and there are only a handful of film labs left in the world that can do it. And the process is not optimal from a qualitative point of view, said Brad Collar, Warner Bros. senior vice president of global archives and media engineering.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we shoot something digitally \u2014 with zeros and ones representing the pixels on the screen \u00ad\u2014 and print that to an analog medium called film, you destroy the original pixel values. And, sure, it looks pretty good, but it\u2019s not reversible,\u201d Collar said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we can take the digital representation of those pixels and put it on a medium like silica and read it back off exactly as it was when it came out of the camera, we\u2019ve done our preservation job to the very best of our ability. That\u2019s what I love about this,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not economical to create archival film negatives for every digitally shot television episode in the Warner Bros. library. The company hopes Project Silica might prove to be a cheaper, higher quality alternative to create physical archives of digital content.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s much more work ahead to reach that scale \u2014 Microsoft researchers would need to significantly increase the speed at which data can be written and read, as well as its density. Warner Bros. envisions its own infrastructure to read data from the glass archives. But both partners see promise in how far they\u2019ve come.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Project Silica\u2019s storage solution proves to be as cost-effective and as scalable as it could be \u2014 and we all recognize it\u2019s still early days \u2014 this is something we\u2019d love to see adopted by other studios and our peers and other industries,\u201d Colf said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it works for us, we firmly believe that this will be a benefit to anyone who wants to preserve and archive content,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Turning digital data into physical artifacts With a nearly 100-year history in film and television, Warner Bros. owns one of the world\u2019s deepest and most significant entertainment libraries. Re-releasing older films in new formats or for new audiences is an important part of the business. It\u2019s also a tremendous cultural responsibility to preserve some of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103065,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[135,50],"class_list":["post-103064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-microsoft-news","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-recent-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}