THOUGHT LEADER
exist – or if it does exist, it does so only in a very tiny way. Robert Houllahan, director of Cinelab Motion Picture Services lab in Boston (not affiliated with Cinelab Film & Digital in London), believes digital capture brings its own host of sustainability issues, which need to be looked at carefully. “For 100 years, all films were made into prints and distributed to theatres. That’s not likely something we’ll go back to,” says Houllahan. “But as things become more realistic with climate change – and the very real problem of creating energy which isn’t so persistently toxic as using fossil fuels – there will be a serious crunch in the next 30 years with the amount of material and energy human civilisation uses. You might find that physical media becomes much more sustainable than using cloud computing all the time.” With digital, there is always the opportunity for scale, but how efficient is that scale? Houllahan points to Netflix’s DVD home delivery incarnation in the days before streaming, which is said to have offered 70,000 titles at its height. The streaming service now has roughly 17,000 titles across its catalogue. Physical material is, by definition, more sustainable, although that’s not always a good thing. Take plastic, for example, which is sustained in the environment for generations. Mechanical equipment can be made to last for a long time, while digital equipment – and all the materials and minerals that go into its production – has a very short shelf life.
THERE WILL BE A serious crunch IN THE NEXT 30 YEARS”
Houllahan points to a screening of Dune he attended recently where an optical block from the theatre’s digital projector had burned out. “How old was that projector?” he asks. “Maybe five or eight years at most. A 35mm projector can last 100 years. Making film prints is one thing, but making several digital projects is more complicated. An abundance of technology’s infrastructure is much more routinely replaced – and I don’t know if any of that can be recycled.” Cinelab is powered by a 250kW solar array on the roof, and equipment is becoming increasingly efficient. Most of the power consumption in the lab is used for heating, primarily for getting the chemistry to proper temperatures. In addition, Houllahan is installing a power monitoring system to learn exactly where the main power draws are. The chemistry of film has also become less toxic over the years – the principal chemical waste product being silver, which is reclaimed through electrolysis and then sold back into the silver market. THE DISCIPLINE OF SILVER Creativity needs boundaries in order to thrive. Give someone infinite time and resources and they’re not likely to produce as much quality as someone with a set subject, budget and time limit. The illusion that the digital world has no footprint removes creative boundaries and inevitably leads to a massively higher shooting ratio than film does. Shooting on film brings discipline. When the camera is rolling, frames are being exposed; you are actually rolling through physical material. On a tentpole film, the cost of film stock may not be the highest priority, but the psychological
focus that comes with shooting film means less waste. Capturing digitally, particularly when planning is poor, can mean ‘keep the camera rolling and we’ll figure it out in post’. It’s always easy to do just one more take. Shooting film may lead to more focus, better use of time and more thrift all around. Shooting digitally also means generating data – and where there is data, there is power consumption. “Shooting ARRIRAW on an ALEXA LF or ALEXA 65, you’re generating a massive amount of data,” Houllahan explains. “It all has to go someplace, and that’s hard drives or other kinds of data storage. The best long-term storage medium right now is LTO tape, but eventually, you’re still going to have to migrate that data. A big show could generate a petabyte of data – that’s hundreds of LTO tapes.” Film as a final storage medium does avoid the struggle of having to keep your archive copy upgraded to be compatible with storage technology. The underlying technology of a film print of 1895 is identical to that of a film print today – and if somehow all the film projectors in the world vanished, it wouldn’t take long for engineers to rebuild a projector from scratch. The major studios are well aware of this archival longevity. Even when a film’s workflow is entirely digital, some studios will make a final master recorded to film to ensure preservation. A well- packaged film print in the right conditions can be locked away for a century and still be viable. “Everyone wants a simple answer, but there’s a lot of nuance and complexity,” adds Houllahan. GOLDEN LABS Chris Lane started working in film labs when he was 16, and has stayed with it throughout the medium’s ups and downs. Now head of Cinetech UK, he continues building facilities, labs and
A CLEAN SWEEP The Cinetech film cleaner supports 8mm and has a 4in vent duct port
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