Netflix’s Media Production Suite

I was reading about the cinematography of _Collateral_, possibly the first large budget feature film to be shot digitally, and one of the issues back in 2004 when it was made was the amount of storage required for digital video and the risk of not being able to retrieve the images from the data stores:

> “We did massive testing with the hard drives, and everything was great, and then we had an experience where we shot, and when we sent in the material, they couldn’t get the information off the hard drive,” said Cameron. “So the studio went ballistic and was like, ‘There’s just no way we can we can let you guys do this.’”

> The compromise was the production would record to hard drives as well as SRW tape. And unlike today, verifying the digital footage was equally cumbersome and tension-filled.

> “We recorded everything two or three times on decks that we carried with us,” said Beebe. “So we were backing up, two or three times.”

https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/michael-mann-c...

> we were backing up, two or three times

So they just rediscovered what IT world knew for decades, or what am I missing?

When Data/File based workflows started in movies (around 2004), 2-3 copies was the standard from the get go and ideally this was with MD5 checksums (currently xxhash is more common because it's alot faster). LTO backups are also generally part of the copy chains as the 3rd or 4th copy. Before that, duplication with tape was while recording wasn't as common, but it was more common to duplicate after recording. Although you'd have some amount of generation loss depending on the format, not so with recording to multiple decks with the same source video. With film it obviously wasn't possible but original negative (o-neg) was much more cautiously handled. You'd have copies made going to an interpositive for editing and dailies process. Those wouldn't an identical quality so to get a negative copy, you'd be 2 generations of loss. By the time you're seeing a print in a theater, it would be 3 generations. (one->IP->IN->print)