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It wasn’t just “tapes going back to the 80s.” Those were just the media Universal initially admitted to losing. No, that building was the mother lode. It had fi
by proggy 6y ago
It wasn’t just “tapes going back to the 80s.” Those were just the media Universal initially admitted to losing. No, that building was the mother lode. It had film archives going back over 50 years, and worst of all — unreleased audio tape masters for thousands upon thousands of recording artists. The amount of “remastered” album potential that fire destroyed is probably in the billions of dollars, let alone the historical loss of all those recordings by historical persons that will never be heard due to a failure of a fire prevention system. Fascinating case study in why you should never put all your eggs in one basket.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire
- arp242 6y agoIn 1996 Surinam lost many of their government archives after a fire burned the building down. I can find surprisingly few English-language resources for this (only Dutch ones); guess it's a combination of a small country + before the internet really took off.
- AdamJacobMuller 6y agoThis is why I'm such a fan of digitizing. If you have 1 film master you effectively have none. Do some 8K or 16K scans of that master and effectively manage the resulting data and you're effectively 100% immune from future loss in perpetuity. Losing parts of history like that is tragic.