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There's the obvious reason -- that digitization is expensive, relatively speaking -- but even more so, the rights to a lot of those older movies are not well de
by jfb 11y ago
There's the obvious reason -- that digitization is expensive, relatively speaking -- but even more so, the rights to a lot of those older movies are not well defined. Many of those older movies are under contracts that have no provision for digitization, and in many cases the rightsholders who could grant a license are unknown. It's a mess.
- jkestner 11y agoAnd that's a great case for actually allowing copyrights to expire at some point.
- e12e 11y ago> There's the obvious reason -- that digitization is expensive Um, if it's on DVD it's already digitized.
- jfb 11y agoIt's unfortunately not that simple. Nobody uses DVD as a mezzanine format, partly because 4:2:0 MPEG-2 at DVD data rates is unsuitable for further manipulation, and partly because the DVD rights holders may not hold the rights to republish. It's a mess.
- e12e 11y agoI just meant that in the process of producing a DVD, all the material would have to have been digitized. I'm sure for some releases the production companies have gone bankrupt and/or the files are lost -- but I'd think that once digitized the masters would be kept around?
- jfb 11y agoYou'd like to think so, but for the most part, the digitization and prep work is done by post houses or specialist digital distribution services, and the intermediates, which cost money to preserve, are almost always discarded.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]