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Long Term Image Storage and Aperture
How many of you have heard of Cinerama? You can read about it on Wikipedia here, but the short story is that it's an obsolete film technology that used 3 35mm projectors to create a widescreen image. Mainly used during the 50s, it's rather difficult to find a theatre today capable of projecting an original Cinerama print. However, you can still look at an original still slide or print taken in the 1950s without a problem. It's pretty obvious that we all want the still photos we're taking today to be more like a slide and less like Cinerama. How do we achieve that goal when RAW formats vary so much?
I'm willing to bet that many of you are going "oh, that's easy, use DNG" (I'm ignoring those of you who say "just shoot JPEG instead of RAW"). In case you don't know, DNG (Digital Negative) is a generic RAW format developed by Adobe that's designed to be an open standard for RAW files, similar to TIFF (DNG is based on the TIFF format). The theory behind DNG as an archival format is that 10 years from now, someone writing a new photo tool is more likely to just write code to support DNG instead of writing code to support the obsolete Canon D30, D60, 10D, 20D, etc.. Yet because you can embed your entire original RAW file into a DNG file, you'll still also have the original image in case a future tool does explicitly support that format. Aperture supports DNG files to an extent, and you can find out more in this article.
However, Aperture does not have a direct "convert to DNG" tool, and setting up a DNG-based workflow has some tradeoffs. Adobe is quite active about adding new RAW formats to its DNG conversion utilities (both the stand-alone tool and the converter inside of Bridge's Photo Downloader), and they even tend to support new cameras before Aperture does. Earlier this year, Derrick wrote a nice post about using DNG in Aperture from the perspective of using unsupported cameras' RAW files in Aperture.
If you read that and say "well that sounds a little clunky," I'm inclined to agree with you. I'm also willing to bet not many of you convert all your images to DNG. Personally, my attitude right now is "why bother?" Aperture, Lightroom, and the other tools we all use daily already have code inside of them to deal with tons of RAW file formats. I think that 10 years from now, should Aperture 7 choose to drop support for the original Canon D30, there will be some "upgrade RAW file" function that lets the program still read old formats, even if it means converting them to a format like DNG, just like how Microsoft Word can still read files from early versions of Word.
Given it's still possible to see Cinerama movies in certain locations, I genuinely think it'll still be possible to read today's RAW formats 50 years from now. But just in case, I do keep my old Aperture discs in their boxes in the closet! What do you all think?
Will you be able to use your old Aperture discs in 50 years time? They may be as useful as a floppy disc is now!
It's not as simple a question as whether your files will be readable or not in x years. Chances are, you'll always be able to find some program to read a standard D700 NEF - maybe something with a GUI or a command line converter. But will the program of your choice be able to *fully* read the specific type of file you want to process, so a compressed 14 bit Nikon D700 with metadata added by the Nikon SDK? Will it be able to safely add metadata to the image or will you forget that pictures of that vintage are before it became safe and normal to do so? With all the undocumented junk in raw files, a public and documented format makes a lot of sense and means you'll have a range of programs at your disposal. It's not as if DNG is Adobe's any longer - they're handing it to the ISO and other programs such as Aperture can happily process the format. There's nothing to lose other than the opportunity to slow down your workflow with Nikon Capture....
Well, it is still possible to use a floppy--it just takes some doing. Now granted I might have to sneak into a "relics of the early 21st century" exhibit to find an iMac I can put the Aperture CD into :)
Gio, yes, that is a good point about the metadata. Right now, baseline DNG loses a lot of that information. For example, auto noise compensation is disabled in Aperture because baseline DNG doesn't provide the needed information about the specific sensor and ISO. What I was more getting at when I say "don't worry about it now" is that I think once there's a good, standard format (which might be DNG), Aperture will support it whole hog and there will be an upgrade or convert function built in that makes it trivial to get old and new files into this standard format. And I think that function will exist before these formats become completely obsolete and this really becomes an issue, hence why I wouldn't bother with Nikon Capture or Adobe's Photo Downloader over Aperture.
In answer to the opening question, YES. Grand Prix, the fictional story set during the 1966 Formula 1 racing season. I have the booklet sold during the first run showing, which was the last movie I recall seeing that required true box office seating -- with specific seat locations -- either in the balcony (where I first saw the movie) or in the lower level.
All of this is a concern, not only at the software level, but also at the hardware level. Larry Jordon's Final Cut Pro newsletter had an article about a month ago regarding the reliability of hard drives. And when they are not regularly powered up, they may have a shorter shelf time than expected.
Ken Hutchins
It is very unlikely you will be able to read a D700 RAW file 20 years from now, much less 50. I bought into PhotoCD technology in 1996 because the disks were supposed to last a century. 12 years later, one eight of the claimed lifetime, the only way to read PCD files is with Photoshop in PowerPC mode, Kodak has "dropped support" for the file format.
Many converters can't be trusted; a lot of software is decreed to "work" if they can run a few files through it and it seems to be OK. You don't want to wake up 20 years from now and find out that the freebie D700 converter which is still available from some teenager has weird artifacts on half your files and rejects the other half.
Simple, major standards such as TIFF will last a bit longer. DNG has its own complexities, and is more of a marketing adventure than a solution. Until and unless DNG becomes the dominant standard, your best albeit lousy bet is to save everything as 16-bit TIFF files.
PhotoCD is a great example. Back when I was actively writing Lightbox (2003, 2004 or so), I actually added support for PCD files upon customer requests. I think it's interesting that right now, we're at a point where you can recognize the file's about to be obsolete and still have a tool that you can run on your computer to update the files to something more standard, like TIFF. Here's a question, though. Did you keep your negatives? I wonder if you'd get a higher quality image scanning them in yourself now, rather than using the original PCD file.