low resolution

[rosmari]

I have some old 8mm movies, converted to .avi. Dimensions are 720 x 480 - which becomes quite fuzzy even on a 19"screen.

Video clips I take with my current camera give me a 1280 x 720 Dimension, which is acceptable.

Is there a way to improve that low resolution?

[aedipuss]

sure if you start with the 8mm film again and have it transferred at a higher resolution with better equipment. other than that no.

[TBoneit]

Not to mention that 720 by 480 is NTSC DVD Resolution. AVI ios not dvd ready btw.

I find that standard DVDs at that resolutiojn look fine on a 32" HDTV. So something went wrong in the film to avi process.

[lordsmurf]

Improve it? No.
Go back to the film, start over and do it better? Yes, it can look better.

[rosmari]

I paid someone $52 for the conversion to .avi - at the time, it didn't occur to me to ask to put it into a higher resolution.

So, where do I go - and at what price - to have the original 8mm films converted to a format that I can further edit?

[OldMedia]

If what you are looking for is excellent high resolution quality. I suggest that you send it to a small motion picture lab that uses a telecine. If you live in a major city with a small local lab I suggest starting there...if not I suggest sending the film to a place like Cinelab (I have used them for many jobs and they are very very helpful even when I only have a small amount of transferring) in Boston, or another small film processing house that will do small jobs. Alot of local business's that do "film" transfers are merely using a mirror system or white screen system in which they use a video camera to tape what a projector is displaying on a screen or a mirror, when done properly this can give you good results.
Unfortunately alot of these small business's that you find in your local phone book, that offer services to people with old home videos - use consumer style one chip cameras or don't supervise the transfer at all. A place like Cinelab (there also other small labs that transfer small amounts of footage) will charge you by the foot to transfer using a telecine system which is the preferred method (usually a $100 minimum)... you will notice a significant difference. Its all about what your looking for, with a professional lab you won't need to worry about re transferring again. What you would probably want to ask for is a one light transfer unsupervised, that is the cheapest... but works great with home movies. They can transfer it to any format you want.

[lordsmurf]

For 8mm film, I suggest http://wood-land.com
Cinelab is probably another good suggestion. http://www.cinelab.com

A lot of these small business you find in phone books don't have an f-ing clue what they're doing. If they're HQ'd in a strip mall, run away. Fast. Most pro operations are located in private locations, and customers are not permitted on premises. It's all by mail, or you have a meeting somewhere for larger projects. A walk-in location and phone number might make you feel better, but that's all your paying for -- their phone bill and strip mall rent, and not the quality of your video work.

Get it transferred to mini DV, too. Then have a DVD made from that, in addition. Consumer shot 8mm film is best converted to a DV tape first, and a DVD made from that new DV master. This is one of the few times you'll see me suggesting DV as an appropriate transfer medium.

8mm film is well below 720x480 resolution, you're just needlessly upscaling for HD.

When you search for 8mm transfer info online, you may come across the site film-to-video.com, and his random ranting and other notes. This guy is an idiot, and repeats a lot of myth and BS.

[2Bdecided]

For 8mm film, I suggest http://wood-land.com8mm film is well below 720x480 resolution, you're just needlessly upscaling for HD.

I don't agree with the first part - good 8mm film can be a good match for 720x480 resolution. HD is usually overkill, though sometimes it's nice to handle the upscaling yourself.

http://www.vimeo.com/6751675
http://www.vimeo.com/6377661
(see the other transfers by the same person by clicking through the list on Vimeo).

http://www.super-8.be/s8_Eindex.htm

Frame grabs:
http://www.super-8.be/s8_frames.htm
(plenty there - very few are "well below 720x480 resolution").

Cheers,
David.

[lordsmurf]

I mostly refer to average out-of-focus home shooting (mostly the fault of the cameras).
Even 720x480 is above the resolved detail.

[2Bdecided]

Agreed, if the original footage is not in focus, then even 320x240 can be overkill!

Cheers,
David.

[turk690]

For 8mm film, I suggest http://wood-land.com
Cinelab is probably another good suggestion. http://www.cinelab.com

A lot of these small business you find in phone books don't have an f-ing clue what they're doing. If they're HQ'd in a strip mall, run away. Fast. Most pro operations are located in private locations, and customers are not permitted on premises. It's all by mail, or you have a meeting somewhere for larger projects. A walk-in location and phone number might make you feel better, but that's all your paying for -- their phone bill and strip mall rent, and not the quality of your video work.

Get it transferred to mini DV, too. Then have a DVD made from that, in addition. Consumer shot 8mm film is best converted to a DV tape first, and a DVD made from that new DV master. This is one of the few times you'll see me suggesting DV as an appropriate transfer medium.

8mm film is well below 720x480 resolution, you're just needlessly upscaling for HD.

When you search for 8mm transfer info online, you may come across the site film-to-video.com, and his random ranting and other notes. This guy is an idiot, and repeats a lot of myth and BS.

My curiosity piqued, I immediately went to film-to-video.com. The man behind it, a Bruce Mayfield, does seem to go out of his way to leave you in no doubt that he's the 8/16mm film-to-video transfer guru.
But, really, which of the things he says is BS?? Is it his insistence that MPEG2 (and therefore DVD) is lossy and therefore not archival?? Or is it because he avers the DVD+R and -R media lifespan is 2 to 5 years? Or his insistence on giving you miniDV as the end product?
What else is there? (by Röyksopp)

[2Bdecided]

My curiosity piqued, I immediately went to film-to-video.com. The man behind it, a Bruce Mayfield, does seem to go out of his way to leave you in no doubt that he's the 8/16mm film-to-video transfer guru.
But, really, which of the things he says is BS?? Is it his insistence that MPEG2 (and therefore DVD) is lossy and therefore not archival?? Or is it because he avers the DVD+R and -R media lifespan is 2 to 5 years? Or his insistence on giving you miniDV as the end product?
What else is there? (by Röyksopp)

All the things you quote are scaremongering, but not without some basis in reality.

So there's a little bit of truth in each of the statements, but not enough to matter.

DV is better quality than DVD, but still lossy. For archival copies of 8mm film you'd probably use lossless (e.g. HuffYUV AVI files on a HDD). But most normal people would be happy with a good DVD!

Some recordable DVDs do die, but not all, and/or not that quickly.

HQ frame-by-frame full-frame in-focus transfers are far more important than any of this. The restoration you can do in AVIsynth is far more important than any of this (though start with lossless in this case).

Cheers,
David.

[EddyH]

For 8mm film, I suggest http://wood-land.com
Cinelab is probably another good suggestion. http://www.cinelab.com

A lot of these small business you find in phone books don't have an f-ing clue what they're doing. If they're HQ'd in a strip mall, run away. Fast. Most pro operations are located in private locations, and customers are not permitted on premises. It's all by mail, or you have a meeting somewhere for larger projects. A walk-in location and phone number might make you feel better, but that's all your paying for -- their phone bill and strip mall rent, and not the quality of your video work.

Get it transferred to mini DV, too. Then have a DVD made from that, in addition. Consumer shot 8mm film is best converted to a DV tape first, and a DVD made from that new DV master. This is one of the few times you'll see me suggesting DV as an appropriate transfer medium.

8mm film is well below 720x480 resolution, you're just needlessly upscaling for HD.

When you search for 8mm transfer info online, you may come across the site film-to-video.com, and his random ranting and other notes. This guy is an idiot, and repeats a lot of myth and BS.

My curiosity piqued, I immediately went to film-to-video.com. The man behind it, a Bruce Mayfield, does seem to go out of his way to leave you in no doubt that he's the 8/16mm film-to-video transfer guru.
But, really, which of the things he says is BS?? Is it his insistence that MPEG2 (and therefore DVD) is lossy and therefore not archival?? Or is it because he avers the DVD+R and -R media lifespan is 2 to 5 years? Or his insistence on giving you miniDV as the end product?
What else is there? (by Röyksopp)

Never heard of the guy, and he may talk an awful lot of crap, but in the cases you state it sounds like he largely speaks truth.

MPG2 is an INHERENTLY lossy format, and even the maximum legal DVD rate (~10mbit/s) is still quite a lot of compression down from raw digital video (closer to 250mbit/s for standard def).
The miniDV he insists on supplying you with encodes at about 25mbit/s and does away with the interframe motion compression that allows DVD files to be crunched so small but can also be responsible for greater lossy-compression artefacts and makes future lossless frame-accurate editing impossible.

The quality you can get out of both can be very good when handled well (hmm... unless you're using a lot of strong colours with NTSC DV that is, as its colour resolution is poor), and will satisfy most demands, particularly just for backing up old home movies - I rarely have to go above 6-8mbit when I'm making even a fancy project with lots of "non-natural" material - but if you're looking for total quality preservation in your archived materials, they're not the way to go. Even the system it uses to subsample the image before sending it to the savage DCT part of the compressor loses some image data.
(You want some kind of broadcast standard digital tape system maybe, with non-subsampled colour. Or vastly oversampling it to 1080p hi-def, such that the quantising errors are actually dwarfed by the grain of that unbelievably tiny square of film...)

Insisting on giving you a DV tape is an odd choice, though if it's a PAL one, it's probably the highest quality option (unless there's relatively little motion in your film ... unlikely!), and you can convert it through to DVD using a set-top recorder on its highest quality using an everyday DV cam and composite or Firewire (i.Link) cable and be perfectly happy with the outcome. I mean, those things have been used to make hollywood movies after all.

(If it's an NTSC one, I'd personally be happier capturing direct to hard disk somehow - maybe using some kind of pro-grade telecine rig - then converting from that even-higher-quality master to BOTH DVtape and DVD, or whatever the customer desires to have. After all, storage is cheap these days; never mind the 13Gb a DV tape holds, the ~130Gb an equivalent length of uncompressed, 24bit RGB (or 87Gb for 16bit YUV, if you don't mind a little subsampling) is chickenfeed when a 1000Gb disc costs under $100 (or twenty quick & dirty $5 transfer jobs) and can easily handle the 30mb/sec transfer rate. It won't load your CPU too much more, as it has to be decompressed to that format for processing anyway - you just need the I/O system to be up to the job).

Quoting the average lifespan of DVDR - in a consumer environment - as being about 5 years is possibly being kind to it. You leave those suckers out near a window in summer and they may become unreadable before christmas - and that's not counting physical damage (scratches), finger grease, etc that come from other forms of sloppy handling. It's not a tape in a cartridge, or a film that stays on a protective reel for all but a few scant seconds of its playback time - the whole data surface is exposed and vulnerable all the time it unboxed.
In an opaque box, on a shelf in a cool, low humidity room, they should last a lot longer. But I wouldn't count on them doing so, and I certainly can't estimate myself how long that would be - I havent been using the format long enough to have a valid spread of samples. I can however say that some DVDRs are produced so badly that they're barely readable when they come out of the drive, so it doesn't take much to kill them.

(I would hope the chap you describe is a/ using the highest grade media and hardware he can reasonably purchase, b/ massively understating his own personal estimate of the media's longevity so that any complaints he DOES get about them dying "early" fall at least a couple of standard deviations away from the mean, and so aren't too frequent)

[lordsmurf]

The "DVDs die in 2-5 years" myth was started by somebody close to IBM, who ... ding ding ding ... sells magnetic media only. It was fluff propaganda, nothing more.

This is another great example of BS:

Dirty Little Secret #3: DVDs are not "high resolution". If I told you I was "throwing away half of your movie film to transfer to DVD", would you do it? Well, that is exactly what "transfer mills" are doing. Each one of the "little pictures" in your film is made up of hundreds of "little lines". If I throw out every other "little line" to fit your film to a DVD, I have thrown away half of your film, haven't I? That's what MPEG2 compression does. Still want me to transfer your film to DVD?

This sounds like a poor understanding of interlacing. The whole site is full of similar ridiculous statements. He may as well rename that "dirty little secrets" page to "myths I believe and things I don't understand"

@EddyH
1. MPEG-2 isn't all that lossy -- specs do go higher than DVD. At 20-25Mb/s and I-frames only, you won't see artifacts. That can even be true in the 12-15Mb/s range.
2. I can leave a VHS tape in the sun, and it's going to get just as screwed up as a disc -- that's not proper storage. Of course it gets damaged! Heck, even a piece of paper gets ruined in sunlight.

[OldMedia]

This Film-to-video.com guy I seem to find a little unnerving

Before I get to him I would like mention the original question rosmari asked (in case the film-to-video guy has scared rosmari) In my opinion, I think in rosmari's case woodland would be fine. Taking into account costs, woodland would do a good job based on what I read about them. The costs are less then half what a professional house like a Cinelab, Technicolor, DuArt, or a Deluxe would charge. Keep in mind this is a family home movie shot on consumer film camera with below average glass (lens). If the website holds true for woodland, then the equipment they use should be sufficient. If the lifespan of a DVD scares you (what ever that may be) then make a copy , and then copy the TS file to your computer as another backup. I happen to believe MPEG2 is sufficient for 99% of the average persons old 8mm home movies, as long as it was transferred properly to the digital format using decent equipment operated by people that know what they are doing... that is key.

I have in the past had to do transfers, and always ask experts what the best route is for what we need for the least amount of money. In many cases when we needed old family movies as part of documentary style shows, we just took a projector and used a DVC Pro Camera (and at one time Beta SP) to record the images on a white surface. This worked fine. YOU SHOULD ALSO KEEP YOUR ORIGINAL COPY OF YOUR FILM. At this point and time film (or at least the Silver Halide based film, which replaced the dangerous silver nitrate film many years ago) holds up for a very long time when stored properly and is a PHYSICAL copy of your footage not something that needs a special machine to turn analog tape or 1's and 0's into a image (which is arguable I guess, but you should always keep the original copies of anything that is important to you)

On to our Film-to-Video.com guy, well I don't know where to begin. There are to many things to quote from him but here is one:


"Many years ago, I made the decision that I would rather apologize for higher prices -- and produce the highest quality product in my industry; than to apologize many times for cheap quality -- to stay competitive with the cheapest prices in my industry. I also made the decision to treat every client as if they were my own Grandparent or Grandchild -- like I would want someone to treat me."

He has also trashed the telecine method as well, which leads me to believe that he must be using the industry standard 2K Digital Intermediate transfer process, but since he is the best in the industry ... a 4K Digital Intermediate transfer (which is uncommon even for studio pictures).. Perhaps his customers are shooting home movies on Arri SR3 Cams, with Kodak Vision 3 film, and using the best len's in the world Zeiss Super Speed's. Which would require something better then a DVD (in the professional world many use DigiBeta or raw uncompressed digital footage on a very large hard drive)., because the film is exposed and focused properly beyond the ability of any consumer film camera (and most home movies aren't lit by a gaffer either).. With the quality of most home movies a telecine transfer is sufficient, many professionals still use this method to this day (have you every watched NFL films, they still use telecine transfers).
I am going to quote a sticky by lordsmurf in the restoration forum "Garbage in Garbage out", if what was shot looks bad... or is of mediocre quality then that is what your going to get. You can only polish it so much, and spend so much money.

[2Bdecided]

In many cases when we needed old family movies as part of documentary style shows, we just took a projector and used a DVC Pro Camera (and at one time Beta SP) to record the images on a white surface. This worked fine.

This usually gives you flicker, or blended frames, or both.

Most such non-frame-locked transfers include blended fames (i.e. one video frame which contains two original film frames mixed together).

You may think this is fine, but I think it's not good enough. It might look OK with 60i NTSC on a CRT, but good luck trying to get something clean enough to watch on a PC or post on the web at 24p. (It's possible to unpick this mess quite well, but it's not a good starting point for most people).


Unless the projector has an enlarged gate, it's probably cropping the edges of the film, which will be further cropped by any bad framing on the Camera, which will be further cropped by the overscan on most TVs. Not good. You end up zooming into the centre of an already low resolution image, and of course losing the edges of the original picture (which probably wasn't framed very well to start with).

Cheers,
David.

[OldMedia]

[QUOTE=2Bdecided;1980434]

You may think this is fine, but I think it's not good enough. It might look OK with 60i NTSC on a CRT, but good luck trying to get something clean enough to watch on a PC or post on the web at 24p. (It's possible to unpick this mess quite well, but it's not a good starting point for most people).


Unless the projector has an enlarged gate, it's probably cropping the edges of the film, which will be further cropped by any bad framing on the Camera, which will be further cropped by the overscan on most TVs. Not good. You end up zooming into the centre of an already low resolution image, and of course losing the edges of the original picture (which probably wasn't framed very well to start with).

Cheers,
David.

You are correct about these problems that you can run across with capturing film in this manner. I was just using that as an example in rosmari's case. My point was that with 8mm home movie's you don't need to go crazy and send your film to this film to video.com guy (Unless you don't mind spending alot of money for a little more picture quality, and you can colorcorrect what ever you get from anyone with software anyways).

Considering that many local film to video guys that you find in your phone book or at your local strip mall use this same video camera capturing process only with consumer quality equipment, and are less educated in the process (they seem to stay in business so many people are accepting this substandard quality... keep in mind that most of these people do not own a projector so they are unable to compare what the image should look like and the image they recieve from these business's).

Woodland uses this same method but with better gear... and in my case I use people that work professionaly in the film and TV world that know what they are doing and have done a good job. Would I prefer a telecine transfer... sure I would but time is always an issue so I go to the next best thing when I can't wait around a week for a transfer (I hope I didn't confuse anyone and made them want to whip out the old camcorder and projector and give it a whirl...because what David said above would happen unless you know what you are doing)

Some people are just happy to finally watch their old family movies after many years, I am sure companies like Woodland and even the crappy transfer company in the strip mall have made many people happy to just see grandma on her 1958 trip to Florida again (even if they could have done a better job transfering the film).

[EddyH]

The "DVDs die in 2-5 years" myth was started by somebody close to IBM, who ... ding ding ding ... sells magnetic media only. It was fluff propaganda, nothing more.

Well, if you're talking normal pressed DVDs, then sure - once they got over the whole issue of that poorly made batch where fungus got in.
However when it comes to DVDR I can only speak from my own experience, and it's definitely not a favourite format. Very good quality discs in a good drive, burnt at low speed and to a couple hundred megs short of full capacity, and handled with paranoia, CAN be fairly reliable as archive media. However, buying the sort of stuff I can reasonably afford and source on an as-needed basis (ie the second best brand in a local store), in the external drive that was a free extra with my ultralight laptop, stored in spindles in a big plastic box, this reliability doesn't last so long - and even some of my old CDRs are losing the fight also. And CD usually seems to be more robust than DVD.
And of course, when you get to the cheap end of the market, the things aren't even guaranteed to finish WRITING before throwing errors. Case in point, my workplace PC with its slimline writer and the cheap-shit discs they buy (not even spindled - just in a plastic wrapper. Ugh.) ... peaks at 4x, and probably 2/3rds of the output are instant coasters.

So from experience alone, before we even get into studies and theory, I'd quite happily say he's justified in giving people that warning. If their discs last longer, or even forever, then fine - they carry on quite happy that they've got super-good ones. If in the more likely instance, they're mishandled, badly stored, and aren't so great to begin with, then the prediction will come true, and if his customers come along to complain he's got a recourse to "I told you so".

Not that all forms of magnetic media are better... but yes, even though I make CD & DVD backups of pretty much ALL my data, that's strictly as backup rather than archive. I would rather trust my longterm storage to a good quality hard disk. For a start, it's environmentally sealed... and it's cheaper to boot. And I have lost files post-HDD theft to dropouts even from what looked like good quality discs.

This is another great example of BS:

Dirty Little Secret #3: DVDs are not "high resolution". If I told you I was "throwing away half of your movie film to transfer to DVD", would you do it? Well, that is exactly what "transfer mills" are doing. Each one of the "little pictures" in your film is made up of hundreds of "little lines". If I throw out every other "little line" to fit your film to a DVD, I have thrown away half of your film, haven't I? That's what MPEG2 compression does. Still want me to transfer your film to DVD?

This sounds like a poor understanding of interlacing. The whole site is full of similar ridiculous statements. He may as well rename that "dirty little secrets" page to "myths I believe and things I don't understand"

Yes, that is rather stupid. Particularly as you could just encode the film as progressive, and, barring the arrival of some bizarro-world home film that runs at more than 30fps, capture the entire content anyway (and often over two whole frames - old 8 / 16mm tends to run at something like 18fps doesn't it? Which means you need some rather peculiar form of pulldown ... 5:3 rather than 3:2? Who wants to bet he isn't even aware of such matters, let alone implements some way of dealing with them?) ... actually thinking about it, it'd appear to run a fair bit smoother if you DID capture as interlaced, so as to make for less jerky pulldown.

@EddyH
1. MPEG-2 isn't all that lossy -- specs do go higher than DVD. At 20-25Mb/s and I-frames only, you won't see artifacts. That can even be true in the 12-15Mb/s range.

Well yeah ... but I was considering DVD only, given that this is the likely output you'll be getting. As in, film to DVD transfer... Can you give me an example of consumer media that uses >10mbit MPG2? I hope I demonstrated some awareness of that sort of thing with the DV tape comments (ok, so it's not actual MPG2, but it's very close to it and embodies the same concept - 25mb/s, Iframe only...)

All the same, it IS STILL A LOSSY FORMAT BY DESIGN. There won't be any corruption visible to anyone without superman-spec eyes, but if you run a diff of the input and output frames you'll get a positive result for data loss. Even at 25mbit, i'd wager --- you've just cut out 225mbit of the original data, what do you expect?
(Same as a digital camera in "superfine" mode - the quality of it is great, enough to use as a master in all but the most demanding situations .... but, you do still get cameras that offer "raw" mode because that's the only way of having it lossless!)

2. I can leave a VHS tape in the sun, and it's going to get just as screwed up as a disc -- that's not proper storage. Of course it gets damaged! Heck, even a piece of paper gets ruined in sunlight.

Erm ... ok... let's see.... cassette tape: In a protective, opaque black plastic case that, by design, prevents the user contacting the tape (or more than about an inch of it) without disassembly or advanced meddling. Only the very edge, on one side, of the recording media and a small amount of despooled tape is exposed to the sunlight. Plus, it uses magnetic recording which is far less sensitive to disturbance by photon energy.

Paper: depends on how it's made. But I was never arguing for that as a long term data storage media anyway. If you're absolutely having to preserve your stuff, there's a good chance it'll keep it better than DVD (particularly with longlife monochrome carbon ink on acid-free paper, kept in a vault) ... but it's also very, very low data density and difficult to clean.

DVD-R: Recorded USING LIGHT. ENTIRE DATA SURFACE IS EXPOSED TO LIGHT, DUST AND PHYSICAL DAMAGE. And the plastic parts act as a focussing layer.
Of course this is less of an issue if you have a disc-pressing plant in your house and can afford the considerable run-up and -down costs to make single-figure copy runs of each project, given that a commercially produced DVD encodes the data with a series of physical bumps, rather than light/dark marks in a photosensitive substrate, and is therefore pretty much immune to the problem. It is still, however, susceptible to the aforementioned physical damage (scuffing etc) of the protective substrate - or, if it's not sufficiently protected with a thick label, the very thin and fragile data layer.

I've seen the recording layer of discs LITERALLY fade when someone's left them out on a desk for some time, particularly stark when e.g. only half of it is exposed and the other has something lying on top of it. You know how you can tell how much of one has been recorded by the different coloured concentric circles (or spot a poorly-recorded one from a mile off because it looks like a tree trunk section)? It's about halfway as bad as that. And of course, as the drives rely on telling a light bit from a dark bit, as soon as the contrast drops below their readability threshold, your data is gone. I have in fact learned the hard way with quite a lot of old files that sitting in a clear jewel case on a rack isn't such a great idea either - though it does at least limit the damage to the last 50mb or so of a CDR (granted, most of them were >7 years old... but that's still not even 1/3rd of that old tape, and some newer ones also suffered). An opaque box, preferably in a DJ flight case, is better.

I'm willing to listen to all manner of arguments, but it's reliant on you actually thinking them through first

[lordsmurf]

I've already more than adequately explained before why DVDs don't just have data "disappear". I don't have time to do it again. To be brief, there are two possible scenarios:
1. The aging equipment can't read a hard-to-read disc anymore. This is most common, often found trying to read Ritek media. Sometimes it's not even aging equipment, it's just inferior.
2. The disc was never good, and you never noticed. Never tested it.

That's it. The DVD boogeyman eating your data isn't an option. The DVD also does not develop amnesia.

Using good media is also important. Don't buy based on "brand name" either.

Manufacturers and indy labs (NIST, OSTA, etc) have already proven life expectancy as about 25-75 years average. Anything less and anything more is unlikely, assuming proper storage. Claims of 100-300 years is stupid, as is 2-5 years. The problem will be players anyway, not the discs.

Dye fade doesn't really happen either. I've run tests on this, and it only happens in direct sunlight.

Video tape warps in heat.

[VegasBud]

The very integrity of CD-R and DVD-R technology -- which are chemically very similar --is now being challenged by media experts worldwide. Some experts...are now reporting that the life of some optical media (CD-R and DVD-R) to be only 2 to 5 years.

These statements are clearly backed by longevity tests on "dye based" platter technology -- CD-R, DVD-R and DVD+R -- conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The study he cited ("Stability Comparison of Recordable Optical Discs—A Study of Error Rates in Harsh Conditions") actually concluded:

Results suggest that these media types will ensure data is available for several tens of years and therefore may be suitable for archival uses

In other words, the very study he cited (to prove he's right) concluded that he's wrong.

If he can't even get that right, it's probably best to take anything he says with a very, very large grain of salt.

In regards to some other theories about dvdr longevity...any object that is either made badly or subjected to abuse has a shortened life span. If you use inferior media, and/or abuse your media, it shouldn't come as a surprise when you have problems. That doesn't mean that dvdr (as a whole) can't be trusted...just that poor judgement has consequences.