Files as Waste: A Sustainable Post Story
Written By Jaclyn Paris, Green The Bid Member & Head of Development, Cosmo Street
Trucks idling near set, single-use plastics, food waste, elaborate set pieces trashed, generators whirring. When I joined the conversation on commercial workflow sustainability, we focused on physical “things” in production’s carbon footprint. As head of development at Cosmo Street Editorial, the first post company to join Green the Bid, an inquiry was lobbed in my direction: What is post production’s carbon footprint?
Noticing that the “things” the post community produced en masse were files, and forming a hypothesis built upon 15 years of observed trends, I guessed that our files are our greatest source of waste.
As the subject of my hyperfixation for the last three years, I’ve discovered files are a great paradox: They can at once be our magnum opuses, and our cultural ephemera. Files are our precious Tiffany glass — the subject of careful checksums, consideration of losslessness, concern for frame-dropping – and then they get dumped, duped, transferred, copied and disorganized with wild abandon.
To corroborate my hypothesis, I first talked with Keiren O’Brien, a sharp-witted ex-director and founder of Film Locker (now the No. 1 supplier of secure, carbon-neutral digital film data storage to the creative media industries). He quickly schooled me on the environmental impact of files, and I began to understand them as “things,” like trucks idling near set. I learned about rare earth metals, exploitation of resources and the profusion of e-waste generated by the disposal of hard drives. And that fluffy white cloud? It’s actually a server room more giant than the horizon itself, and it’s emitting carbon like you wouldn’t believe. Files sit on miles wide data campuses using potable water as coolants, sucking immense energy from the electric grid. Globally, the environmental impact of CO2e attributed to data servers is poised to surpass that of aviation.
Over the next year, my conversations with sound designers, VFX artists, colorists, editors, DITs and CTOs intensified my hypothesis, with findings more reckless than I imagined. The post community routinely generates unprecedented volumes of media. After talking on a sustainability panel hosted by IATSE Local 600 at Cine Gear Expo, I connected with two DITs and a handful of people from camera departments who are not the first to reinforce the “just in case” mindset that is pervasive in my conversations. Productions are shooting multiple camera angles, shooting wide and framelessly, shooting alt scripts that never see the light of day, while DITs admit to holding RAWs for the long term, just in case. The democracy of means (there is no camera neg, file storage is cheaper than ever) enables shooting and storing excessively with blissful ignorance to our files’ global carbon emissions.
O’Brien poses this query: “What if ‘just in case’ is the reason the planet is changing at a terrifying rate? Could ‘just in case’ be the cause of water poverty in Texas? Why homes and lives in North Carolina are swept away in an instant? And why LA has been levelled by apocalyptic wildfires that ignore wealth, fame or politics?”
On the receiving end of production file excess sits post production. As an industry, we exacerbate the chaos with our own “just in case” ethos. We give copies to the colorist, the VFX team, the editor’s house and the media server. Meanwhile a hard drive is somewhere in Los Angeles under an assistant editor’s mattress. What’s worse? We treat hard drives as single-use objects, and then we leave files on the cloud just in case we need to grab them. “‘Just in case’ instant-access cloud storage has a huge carbon footprint, and it is getting larger as the world’s data grows. Leave 10TBs of creativity online for five years (the average term projects reside with Film Locker), and you create between 1,500kg and 4,000kg of CO2e. That’s equivalent to the energy needed to power your house for two years,” O’Brien explains.
The “just in case” mindset becomes a collective insurance policy based on fear, responding to an unanswered question across the entire workflow: Who is responsible for holding onto the files, and how many copies, and for how long? I feel I owe everyone the answer to this once and for all.
We categorically cannot allow the misunderstanding around data and CO2e to persist, nor can we let it be intensified by the fact that files are abstract. The chronic misconception of a fluffy white and abundant cloud, our modern version of Hardin’s tragedy of the commons, is disastrous. We must break the meta silence, reconceptualize the lack of tangibility and reimagine our data behavior as occupying literal space, on a physical data server, using potable water, pulling from an electric grid. To imagine it as anything else perpetuates the historical lack of measurability and care around the rampageous carbon footprint of data.