The next time a fighter jet is required in a movie, it would be quicker and easier to call up the old image on a screen, and then alter it as necessary to fit the new scene. That's just the start. The longer-term advantages of being able to control the flow of vast amounts of digital data are only now being appreciated. One day, people in Hollywood say, digital asset management could be used not only for its archival abilities, but for dealing with actual film shot or other work done for a movie. Each frame of an animated movie involves countless hours of work by dozens of animation artists and digital effects specialists.
Some movies take years to produce.
So, many studios are busy trying to design their own digital production systems. The Shoah foundation, housed on a back lot at Universal Studios, doesn't have the deep pockets of studios. Physically cataloging the interviews is laborious and time-consuming, and the foundation has more than 50 people doing it in shifts. The name of every place and every person is marked down, for use in later cross-referencing, and a brief synopsis of what's being said is written. To build up its catalog, the foundation has been using a team of historians who have drafted a series of keywords that its database will recognize in searches.