Hollywood Fire Destroys Films Worth Millions

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood your question.  I would assume that most of that money was lost because the films they were working on and/or storing in 1929 were made out of silver nitrate stock, not celluloid, and hence were quick to burn. Under those circumstances, the costs would have quickly risen.  I'm sure that's what happened.  And when you add in production costs as well -- money spent on the films that were lost -- the total losses would have been overwhelming.

And I just wanted to add one more thing about what CFI (and other labs) did before digital completely took over - in the transition in other words:  when films were still shot on film but edited digitally, the lab, through what is known as telecine, would transfer the film negatives to the digital format for editing.  Then, when the editing was done, they'd transfer the digital final cuts back to the film format.  Those were the last good days, in my view.