So Where's the Patreon Money Goin' Anyway?

Hey, everyone, and an especially warm welcome to the new faces around too!

Before I get to talking about my main story here I just want to say, I'm so happy that people are enjoying the Mario restoration, it truly means the world to all of us on the team!

That said, we did find some issues on the audio when dematrixing it through a Pro-Logic or similar surround system, so we'll be posting a fix at a later time. For now, please enjoy it in regular stereo.

Now, another reason I want to thank you all so much is that, majorly due to your guys' support, we've been able to seriously upgrade our storage capabilities!

So, I want you guys to guess just how big a lossless, raw, 4K+ scan of a film is. Let's say, a 90-minute movie on 35mm. Or a 16mm anime episode. Okay. You done guessing? Read on.

So... if we're talking rendering out the scans at ProRes 4444 XQ and 12-bit color (which is standard for this kind of thing!) we're looking at over 1TB for the movie and around 500GB for the anime episode... YIKES.

The costs and logistics needed to properly archive these things are neither simple nor cheap, and we have tried many different solutions that just, didn't work out so well.

That is until we discovered the magic of LTO. You see, LTO tapes and drives were designed with mass, long-term storage in mind for use cases just like ours: users who need to archive huge files at usable transfer rates, to keep safe for as long as possible. How does this system work? Well, first you need the drive... which isn't cheap. The retail in the thousands of USD at minimum, but... once you have that, each tape, which in LTO-8's case can store 12-30TB of storage depending on compression, is only like $60 USD! It is an investment but in the long term we really think it will help save on costs. Another brilliant thing about this medium is that they are FAR more reliable than regular hard drives... they last for DECADES as opposed to only a few years for spinning disks. So, we feel it is the perfect way for us to store and archive all our precious scans for years and years to come.

Now, why am I telling you this? Because, thanks to you lovely Patrons, we've been able to buy our first three LTO-8 tapes, giving us so much storage to archive our scans to! (The scanner we use had already invested in the drive himself, so it only made sense to get some tapes for them to store things on!) If you ever wondered if your contributions were directly influencing what we did with our preservation effort, well, now you can see you guys have clearly helped us even further advance our goal. We could not appreciate you all even more than we do now.

If you were also wondering, all Patreon funds also go to hosting a local FTP we run to quickly transfer files between our key members for restoration and color work, as well as miscellaneous costs here and there.

So, thank you all so much for helping us with our effort to save as much anime and other content on film as we can, and we hope to show you guys even more awesome stuff in the near future.

If you would like to learn more about the LTO system, here's a good YouTube video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uQVkUQ9T1I

And, here's the official LTO website from Quantum: https://www.quantum.com/en/products/tape-storage/lto-media/