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FT Depot
Posted 1 year ago

IMPORTANT UPDATE FROM FT DEPOT (with answers to questions likely to be asked)

Hello everyone. For the last 4 years this channel has brought you a random 35mm film scan (with a handful of 16mm scans in there) every single day. That might have been a theatrical trailer, or a music “video” shot on film, a promotional piece for an “upcoming” movie release, older commercials, cinema policy trailers, drive-in snipes, as well as various “lost” films such as the Chevy Show amusement park ride films, the Homer Bell tv series and today’s Minnesota Fats feature to name a few.

We have brought these to you on a daily basis with no cost to our audience. This channel is not monetized. It should not surprise anyone to learn that we are not using a home-built scanner rig, but that we are using high end professional scanners coupled with our photochemical film restoration lab. Keeping this channel going every day has cost a surprising amount of money in equipment, chemicals, maintenance, facility costs and so forth. In order to make a quality scan, each film must be prepped with a careful hand inspection and repair, followed with ultrasonic cleaning and sometimes rewashing to remove emulsion scratches. From there comes the actual wet gate scanning and grading. Obviously everything involved here incurs labor costs as well.

We have been happy to provide this service nonstop for the last 4 years, but to anyone that has actually read our channel’s “about” page, you will know that we have stated the following from the first day we started this channel 4 years ago: “We have invested a LOT of time and money into this project and are posting the files WITHOUT a burned-in watermark for those who want to download the videos for their own home private use. All we ask in return is for everyone to please show professional respect by LINKING to the video on our youtube page instead of re-uploading our videos to your channel or elsewhere on the internet (or selling them on physical media). PLEASE UNDERSTAND IF OUR WORK IS RE-UPLOADED BY OTHERS OR SOLD ON PHYSICAL MEDIA TO PASS IT OFF AS THEIR OWN, WE WILL HAVE NO OPTION BUT TO WATERMARK OUR FUTURE VIDEOS OR TAKE OTHER ACTION.”

That’s pretty clear. This one and only simple request to show support and respect for all the work we put into this channel by linking to our videos instead of stealing and re-uploading has been rudely ignored by a lot of people, with many racing each day to upload our videos to the internet archive and posting the videos elsewhere.

As an example, some of you may recall the issue with “D.M.” stealing our restoration and scanning work on drive-in theater snipes and then selling dvd bootlegs on ebay (while simultaneously running his “Christian ministry”). As a direct result of his actions, this is why we have not uploaded any additional drive-in clips for the last year or so.

Other people have lifted scans of ours and re-uploaded them with added fake sharpening, motion smoothing, simulated high frame rate and other vomit-inducing video filters, then claimed they have miraculously “restored” it when what they have actually accomplished is to make our work look terrible and nothing like actual film.

Overall it has become exhausting to put forth the amount of time and money we have sank into this channel only to have idiots on the internet claim that if it exists on the internet, it “belongs to everyone”. That ignorance on how the law works, coupled with their level of total disrespect to our channel is overwhelming to the point we have made a decision.

Effective today, we are ceasing daily uploads.

For clarity, we have no intention of closing the channel or abandoning it. We may consider moving it to another place such as Vimeo, but if we do we will certainly make another community post with our new channel location so anyone currently subscribed to THIS channel will get an alert and be able to follow us if we move elsewhere. For now though, it will remain here and we will continue to add to the channel at random intervals, but it will no longer be every single day.

As far as the frequency of future uploads, we have not yet decided. However let’s be honest, the more people keep re-uploading our scans instead of linking to them, the less likely we will be to update on a frequent basis since that is THE issue that kills our energy and desire to continue uploading.

For anyone who legitimately wants to support the channel for new scans, when you see our work being re-uploaded, contact the channel or comment on their video pointing out their actions. If you aren’t sure it is our scan, you can email us the link and we can definitively verify if our scan was the video’s source or not. We can verify this even if the scan had been re-uploaded to some other channel and then that upload was used as the source. This is done through a few different types of invisible watermarks which have always existed on our uploads, but you have to know explicitly where and how to read the watermark in order to see them, hence “invisible” watermarks. This was done so they would not distract from normal, legitimate viewing. (For some of the known-to-be-lost films, we have however also incorporated traditional visible watermarks.)

With that being said, cinema policy trailers are the primary thing we keep an eye out for. We do have a lot of these which have not yet scanned, but the reason you have not yet seen them yet is because when the print we uncover has been beaten to near death from being ran hundreds or thousands of times at a cinema, rather than upload a scratched and splicey policy trailer, we have been setting them aside in a specific pile in the hopes we will find another print in better condition. However after a certain amount of time has passed without finding better source material, we will go ahead and do whatever photochemical restorative work is possible on the film and upload it with whatever remaining defects are present. The reason we don’t just immediately take those steps is because photochemical restoration of a film is not cheap, nor is it quick or easy. As long as the film is not actively decaying from vinegar syndrome necessitating immediate action, it makes far more sense to delay it and scan something else in the meantime in the hopes of a better condition print surfacing. This is precisely the logic we have been following for not just policy trailers, but also Scopitones and so forth.

Regarding sound logos and THX trailers, we still have lots of those to upload as well, including literally the complete library of every single THX trailer in 35mm and 70mm as well as all of the variations of every THX trailer sound mix ever made…and yes our library does include the couple of “lost” ones. THX trailers are the one type of content where we actually do upload them at specific intervals, whereas all other content is generally uploaded in a randomized fashion. Humorously to us, nobody seems to have caught on to that pattern yet. We uploaded our first THX trailer when we hit 5000 subscribers. The next one we uploaded when we hit 10,000 subscribers. Another one was uploaded at 15,000 subscribers, and so forth. (Your local Mathlete can likely calculate when the next one will go live.) We do intend on keeping that tradition going until they have ALL been uploaded.

We also have other “lost” films which are not in urgent levels of decay like “The Player” feature was. Those are in the queue-to-scan and we will get to them eventually, as the lost films generally require a good amount of time spent in photochemical restoration.

We regret to inform everyone that we have been unable to locate a print in any condition of THE single most requested scan though. Perhaps in time one will surface in our archives, or maybe there is a viewer out there who has a film print in their collection which they would be willing to loan us to scan. Until then we must sadly inform everyone that we still have not been able to locate a print of the highly sought after and continually requested “Adventures in Babysitting trailer in 4K released by Touchstone Pictures in 1987 shown with Ernest Goes To Camp courtesy Buena Vista Entertainment”. Please send your condolences to Naminski.

One thing that we have never done on this channel is the overused (and annoying) plea “be sure to like, comment, subscribe and ring the bell!” The “likes” may assist youtube in their search algorithms, but in fairness the feedback in the “comments” from viewers has helped to keep the drive to continue uploading daily for such a long stretch of time. However given today’s announcement, we are officially requesting that if you are not yet subscribed, PLEASE DO SUBSCRIBE NOW and make sure the notifications are set to "all". With this channel switching to random uploading cycles, it will help ensure that any new uploads we add, or any announcements that we are moving the channel to another online location will show up in your front page suggested videos feed.

Meanwhile, if you or someone you know has prints of cinema policy trailers and snipes (not common items such as trailers) and would be willing to loan them to us, please reach out to our contact email and we can see if it is something we would be interested in scanning for this channel. (Please do not send us ebay links. We are not going to purchase film off of ebay when we still have tons of unsorted film to go through.)

A huge thank you to everyone who has offered positive support for the channel and shown appreciation for our efforts by not stealing the videos we have spent so much time and money to provide. In the immortal words of Arnold: “I need a vacation” but also, “I’ll be back.”

This is our first time using the “community” posting feature on youtube, but you should be able to leave any comments below. Thanks.

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