I have watched the unfaded ESB print 6 times over the past year, and looking at this print, and another UK print that I have gotten a hold of I can say a few things with absolute certainty.
I’m curious, why aren’t you scanning this unfaded print instead of the red faded Kodak print?
I think for a new audience, they would need to regrade the film, both Star Wars and Empire have their timing all over the place. This isn’t surprising as in the late 70s and very early 80s, only MGM and MovieLab had realtime screen timers. All other labs were running a twin projector ‘Comparator’ that was hand cranked and it took around 5 hours or so to make the notes to time a 20 minute reel. The colorist or Front Line Timer/Head Timer as we were called back then, would sit and watch the film and take notes. You would write down the numerical adjustments that you thought each shot needed, so for the cave scene, the FLT would be able to see in their mind that to get the cold blue of the shot that the Director wanted, the adjustment would now be 12,12, 26 to be added or subtracted to the printer file. This would then go away and you wouldn’t see how it looked until a new print was made following the math you had done on the printer file.
Really interesting stuff here Poita! So you’re/were a color timer? A few years ago I shot some home movies and short films on 16mm 50D Vision 3 negative film and had it processed/printed on 2383 Vision 3 Print film at Fotokem in California. I think I read somewhere that all movies released in the past few years that have had photochemical intermediates have all been from Fotokem. Maybe even that 100% of release prints for Hollywood movies are made there too. They may be the only place left in America that still does it the traditional way. They have extremely cheap student prices so I took full advantage of that. It cost around $.09/feet for processing color and $.18/feet for a one-light/best light workprint. Whoever their timer is did a heck of a job. They were basically almost fully timed even though they were only best light workprints. That may have been because of my excellent metering though 😃
They even gave you a free sceening of your films in one of their screening rooms. You don’t even have to reel the film up or anything, they have a projectionist do it for your while you wait in a nice comfy seat in the screening room. Pretty humbling to think about the directors/cinematographers that had been there before me. I know of a few big directors still doing photochemical intermediates.
So the version I will be working on certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste, the black levels are all over the place on the prints, the timing is all over the place, some shots don’t match as well as they should, there is a shitload of dirt in many of the composite shots that was printed into every print, and I stabilise to the sprockets, so the camera weave will also be there.
In short, it will be how it looked in 1980, colour, neg dirt, grain warts and all.
I’m in total agreement with this! No tinkering.