Oh, the real life strikes back ! 😉 Congratulations for you job !
Why wouldn’t Despecialized become a team/community work for the next edition(s) ? I know it is yet partly the case (the list of “special thanks”, Towne’s SW etc.), but what if guy who have the skills and the experience here work together for scenes replacement, rotoscoping etc. under your supervision ?
For the Original, since Neverar’s correction is coming soon and good 35 mm available references multiplicating, the OT community should move forward ! “On met la gomme Chico !”
Moving forward, the most useful sources for Despecialized will surely be cleaned up 35mm footage. I don’t think there could be any harm in lots of people contributing properly cleaned shots. But I don’t think there are very many people here who are particularly skilled at this. It would not be ideal to farm out the work to unproven people. While the initial learning curve is not too bad (and this is speaking from my own personal experience) for cleaning up quick shots, credits, etc, it is quite another thing to rely on us random folks for the bulk of the film. It can be a long and taxing process and it is easy to make mistakes that are destructive to the product. I am certainly not qualified for any kind of extensive restoration.
Training people in these skills is a project in and of itself. But if people took the time and effort to learned (and showed some example work based on any of the now available 35mm scans for quite a few films), I don’t think it would be unreasonable to get a few more people involved.
Anything to do with color correction, on the other hand, needs to be done by as few people as possible, in my opinion. As shown in the many color correction threads, we’ve all got different opinions. Most of the things we all come up with are honestly probably good enough. But the grading needs to be consistent.
Also: congrats on the job, Harmy!