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Post #1013700

Author
poita
Parent topic
The Original Trilogy restored from 35mm prints (a WIP)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1013700/action/topic#1013700
Date created
28-Nov-2016, 4:24 AM

The ‘Australian’ print is one of 6 ‘Exhibition’ LPPs that were struck in 1983.
There may be more, but I know at least six were originally made for a few places to do a ‘Trilogy’ marathon when Jedi came out. This is the only surviving one I have found, another appeared to turn up in Atlanta, but turned out to be a Fuji print.

The UK one I am looking to get scanned next has not faded anywhere near as much as the German prints, it was kept in a Coolroom, and that seems to have slowed the fade compared to other prints I have seen.

The German print looks like the samples on the first page of this thread.

We scan at 16bits per pixel, this means the total ‘colours’ able to be captured jumps from the approximately 16 million colours that a DVD can reproduce @ 8bpp to 281 Trillion colours @ 16bpp.
In practical terms it means each channel, Red, Green and Blue, jumps from 256 shades each to 65,536 shades each.
This lets us recover as much colour as if left in the print.
It would be better to have an unfaded print or negative, but, when it comes to Empire a partially faded print is the best we have available to scan, and generally only heavily faded prints turn up, and it is getting worse by the day.

I wish we had access ten years ago, but am glad we have access now, it is literally in the nick of time to ensure the theatrical presentation of Empire is relatively well preserved, warts and all, either for future generations to see the state-of-the-art film making from 1980 as it was, or for people to look at as a base for restorations back to an imagined ‘perfect’ version from 1980, one where you kept each composite frame meticulously clean, got your mattes as precise as possible and used the finest grain film stocks etc.

My interest is in warts and all preservation of one of the most important films of the early 1980s, and hopefully with the generous help of a lot of behind the scenes people, we can get it done.
We have already had help for the scanning of other prints, by two people in the US that I will be forever grateful to, and many others that have allowed the dream to become a reality. I can’t thank the preservation community enough.