The Original Trilogy restored from 35mm prints (a WIP) — Page 15

Or whoever wants to sponsor the cleaning for one reel. 😉

The reply was for Harmy 😃

Harmy doesn’t mind… so everyone have at it 😃

A few people have been asking re technical details of the scanning, basically it is scanned at full aperture 4K, which give us over 3 times the vertical resolution of UHD, and a little more horizontal resolution (but negligible).

The print is anamorphic, so we end up with nearly 3000 lines of vertical resolution vs the around 820 lines or so on the official Blu-ray.
As for colour, it is 16 bits per pixel, vs 8 bits per pixel of Blu-ray, and it is 4:4:4 colour vs 4:2:0 of the official Blu-ray, so there is a lot of colour range to play with.

Of course, it is a release print, not a negative, so the print itself is quite variable as far as density, contrast and grain/resolution goes, but I believe we are pretty much capturing as much as is there.

Having seen the scans, I actually believe that given proper care, a restoration based purely on these scans could look better than the official BD on all counts - with a bit of sharpening (which there is a lot of on the BD) it actually rivals the sharpness and detail of the BD, and with some careful cleanup and noise management, it could look nearly as clean as the BD, while not looking unnaturally digital, like the BD does. This would take some serious restoration effort though, so the simplest way to get the original version something resembling a modern transfer/restoration of the kind we see with movies like Jaws or Spartacus, is still to color correct and despecialize the BD.

Thanks to everyone, we have enough to have 5 reels cleaned, and aren’t far from being able to get #6 done, so I have sent them all in, and am hopeful that we will raise the last part before I have to pay the bill 😃

My heartfelt thanks to everyone that has helped out in any way, I feel it is such an important film to preserve, and it was literally going to fade away forvever if we didn’t act

I’m uploading the scans done so far to Harmy now, and will post some images and samples over the next few days as I get them rendered out.

AllAboutThatSpace said:

My two cents would be to get the DE Reel 2 cleaned next, assuming it will be crucial in subbing the latter half of the British reel, which is damaged. I know you can scan it now as it is, but seeing as it’s vital, you might as well treat it as the next part of the preservation.
I’m sure if it came to reel 6 of the Brit print and funds had run out, the community would come to the rescue 😉

Clearly the way to go!

A little donation is coming your way Poita 😃

Donation executed 😃 Thanks Poita!

It is the red flashes in the 2nd half of reel2

I’ll show you what it looks like on the IR scan, you can see the mould pattern clearly on that if interested.

Donation made.

A quick look at Reel4 😃
https://infinit.io/_/38P6PcQ

Thanks to everyone for making this possible!