Duke of Crydee said:
Can someone help me understand the whole Star Wars print history?
I’m just curious about the backstory of this, as for a long time these projects have just been cobbling together rips of retail releases and TV recordings.
How did full 35mm prints of the movies turn up? How many are out there in the public? (Because I assume having them, or access to them, is uncommon?)
Does what Poita or TeamNeg1 have represent the best available in public?
I know this information is somewhere, but I wouldn’t know where to begin to find it here in the forums. I can’t say how awesome it is that this is happening. I donated to the cause and would do so again for an archival, historically accurate (as much as possible) set of the OT.
Basically, at the end of a theatrical run, the studios used to either ask for the prints to be returned, or just as often, destroyed. Many prints had a bandsaw run through them at the end of their run.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN_8ZBiYUJ8
A few, very rare times, the cinema owner or projectionist would keep the print instead, and store it away.
That lead to a secretive ‘grey market’ for 35mm theatrical prints amongst private collectors.
There are very few complete prints around, and most of them are battered to bits as they had been run hundreds or even thousands of times by the time they ended up in a collector’s hands.
They were very hard to find or purchase as it is kept relatively quiet, especially after Planet of the Apes star, Roddy McDowall was swooped upon by the FBI for owning and trading prints in the 1970s (see here for some backgrounder on that: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/roddy-mcdowalls-planet-tapes-0)
So the prints are hard to find, expensive to buy, and then you need access to million dollars of cleaning and scanning equipment to get the best out of the prints, and 20+ TerraBytes of space to store a single scan of the film, so nearly 50TB if you also want a backup.
Just copying a single reel of data to a RAID to get it ready to work on can be an overnight job, even moving the data around takes an eon, let alone working on it.
So basically, up until very recently, it just hasn’t been possible or practical to be able to do this kind of archive and restoration.
In the case of Star Wars, we got lucky that some Technicolor IB prints survive, they will look about the same in 30 years time as they do now, same with Return of the Jedi, the LPP prints will still look much the same in another 30 years. With Empire however, the prints were all on early 1980s Fuji or Kodak stock, all of which had a fatal flaw and faded fast. In another 30 years, those prints will be unwatchable, with no colour left except for red.
If not for everyone here helping out, and being passionate about this little 1980 film, its theatrical presentation would very likely have been lost forever. Star Wars and Jedi could have a print based restoration done by the next generation of people, but it would be too late for Empire.
I am forever grateful for the support of this community and the way it allows us to do what the studios have neglected to do, and preserve our important film heritage, warts and all, for future generations to be able to watch and study what was the state of the art in film making in 1980.
As for are they the best sources available, well, for Empire I think these are very likely the best we will get, and they are certainly good enough to fully restore the film.
The releases so far by TN1 were, as mentioned before, from an LPP of Star Wars, that whilst a lot better than the LD and TV rips of the past, was a relatively low quality print as far as prints go, better ones are available and some have been scanned and archived, they were done a few years ago now.
I still have two Star Wars prints that are awaiting scanning that are of about as good a quality as is likely to turn up.
The LPPs that have been scanned of Jedi so far are of a good quality, they are all from a batch that had colour issues (a heavy blue cast in later reels) and are quite grainy, there is a couple of better sources kicking around out there that hopefully we can get to next year, but there is no hurry on those. I have another two Jedi prints available to be archived that haven’t been looked at yet to see what the quality is like compared to what has already been scanned.
The main issue is cost, storage as mentioned runs to around 50TB per film if you want to have a backup, a commercial 4K full aperture scan with damage matte costs between USD10,000 and USD25,000 and the added complication that typically the best scanning facilities won’t touch, or can’t be seen to touch a film still in copyright, and professional cleaning runs at about $150-$200 per reel.
Just shipping 7 reels of Jedi around costs hundreds of dollars in freight alone.
There are other ways, but there is no way around the problems that it is expensive, time consuming, a bit of a grey area, and hard to find, purchase or borrow prints in the first place, and then data wrangling is a bit of a tedious nightmare.
Then once you have the prints, restoring them can start taking place, and at roughly one hundred and seventy five thousand frames in a two hour feature, each frame over 100MB in size, working on them eats a lot of your personal time and resources. And then you have to have yet another 20+ TB of hard drives for your corrected versions to output to.
You really have to have a passion for it, it kind of consumes your life 😃
