Hey guys I’m new to this, can someone just give me a quick summary of everything that has happened?
Hard to beat Towne’s post…
Basically as far as The Empire Strikes Back goes, we have cleaned and scanned a UK print @ 4K full aperture that had good colour, but unfortunately has mould which shows up as red flashes in many scenes.
I have purchased a German print of Empire that has more faded colour, but no mould, and am hoping to have it cleaned and scanned at some point in the future once I can afford both the process costs and the 20+ TB of storage that the scan takes up. To clean, and store 6 reels (which Empire is, Jedi is 7) costs around USD2000 (cleaning and HDD costs) plus the cost of scanning (and the scanning can cost up to USD15K)
We are currently going through the UK print to see what frames are missing, and checking against the German print to see if they are present, and if the mouldy frames are okay on the German print, with the hope of creating one complete print.
I’m away from home for a while at the moment, so you won’t see much in updates for a little bit, I did have a few segments of the German print scanned, without cleaning, as I was about to lose access to my favourite scanner, so wanted to get as much done as I could. I was working up until then on cleaning up some of the more damaged German frames to see if the colour can be recovered and the damage repaired, i.e. to see if the print is worth the enormous cost of scanning and cleaning it.
I have scanned one Return of the Jedi LPP, another is awaiting scanning and cleaning, and multiple Star Wars prints have been scanned, but another IB Tech is awaiting scanning and cleaning, and I’d like to rescan the LPP at some point.
We also have an 8mm print taken from a 35mm French print of Empire, that is useful for a colour reference, as the print was in good shape colour-wise when the 8mm version was taken from it. I need one of these to be able to transfer it for scanning (http://www.ebay.com/itm/ELMO-ALUMINUM-Super-8-MOVIE-REEL-1200-ft-360-m/381889385828)
The focus has been on Empire as all available prints of it are fading rapidly, so it was most important to get it done as a matter of urgency, Both Star Wars and Jedi are on film stock that doesn’t really fade, so the urgency for them is far less.
I am currently hamstrung by storage constraints, cleanup is slow as there is not enough free HDD space, so things are constantly being copied on and off the RAID which is very time consuming.
That pretty much wraps it up to where I am at (if you ignore THX and a bunch of other non-trilogy projects that are also underway, but those are a story for another time), hope that helps bring everything up to speed!
TLDR Version. UK ESB Print scanned, German ESB Print not cleaned, some reels partially scanned.