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The Phantom Menace on 35mm (* unfinished project *)

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UPDATE 2019

This project is dead. I’m very sorry to all who donated. We will need to find a new print and start a new project for TPM 35mm to happen. Everything below is archived for transparency.

(old) Update: Scanning will go ahead (YAY!) If this project interests you please send a donation to poita, even a small donation is appreciated (see below). The full cost of this project will be around $2500+.

How to donate?

  1. Poita’s PayPal email address is here, or use the paypal.me/poit link.
  2. You can also send bitcoin or mine bitcoin (watch your electricity bill if you mine it). Address: 13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x

Donation deadline and amounts

  • You can donate now, or next month, or even in the new year. Poita will continue accepting donations until further notice. There is no formal deadline on donations themselves.
  • Every amount helps and is appreciated:

poita said:

Honestly, ever dollar helps, and it doubles as an easy gauge as to whether people really want a project, or if they would just ‘like’ to see it.
That really goes for anyone’s projects, a buck or two or five is always appreciated, as much for the sentiment as for the offset of costs. A lot of people who work on these various projects put hundreds or even thousands of hours of their free time into making them happen, call in favours, take risks and spend more of their own money than is even vaguely sensible.
When you see people chip in anything to help, it really, well, helps. There have been many times sitting alone at 3am that you feel like giving up, looking at an A/B roll of frame #114003 for glitches you may have missed, or logging a missing frame, and then you get a ping with a message that someone in another timezone on the other side of the planet has donated five bucks, and an accompanying message that the movie held a special place in their life for their own special reasons, and you get a second wind - it keeps you going, and reminds you of your own passion for this stuff, and you keep plugging away it.

  • If you’ve already donated you can of course feel free to donate again if you want to.
  • The above info on donations is also relevant to all of poita’s projects, including the SE scanning.

Trailer

Here is a 35mm Trailer scan, this is Jetrell Fo’s trailer and he very kindly allowed me to share it:

There is also a different scan of the same trailer shared by Williarob here.

Project Info

You may have noticed in poita’s thread poita has the opportunity to scan the SE Trilogy in 4K triple-flashed with a damage matte. There is also a Phantom Menace print available that can be scanned at the same facility. To be scanned triple-flashed with damage matte would require 21TB of storage, scanned single-flashed can be done with 4TB. The prints (Phantom Menace and the SEs) and the scanner are only available for a short window, so it’s now or never if we wish to get this scanned. It is about $400 to ship the print (there’s also a rental charge).

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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You can count on me, I certainly can financially participate and maybe provide cloud space for the 21TB of storage. Just tell me how and when I can participate.

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Unfortunately we need internal drives to cover the storage. The scanner records straight to them. So that’s our first obstacle! We don’t need that space permanently though, theoretically we can compress it down to whatever size we want after we get the scan back… but if we want it triple-flashed it has to be delivered raw. I hope that makes sense! 😛 This won’t be a cheap project if it goes ahead. 😃

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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Ok, so the needs are financial more than technical. Fine for me, just tell me how I can participate!

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Yes, although you purchase a hard drive to loan if you wanted (you’d have to send the money of course). Poita will let us know soon precisely what we need, if we can use some external drives then storage would already be sorted.

On the other hand, with the cleaning that gets done we may not really need the IR damage matte anyway (we would only need it for damage, not for dirt).

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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OK, just let me know how and when I’ve to send money, I’ll be happy to participate to this project.

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I can participate also. The movie is mostly meh, but the Blu-ray is overscrubbed, overfiltered and has digital Yoda. A 1999 filmlike aspect would be appreciated for sure.

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I can probably donate an 8 or 10 TB drive if necessary. Also, if you’ve got the external drives, couldn’t you just disassemble them to remove the HDDs?

If I had some gum, I’d chew a hole into the sun…

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Only certain models will work, preferred is the Seagate Skyhawk 8TB internal.

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!

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poita said:

Only certain models will work, preferred is the Seagate Skyhawk 8TB internal.

Hi Poita,

If you can find the exact model you need on Amazon, please let me know and I will order it and send it to your address (if OK for you, don’t hesitate to PM me).

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Interesting that you prefer Seagate. I’ve had two Seagates fail on me in the past few years.

she/her
mwah

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I have 4 x Seagate IronWolf 8TB in my NAS and I wouldn’t change for anything in the world!
Compared to Western Digital, they are a bit noisier, but I have no problems with stability or performance, they do not heat up unnecessarily and IronWolf’s internal health tools are frankly useful.

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It’s not a matter of preferring seagate, it is what the Scanner will work with, it only functions with a few models.

The Seagate 8TB Skyhawk, Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro all work, as do the 10TB models of those.
e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-SkyHawk-Surveillance-Hard-Drive/dp/B01LXF9W9C/

I’ve had seagate, toshiba, Western Digital and Hitachi all fail with various models over the years, it seems more model specific than manufacturer specific when it comes to failures.

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!

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clutchins said:

Interesting that you prefer Seagate. I’ve had two Seagates fail on me in the past few years.

Yeah it makes sense, the drive needs to be fast enough not to choke on the data rate coming from the scanner. The only issue I have with the Seagate is that it only has a 3 year warranty, WD Gold drives have a 5 year warranty. Still though on price comparison it can’t be beaten.

Ironwolf drives are on special this week:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822179003

Are they better then SkyHawk?

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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Don’t know if they are better, but they also work with the scanner.

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!

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Well in any case I can get an 8tb drive for this project, so storage is sorted at least for a single-flash scan. If someone else wants to contribute the remainder of the storage we can get it triple-flashed.

We will need some substantial donations to get this done though, so let me know if you’re willing to donate to this and how much and we’ll see if we can raise enough to scan or not. I’ll just take pledges for now and if we get enough then move to donations. 😃

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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Definitely willing to donate. Won’t know how much for at least a week, but once I know I’ll shoot you a PM.

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RU.08 said:

Well in any case I can get an 8tb drive for this project, so storage is sorted at least for a single-flash scan. If someone else wants to contribute the remainder of the storage we can get it triple-flashed.

We will need some substantial donations to get this done though, so let me know if you’re willing to donate to this and how much and we’ll see if we can raise enough to scan or not. I’ll just take pledges for now and if we get enough then move to donations. 😃

I’ll also provide a HD, it is currently on the way to Poita.

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Hi all, thanks for the interest. So far ZigZig has donated, so a very big thanks there.

I have a small window of opportunity for this, if there isn’t enough interest, I’ll have to let it pass, so if you are interested, now is the time to come forward.
It will cost me around $2500 to scan this, plus hard drives and freight, I can foot a fair chunk of that if there is enough genuine interest out there, but if there isn’t, I’d rather focus on a different title that people want more, as personally this film isn’t on my own wishlist, this is purely service to the Star Wars community for me.
If there is another forum where there might be more TPM fans, let me know, if people really want this film preserved, then I am all for it.

Also if anyone has the DTS discs, drop me a line.

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!

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Jetrell Fo has the DTS discs for all the prequels. You can contact him at the other forum.

Forum Moderator

Where were you in '77?

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ChainsawAsh said:

Definitely willing to donate. Won’t know how much for at least a week, but once I know I’ll shoot you a PM.

PM sent - now that I’m stuck working 84 hours next week I don’t need to wait and see, but I won’t have the cash to donate until my next check on the 13th.

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poita said:

Also if anyone has the DTS discs, drop me a line.

If I can ask you to be more specific. Do you need the actual discs or do you need the audio from the discs.

The ISO disc image of the Cinema DTS-CD ROMs from all the SW films, SE’97 and the prequels, can be found on the usenet circuit. I am sure there are people here that have the ISO disc image files and can extract the .AUD files from the discs to open the 6 channel audio files for sync’ing.

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The ISOs are fine, it will help me sync up and look for missing frames etc.
Thanks for the heads up.

Donations welcome: paypal.me/poit
bitcoin:13QDjXjt7w7BFiQc4Q7wpRGPtYKYchnm8x
Help get The Original Trilogy preserved!