I’d love nothing more than to get ESB done, it is difficult to prioritise one project over another.
The main scan the 4K77 project is using exists in part because many years ago I sent them $3000 worth of hard drives to store it on. The 1977 crawl exists because they lent me the film to get the 1977 crawl scanned on a pro level scanner, the ESB print got scanned in part because of Harmy’s followers. If Mike Verta hadn’t started on his project, some of these prints never would have been found and scans would not have been done.
We all help each other out behind the scenes, and make massive sacrifices of time and money to do so. It often means sacrificing time on your own project to help out with someone elses.
I got a PM the other day from someone who just wants me to upload the entire 21TB scan to their computer for them to use in their own experiments. Just doing that requires days of my time to restore the scan from LTO to hard drives, to tie up a computer for weeks to transfer the files, a computer that then can’t be used for doing any work on any of the projects. They just expected that it would be done for them, with no thought to the time and money costs involved at this end.
I also copped some flak on PMs as to seeing that I am so rich and can throw this sort of money at projects, why do I need donations anyway. I get this assumption quite a bit.
The reality is, I have 4 kids, two have medical issues, one has severe mental and physical disabilities and I am her primary carer. This means I can only work on short professional projects, or ones where I can work remotely from home. This means I typically make around AUD$30K a year in income, about $23,000 US a year, and my time is split between the work I can do and the needs of my kids. The time inbetween those spaces, I spend on this stuff, and we live very frugally and I spend probably more than I should on this stuff as well. Anything I would have spent buying a coke or a magazine or a coffee or something, I throw at this instead. I love it, I love working on it, and being part of a community that has done something that the studios are unwilling to.
The purpose of mentioning all this is that it boils down to I have limited resources of money and time. I have amazing resources of access to equipment and expertise, but am severely hampered by time and money. It is frustrating for me, and for everyone waiting on these, and without the help coming in from all of the amazingly generous souls here and on FanRes, none of this would exist. You all are truly amazing.
It is so frustrating sometimes, I wish we had a Zuckerberg style sugardaddy behind our cause, for about $40K per film, we could get the OT restored to a truly spectacular 4K that would knock the socks off the Blurays, and get it done in a few months, but we don’t have that kind of money available. It is a pity, as we could genuinely restore all 3 films for less than they spent re-doing the sound for the ANH SE.
Anyway, enough of a look behind the curtain, I just want everyone to know that I am as impatient as you all are to get the OT fully restored, in a glorious 4K deep colour version that it deserves, but other projects sometimes get priority, it all helps in the end, even if it delays things for a while.