RU.08,
What Mr. Cook said was that they would find the best settings for a film and then hope they didn’t stray while they monitored the transfer to check. The machine was a best to change the settings on (an hour and a half at the start of the day) and between the two comments and many others in the 90 minute interview I understand that they did not tweak the scenes but rather looked for the best settings for the entire film (not sure if he meant for each reel or for the entire film). He never mentions using a special telecine film. He never talks about 16mm. He talks about interpostives and internegatives which are the two intermediate steps in chemical processing from o-neg to release print. Both are lower contrast than the release prints.
And according to the man at BBC interviewed about the next generation machine (Mr. Cook was using a Rank Cinetel 2 and the man at the BBC circa 1990 was using Rank Cinetel 3), it could do release prints, negatives, and intermediates. I conformed that with an independent source. So it can do anything on 35mm or 16mm from the o-neg to a release print. Please refer to all his comments about the 1982 telecine that happened right before he joined the team and refer to the images of the LD archive of that telecine that I have included. It is a fine transfer that really contradicts what you are trying to say. Per Mr. Cook’s interview, it was a release print that was turning green and they had to restore the color rather than just do a straight transfer. From how it turned out, they didn’t do a bad job and the dark areas contain far more detail than the Technicolor prints.
And you are incorrect about prints not having crushed blacks. Please refer to the Technicolor scans. Either Mike Verta’s samples, DrDre’s scan, or the full film release as 4k77. It is full of shots where the dark areas are just a blob of darkness where all the telecines show an abundance of detail. We know that at least one telecine was from a release print (1982), at least two were from interpositives, and some from internegatives (interpositives would not have the reel change cues and internegatives would). Not one of them is from a special telecine transfer (not surprising since none of these are TV station telecines which is where you might find a special 16mm telecine print).
Your theory of the nature of the source of the telecines is not born out by the abilities of the machines used, the interviews with two different telecine operators, or the accounts of the sources of other telecines which agree with what Mr. Cook has said. I think the evidence presented makes it very clear how Fox did telecines and that it was from a release print or intermediate (the O-neg was too precious most of the time except when no other prints were available such as the Chaplin films). That matches what I have always heard and observed from watching movies on various movie channels from across the years. A great many telecines are made from theatrical prints, especially for older technicolor films where a full restoration would have to be done to realign the 3 strip Technicolor negatives - pretty cost prohibitive for a telecine for TV viewing. We could continue to discuss this, but I think the horse is dead and the evidence I have posted is pretty clear cut. Fox never used a special print for the Star Wars telecines. It was always a print on hand. Even the print used for the Definitive Collection was not one done specifically for that and was a standard interpositive.
Your continued comments about a low contrast print match the nature of interpostives and internegatives so I don’t know why you keep insisting that it had to be a special print when the evidence says otherwise. We can talk in general about the entire TV industry and print distribution, but that is a separate topic. This is specifically about how Star Wars was telecined and from what source and how that relates to the colors. There is zero evidence that any major Star Wars home video release was transferred from anything but an extant print (interpostive, internegative, or release print). I myself have plenty of evidence that 16mm films were the norm for distributing TV content around the world to TV stations and I’ll take your word that they are low contrast positive prints (which fits with the look of the Doctor Who prints recovered). But that is TV station distribution not major network or home video transfers. The higher end machines are clearly designed to transfer from any source from o-neg to intermediate to release prints. For a huge film archive like Fox, Paramount, MGM/Republic, WB, and Universal each have, having to make a special print for each telecine would become costly. Why do that when you can just buy a machine that can do anything. The Rank Cinetel was just that - a machine that use any source material. We have two users of those machines that say it could and the stats on the machines say they could so why do you keep saying they can’t? I really don’t get it.