If the OUT gets an official (U)HD release, will Project Threepio still be maintained?
That’s a really good question. My entire personal motivation for this project is that there isn’t even a respectful DVD-quality release of the OUT (recycled decade-plus-old Laserdisc on the DVD format with the wrong audio didn’t cut it even in 2006). Given what I’ve seen of the condition of these films, what I would be satisfied with as a fan is a respectful 1080p Blu-ray transfer. No SE changes, every attempt to maintain color and sound fidelity, but your typical well-done Blu-ray film damage cleanup and such is fine. UHD would certainly be gravy and I wouldn’t turn it down, but a top-notch Blu-ray would meet my needs and I’d be a delighted customer.
So would I maintain Project Threepio under such circumstances? To be blunt, no. I wouldn’t necessarily abandon it, though – I’ve written this thing to be a self-contained toolkit that anyone with enough knowledge could use and even maintain. So if someone else wanted to take over, I would stick around to show them the ropes.
That said, if I believed that there was even a remote chance that such an official release would be available to fans within my lifetime, Project Threepio would never have even started. Project Threepio is, in a way, founded on the idea that Star Wars will never be available to fans in any acceptable format aside from fan preservations, until it enters the public domain. Therefore it’s worth my time to make those fan preservations as globally accessible as possible, because public domain Star Wars is a long, long time from now.