have been doing some research on the various version of the 81 crawl that are out there and I have found a wide range. I think what I have discovered is that pretty much every copy that was used for home video transfers was an older copy that had the 81 crawl spliced in. The Spanish THX version is very telling. It does have the English 81 crawl. It doesn’t have the 20th century fox logo or music. It starts with the Dolby clip and then to the Lucasfilm logo with no music. Both the Lucasfilm logo and the A log time ago… card match with the rest of the film. The crawl and flyover do not. For one they are lower down in the frame than the rest of the film. Also, very much like the SSE 81 crawl is too dark and over contrasted, the contrast of the 81 crawl from the Spanish LD is lighter. I have yet to find two versions that are not from the same film source that match. I know of 5 distinct copies and no two are quite the same. Even the colors of the components vary slightly. I just wanted to see if I could pinpoint any major failures in my recreation and I have run out of things to check. I think the color of my planets and star destroyer might be slightly off, but I would rather err on the side of better matching the 77 crawl and the 97 crawl (from the BD and D+ sources) than try to dig further. I don’t think that the source we have are going to reveal much more and I think having it be too far off from the 77 crawl, the 97 crawl, and the only copy we currently have of the 81 crawl itself.
The SSE copy differs from the LD copies in a couple of ways. The planet is more pink, the atmosphere and moons are more blue, the Star Destroyer has not yellow tint to it. So overall, that 35 mm print, as bad as it is, makes me lean closer to the 77 and 97 crawl colors. So I think I might be done, except for inserting some things to make it less perfect.
Also, what file format and bitrate does everyone perfer for 4k output? I don’t work in that resolution myself, but I think making the master render at that resolution will improve the 1080p version (by scaling the 4k down).