Fang Zei said:
I'd prefer a well-preserved print from the 80's. Failing that, I'd prefer the Robert A Harris route. Meticulously de-SEing the movies, while a noble effort, will never really be 100% true to the original conformation.
zombie84 said:
Thing is, it was never expensive to begin with. In fact, restoring it from the original negative might actually be cheaper since 95% of that has already been digitized in 2004. Just scan the missing pieces--what, maybe 300, 400 feet of film? So thats under $1000 dollars. A little bit of digital cleanup to get rid of a few of the scratches, and then the standard telecine color correction--the labor charges for these things are a few grand, I would suppose. So really, we could have a digitally remastered, restored version of the OOT made from the original negative for a few thousand dollars. If everyone in this forum chipped in five bucks we could pay for it ourselves. Cost has never really been a factor.
Thing is, it was never expensive to begin with. In fact, restoring it from the original negative might actually be cheaper since 95% of that has already been digitized in 2004. Just scan the missing pieces--what, maybe 300, 400 feet of film? So thats under $1000 dollars. A little bit of digital cleanup to get rid of a few of the scratches, and then the standard telecine color correction--the labor charges for these things are a few grand, I would suppose. So really, we could have a digitally remastered, restored version of the OOT made from the original negative for a few thousand dollars. If everyone in this forum chipped in five bucks we could pay for it ourselves. Cost has never really been a factor.
I'd prefer a well-preserved print from the 80's. Failing that, I'd prefer the Robert A Harris route. Meticulously de-SEing the movies, while a noble effort, will never really be 100% true to the original conformation.
It wouldn't be "de-SE'ing" an SE print it WOULD BE the actual original version! Why would you want a second-generation (at best) reconstruction when LFL already has the actual negative, already restored and digitized? All that remains is a few hundred feet of the original FX shots, so to dig those up and scan them--through a proper transfer house--would be less than a thousand dollars; ILM actually probably has its own laser scanner, so potentially it could be as cheap as the hundred bucks it would take to pay an employee to run the machine.