How did the discussion go when your cohort mentioned he had this recording?

We were talking about Star Wars and he offhandedly mentioned that he may or may not have a bootleg from 1977-78.

Is it a hard cut or is there some VCR static. That's one of the problems of using this as an identification method, as tapes are just over 2 hours long, so is it cut because the original tape ran out or was it cut because it was part of the bootleg market and shortened reproduction time helped crank out the copies.

It's a hard cut. I forgot to mention: it has the tight (i.e., close together) JW credit.

16mm has not been ruled out. Both stereo and mono mixes were available in 16mm prints sold in the late 70s. As the vertical cropping is more then the 16mm, that's a factor which leans us in that direction. But not definitively.

I wasn't ruling out 16mm. I was trying to say: "Assume it's not 16mm for a second, what else can it be?"

Finding a flaw which could give us a sense of scale of the original print is an aspect to look out for at this point. For instance if a hair shows up, how much of the screen does it takes up will give us a sense of how large the original frame was. Another place to look for these flaws are at leaders, reel changes or where pieces of the film are missing. These pieces of the film may have been marked up by someone and the size of the pencil or pen may provide a clue.

I plan to post Parts 1 and 2 tonight to Dropbox. It'll be done no later than 8PM EST.