poita said:

I've never heard of an IB print fading; I've had trailers from the 50's that look perfect, and there's stuff dating back to the 30's on nitrate that's supposed to look outstanding. IB matrices can widely vary though. I've had 3 or 4 prints of Thunderball over the years, and only 1 had perfect color registration. The others were off. I don't think that was due to fading, but more due to processing.

They definitely fade, just nowhere near as fast as other stocks. in 1996 I had two IB prints to work on for a restoration, both struck one after the other in 1972, one had faded noticebaly more than the other. One had been kept in a temp controlled film archive, the other in the general office area in a desk. If kept well, the fading over a decade or three is pretty minimal, but eventually all things chemical change with time.

You also get considerably colour differences between prints done at different times, so they are not the be-all and end-all of colour references. You could have three different people print from a neg and get three different results. IB prints tend to be more contrasty too.

However, for Star Wars, an IB print will be the closest we can get to knowing roughly what the colour was like back in 1977. If kept well it won't have changed much. It would have looked a bit different at every cinema anyway, but it is a great starting point for colour restoration. I'm very excited by the prospect of getting to know those colours again after the odd colour pallete of the bluray releases.

When you say "Fade" what exactly do you mean in film stock terms? I know what the terminology of fading means in general, but does film stock fade differently than say, photographs or pigments used in painting? Is it different with each print? Do the prints colors loose saturation, or become a different color, like we all have seen, to a pinkish-red, or can it be a myriad of things?