brycebayer said:

-1 has been promising stuff for years. We might be dead before he finishes.

Sigh. I think poita said it best:

poita said:

A lot of people are working really, really hard, and investing a lot of our own money to get Star Wars on 35mm preserved.

It takes enourmous amounts of (personal) time and money, I can't count the hours and don't want to count the dollars that have been put into 35mm preservation of these films.

If the wait seems too long, then one can always start up their own effort, you just have to track down and buy some prints, build or buy a film scanner, somewhere around 80TB of HDDs (say around $3000 worth), build a computer that can handle working with 100MB per frame and dedicate most of your free time to it.

Then you need to go through all 173,000 frames (for each film) make sure none are missing and match the colour to the print, and fix any bad damage. Then sort out the sound track and synch it, and then sort out the best way to get the 30TB or so of film down to something that someone could watch on their home TV. And all that is just to be able to deliver a very rough watchable print, not a cleaned up one.

Anyone can do it, and perhaps someone out there could do it faster, so by all means give it a shot if you want a faster result.

I'm not being harsh, anyone really can have a go at doing this sort of thing themselves, but if you haven't then criticising the time it takes is not really all that productive. It takes more time than you could imagine. Just moving a capture of one reel from one hard drive to another can take many many hours to simply just copy the file. Waiting for anything can be frustrating, but it is even more frustrating working on something huge and it taking longer than you would like.

So why don't you take a step back and think about all the hard work that's being put into this before you speak.