Very excited your SW will use IB prints. Hopefully for the majority of the film! 😉
I know you’re off so this question can be left, but some of what you describe of your process sounds a lot like Mike Verta’s, i.e. trying to get noise out of the image by using multiple prints. Assuming that he’s doing that, I would say it isn’t necessary for you to do that so much.
Here’s my reasoning. The Star wars blu rays are bad to watch, not for most people, most people don’t care, but bad to watch if you do. Harmy’s are good to watch, as a halfway house between the blu rays and a future restoration. They’re good Home Video versions. I would say that Mike’s project, if it sees the light of day would fall into that category - a great, polished, super clean, “new” looking restoration.
TN1 on the other hand, have introduced us to something a little different, which is the pleasure of seeing a 70’s/80’s film, demonstrably from a film source, which a lot of the hallmarks of film intact - scratches, jitter, cigarette burns etc. The SSE is a very good version of SW, but suffers from the softness of the Spanish print (your new scan will help that a lot.) The portions of Tech IB that most of us have seen - 12 minutes of reel 5, and the end of reel 3 (the remote training scene), plus a few inserts here and there, demonstrate an extraordinary level of colour and detail (whether they have accurate colours or not). I think there’s a real gap between Verta and the SSE that can be filled by a Tech IB version that brings the prints to life in the way we’ve seen. Sure, it wouldn’t be colour accurate, but it would be extraordinarily colourful; it would have film artefacts and the feel of film, but with egregious damage toned down, and it would have the detail density that only Tech IB’s can provide.
Just my two cents. I’ll see if I can help you out with drives in the next month or so. 😃