35mm 1997 Special Edition trailer preservation (Part-Finished)

As some of the other projects for doing this seem to be quite dead for the moment I decided to do one of my own. I have 2 trailer reels, one with the trailer for the trilogy, one with the trailer for ESB and ROTJ.

I’ll be using a nikon coolscan IV ED (LS-40) film scanner. For the moment I’m doing some modifications on the scanner to have the possibility to scan motion picture film on it. (Of course I want to retain the possibility to scan normal 24x36 photos)

Old title: What about a 35mm preservation of the 1997 theatrical SE ?

Old text:

I know a lot of people hate the SE here, but now it’s the same for the SE as for the GOUT. I mean there isn’t any “good” version of the 1997 theatrical release available. The colors on the DVD are like sh**, and both the Blu-Ray and DVD have Hayden Christen<span></span>sen at the end of ROTJ. You have the “noooooo” in the Blu-Ray release also, and so on with Lucas’ “improvements”…

I think the theatrical SE deserves also a preservation, as a lot of people discovered Star Wars that way too. It is not Georges Lucas’ vision of the film any more as he continued to make changes at each release.

It should be made from the 35mm film, the same way negative1 is doing a preservation with the 1977-1983 versions.

As the 1997 version was released on “modern” film emulsion, it is “low fade” and the colors are still pretty good to this day. This month I had the opportunity seeing it in a theatre in Paris as they made a Star Wars marathon and the copies they had (english version with french subtitles) were in pretty good shape. Almost no scratches during the film, although is was pretty scratched in the place where we change the reels.

I think this version should be preserved before the 35mm copies will be too old. Does someone agrees with me ?

I am not in "the know" but I do believe that aside from the DTS cinema audio that has been decoded for the projects there is some 1997 SE print work going on.

It would be great if team negative1 would release the theatrical 1997 SE too ! That way I could have the choice between watching the 1977 or the 1997 version everytime I want to watch Star Wars !

I don't really have the funds for buying a 35mm print reel on ebay, but if people are interested I have a french 1997 SE trailer, maybe I could try scanning it ? I do a lot of film photography so I have a nikon coolscan IV film scanner. So if people would like to see a 2K version of it, it could be an interesting project to work on. Of course I'm seeking for advice as I don't have experience with that kind of work ^^

The only version available is the one from the bonus DVD. I was disappointed when I didn't find any trailers in the Blu-Ray bonus.

There are people who agree with you.  I look forward to seeing the SE's serrated cue marks one day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_marks

In perhaps an homage to three-strip Technicolor, when Star Wars was restored, its conventional circular cues were replaced by "serrated" Technicolor-type cues on selected reels by the restorer.

There are a few other trailer/camera scan project in the forum:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Thorrs-35-mm-Star-Wars-Trilogy-SE-Trailer-WQHD-Restoration/topic/13086/

Nehalem501 said:

It would be great if team negative1 would release the theatrical 1997 SE too ! That way I could have the choice between watching the 1977 or the 1997 version everytime I want to watch Star Wars !

I don't really have the funds for buying a 35mm print reel on ebay, but if people are interested I have a french 1997 SE trailer, maybe I could try scanning it ? I do a lot of film photography so I have a nikon coolscan IV film scanner. So if people would like to see a 2K version of it, it could be an interesting project to work on. Of course I'm seeking for advice as I don't have experience with that kind of work ^^

The only version available is the one from the bonus DVD. I was disappointed when I didn't find any trailers in the Blu-Ray bonus.

I would love a scan of your trailer as I have english DTS audio for it.  There is a torrent on the spleen which has the SE trailers from the LD's coupled with DTS cinema audio .... it's in 720p.

You are not alone in wanting to see this done.

The nearest thing that you're going to get for the moment is dark_jedi's preservation of the 1997 SE trilogy. He is doing one film at a time, since he is improving the picture from a broadcast TV source and syncing it to the original DTS sound mix.

As others have mentioned, there are also some projects that are preserving the 35mm trailers.

My project will be a little bit different than the others SE trailers' ones as I have a French trailer, the CGI rendered text SW, ESB and ROTJ are in French as you can see in this video shot in a French theater http://youtu.be/QN7wmayg2m8

I'd like to find the French DTS CD so my project could feature both audio. For the moment I'll work on it using the English audio. 

I have a U.S. trailer but it was cut in to strips by a guy who was going to sell it piece meal to make extra money.  I saved it from oblivion but so far no-one here has responded to queries about getting it scanned and put back together for sharing. 

Jetrell Fo said:

I have a U.S. trailer but it was cut in to strips by a guy who was going to sell it piece meal to make extra money.  I saved it from oblivion but so far no-one here has responded to queries about getting it scanned and put back together for sharing. 

 This is why I'd never buy any film strips, I think it's wrong to cut a film reel into pieces just to make money.

Nehalem501 said:

Jetrell Fo said:

I have a U.S. trailer but it was cut in to strips by a guy who was going to sell it piece meal to make extra money.  I saved it from oblivion but so far no-one here has responded to queries about getting it scanned and put back together for sharing. 

 This is why I'd never buy any film strips, I think it's wrong to cut a film reel into pieces just to make money.

My intention was to save it from being separated further.  I got the entire trailer, it's just in strips of 5-6 frames each.  Maybe I'll figure out a way of doing it myself.

It should be quite easy to scan as it is in little pieces. In cinemas when the film broke they had a tool to glue or use tape to repair film. As your entire reel is in 6 frames strips I think it will remain like that as a film glued each 6 frames would never resist passing through a 35mm projector. 

I have an idea about how I could use my film scanner to scan my reels (I have the trilogy trailer and the ESB+ROTJ one). I just need to do some tweaking on my scanner so that the film can pass trough it. I'll post some photos to show the setup when it'll be working. 

So this is the beginning of my preservation project for these trailers. First I have to scan my reels, I decided to use my nikon film scanner (coolscan IV ED, LS-40).

I disassembled my scanner to see how it will be possible to scan my reels with it. That black plastic thing going to the right is where the films goes through, it continues to the rear end of the case:

So I just have to make a hole in the scanner's case to let the film out. You can see the marking where I'll have to make the hole:

That way i will be able to have each part of the reel on both sides of the scanner. What is already scanned on the back, what have to be scanned on the front.

I'll post images of the setup once i have finished meddling with the scanner.

FYI - my project is not dead, just been busy with other priorities.

I've finished the setup.
Here are a few scan tests, these are PNG files so you can see the real thing (not as with jpegs). It's just testing so i haven't really made any color correction, noise reduction or sharpening, some of the images were rescaled for 1080p though.

These two are from a 35mm Argo trailer, I preferred to do my first tests on another reel than Star Wars. This is a flat reel, not scope:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17058237/35mm_scan-test2.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17058237/35mm_scan-test3.png

And these ones are from the Special Edition Trilogy Trailer reel (I modified the second image to have the right aspect ratio as my reel is scope):

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17058237/35mm_scan-test.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17058237/35mm_scan-test1.png

What do you think of these scans ?

They look really nice.

Wow, these look great!

poita said:

You are getting some light-leakage at the bottom middle by the look of it.

The coolscan supports digital ICE, how do those frames look processed with it on?

The light leakage was because the next frame was very bright, this was just a test but I'll deal with it when I'll be scanning this part of the reel.
digital ICE will remove dust and scratches but will also blur a little bit the image. I want to retain the defects of the film so I won't be using it.

What do you prefer, dust and scratches removal or keep the image with the defects ?

The scanning process is already long, I'm not really enthusiastic in scanning my reels twice :D

I’ll post shortly the same frame with different options so people can see.