Sorry there's not been much news lately. The scanner now has the hard drive too, so they've got everything they need, just waiting for them to find the time to fit us in amongst all their other scans. Just wanted to let you know that I'm still here and I'll update as soon as I can.

I spoke to the scanner yesterday, obviously normal life is currently interrupted for most people just now, but they expect to start scanning again in the next week or so. I've told them not to rush and to keep safe. I hope everyone else is keeping well too. I'll let you know when there's more news.

No worries these things take time, especially with all that is going on in the world.

Ok, I've got two pieces of good news and one piece of bad news...

Good news part 1: The scanner has started working on the print! 

Bad news : The first reel is causing him some problems. There is a lot of perforation damage on one side of the reel. I knew about this (and discussed it with the scanner) before I bought the the print, but I wasn't sure of the extent of the damage (partially due to the seller's English and my non-existent Russian), but I was told that it had been "fixed by vault worker, so print should be fully playable." While the scanner says this may be true he also says the fixes are so old that the tape is peeling off and the whole reel would fly apart if he played it. So he's currently working through the reel, removing the old tape and fixing it up so he can work with it. 
   

To give you an idea of the scale of the task each white bit on the image below is a bit of tape that needs fixing.
   

Yikes! He's already run out of tape and has had to order more in. He says he's not asking for any more money but I'll be sending him a bit extra as this really is a huge task. He's really doing an excellent job though and once he's done it should be fine. 

Good news part 2: The damage is only to one reel and the rest of them look much easier to work with. The scanner says that even on the damaged reel the image still looks good, so at the end of the day we should end up with a nice scan, it'll just take a bit more effort than we were expecting.

So not off to an amazing start, but things should be much smoother from here on. I'll keep you posted.

Yesterday the scanner sent me some short, filmed off his monitor clips of his scan of reel 1 so I thought I'd share them here so you guys can see how things are progressing. No colour or aspect ratio correction has been performed yet, these are 100% raw. 

Also keep in mind that these are all from reel 1 which was badly damaged, most clips show jumps where frames have been lost. I'm hoping this won't affect any of the unique footage that I'm trying to preserve, but I won't know until I have the full scan. 

Despite all the damage to the reel I'm pretty happy with what I can see so far. The colours and detail look pretty strong so after a bit of clean up (the hard part) this should look pretty nice. 

Here are the clips: 



Despite the strong colours and detail both myself and the scanner are planning to have words with the print seller, as the condition of the print does not at all match what he stated. Before purchase I was promised the print was "fully playable" and had "no splices", whereas the scanner had to put in a lot of extra work just to make reel 1 scannable (not playable) and he counted over 20 splices before he'd got half way through the reel. To top it off scanning this reel has damaged some of his equipment, so he's understandably not happy with the seller. 

On the plus sides the remaining reels are in much better condition so hopefully the worst is behind us. I'll keep you posted on progress both with the scanning and the seller.

I really feel the scanner has gone the extra mile for this print. Considering the condition of this reel I think he would have been justified in refusing to scan it, but he's put a lot of extra time and effort into this, all without asking for any additional compensation. I'm planning to leave him an additional tip once this is all scanned as I've been really impressed with him.

I have four samples but the forum only allows three videos per post, so here's the additional clip:

Hi

I've just got in, when i heard about this project.

I realize now, that i'm not the only one (and there can be... ) to show some love for the movie, i would never have expected to see a 35mm version seeing the light of day, you have my sincère congratulations for such dedication.

That's quite beautiful. But in some of the samples it looks like half of all the frames are missing. You might end up having a hell of a time syncing that stuff to the official version (or syncing the official audio to this).

(2020-04-21, 02:37 AM)v-ger06 Wrote: I realize now, that i'm not the only one (and there can be... ) to show some love for the movie, i would never have expected to see a 35mm version seeing the light of day, you have my sincère congratulations for such dedication.

Thanks for your kind words. I only joined this site a few months ago to post about a SD preservation I'd made of the EU Cut of Highlander 2, and since then I've been amazed at the number of people out there who enjoy this film. There's more of us than you think

(2020-04-21, 02:46 AM)TomArrow Wrote: That's quite beautiful. But in some of the samples it looks like half of all the frames are missing. You might end up having a hell of a time syncing that stuff to the official version (or syncing the official audio to this).

Yeah, reel one turned out to be a lot more "splicey" than we'd expected. The second and third example videos show quite a few splices, but the first one doesn't jump at all and the last one only at one moment, so I'm hoping not too many frames have been lost. The remaining four reels seem to be in better condition, I'm hoping to hear more about them from the scanner shortly.

If there are missing frames from any of the unique scenes from the EU cut then I'll probably have to resort to upscaling SD frames to complete the sequences. I'll know more once I have the full scan.

Thanks for your kind words. I only joined this site a few months ago to post about a SD preservation I'd made of the EU Cut of Highlander 2, and since then I've been amazed at the number of people out there who enjoy this film. There's more of us than you think 




Now wait....Would you mean that we gonna have to fight in the end ? Got a Zatoichi replica katana at home....