Thanks a lot!
Some other random thoughts - just feel the need to write something else...
Fan projects: whatever they are (fan edits, restorations, preservations, reconstructions etc.) they are a sort of drug... at the beginning, you are interested in just one particular title, one you always loved to see "fixed" somehow... you finally stumble across it, watch it immediately, and think: "WOW! I wonder if there are some other... 'thing' around!" (still don't know how to call them at this point).
Then, you slowly discover a well hidden world of restored movies, and audio tracks... "I want more... MORE!" and you try to grab every interesting title - even if it's quite difficult sometimes... after you have watched few ones, you start asking yourself: "Why can't I do one by myself... no, wait, I'm not capable to even cut a single scene, how can I suppose to..."; and this phase lasts forever, for many of us... but someone is brave (fool?) enough to continue...
Time to understand the basis, how to use a software that helps to cut, paste, edit video and audio... it's not that easy, takes months, even years, to just release your first, often badly edited, project... and you are so proud: "I made it..."; time is passing, and every month (then every week, then every day) you have new ideas... "What if I change... but maybe it's better to... I'm pretty sure I could..." and so on, thinking you could change (for good) every movie, even the ones which are almost perfect... that's the word, "almost"!
Fan projects are a drug, a fever... you can cure yourself, and be "out" for some time, but you continually think about what YOU can change, improve, enhance...
I fondly remember my first attempt, doing a prehistoric kind of restoration... it was twenty years ago; I had my good '97 SE Star Wars Italian PAL VHS tape, sitting in the shelf almost unused, because I have discovered, few years before, the laserdisc... DVD was still a novelty, and first releases where terribly compressed; of course, even at the time, I had Star Wars on laserdisc, but only the "simple" UK PAL SE boxset (if I think how much I paid for that... but this is another story...); well, of course LD was waaay better than VHS, but my family (and I) wanted to see it with an italian track... how could solve the problem? Guess what? Took a second VHS recorder, and managed to record the LD video and VHS audio onto a S-VHS tape, to retain as much quality as possible... after I don't know how many trials, I finally recorded it in sync! That was my first fan restoration...
Rudimental, but effective. If I think what can we do today... many average Joes (don't mention average Janes, because women normally don't care about different movie editions) aren't aware of the almost limitless possibilities there are today to manipulate a movie... once we were forced to buy different editions, to have different features, and the chance to see, or hear, a different video, or audio, version, was bound to the media... I mean, if I wanted to see the extended edition, I had to watch it, maybe with a wrong color grading; if I wanted to watch the right color grading, I had to watch a mere VHS with inferior resolution; if I wanted to hear the original theatrical mix, I had to watch a pan&scan version, or a speed-up PAL tape!
Nowadays, everything is possible... take a video from BD, regrade it using a LD as color reference, add a deleted scene from a DVD, grab the original audio track from VHS, and so on... we (FanRes members) sometimes take all of this for granted, and easy to achieve, but we are lucky to have all those possibilities in comparison to the past, and a place (this very forum) where to exchange ideas, opinions, get and give help.
Happy to be part of this world, with all of you; I know some of you since a long time, and I must say we are friends, even if we live in different part of the worlds... we are a strong community, small but capable of doing everything... almost ("almost" for the moment, give us time!)
