Highlander 2 - 35mm Scan

[HippieDalek]

The film is now fully scanned! I've just had a long video call with the scanner where he took me through each reel, showing me the overall quality and any specific issues I should know about for each one.

As we've already seen reel 1 is pretty rough, but I'm really happy with what I saw of all the other reels. Colours, detail and overall condition all look great. I didn't see any splices in any of the parts reviewed from reels 2 - 5. I'm also happy to report that full "fairytale ending" is present and correct and it's in good condition. I don't have any more samples to show just now, but sometime next week I'll be getting the invoice and then the scanner will be sending the hard drive to me, so it shouldn't be long before I can watch the whole scan for myself and see what we're working with.

For those curious the full scan comes in at 1.32 TB in size!

Thank you to everyone who has made this possible. Once I've got the scan in my hands I'll work as quickly as I can to release a "grindhouse" version so everyone can see it.

[PDB]

Congrats Hippie!

[Jrzag42]

This is so exciting!

[HippieDalek]

So now that everything is scanned I need to work out what to do with the 35mm print. I wondered if anyone here had any suggestions. I might have the space for it at home, but the conditions are certainly not ideal for preserving film.

At the start of the project I had hoped to sell it on to cover some of the costs, but as the print is in Russian and reel 1 is in rough shape, I'm not sure if would appeal to many film collectors. Another possibility might be to see if any Highlander fans would be interested in it as a piece of memorabilia.

I'll post about the print on the site I bought it from, emphasising the rarity of this version but also the condition, to see if anyone is interested, but let me know if you have any alternative ideas.

[deleted user]

If you don't want it at home, I'd try to sell it, but be sure to mention the bad state it is in in an adequate manner.

[HippieDalek]

I've posted about it on a 35mm sales forum, and I made clear the condition of the print, reel 1 in particular. I didn't want to repeat the Russian seller's mistakes.

However it looks like I may just have found a new home for it, so looks like all the ends are wrapping up nicely.

[v-ger06]

Such good news, that's great !

[dvdmike]

Hyped for this

[HippieDalek]

The 35mm print arrive at it's new home with one of the forum members yesterday, and the hard drive containing the scan is on it's way to me. Hopefully it should arrive here in the next few days. I'll keep you posted.

[HippieDalek]

I've just received the scan in the mail and I'm as giddy as a child on Christmas morning! 

The scanner has worked out colour settings to get the best out of each reel so I'll be having a video call with him tonight to go through and apply them, but for now here's some sample screenshots.

   
   
   

The raw files are roughly 10 MB per frame and are 2456 x 2054 (2.5K) so the above pictures are really just very low res screenshots. Once I've got the settings from the scanner I'll post some much better examples. 

I'm still aiming for a 1080p release, but once the anamorphic frames are corrected the final image size will be somewhere around 4912 x 2054. While obviously not true 4K (3840 x 2160) I'll be looking into whether there is enough detail in the print to warrant some sort of higher resolution release.

Once I'm happy with the colour settings I'll try and get some sort of sample clip available for everyone to see. Then I'll start working on the grindhouse release! 

Once again thanks to everyone who has helped make this project happen!