We have multiple 35mm prints of The Empire Strikes Back, as you’ll know if you saw the Grindhouse Version released a few years ago. Since then we have found a few more including a 35mm print on fuji film stock (less faded than the Eastman/Kodak prints) This one wasn’t complete, so some of it is still Eastman, but most of it is only slightly faded:

Which makes it easy to restore:

We also have this 16mm print:

This is a dupe from an original 1980 35mm print, made in the 1980s. These thumbnails were created from an mp4 preview file: The best elements from all the film prints we have access to will be combined and restored to the best of our abilities. Unlike the pristine Return of the Jedi print which needed very little work, this project is expected to take at least two years – many of the sources are faded, and have at least as much damage (perhaps even more) as the Star Wars prints we were working with.

Cleanup has begun! Reel 1 is already done.

Last Updated: September 8, 2020

When a film is professionally scanned in 16-bit color as DPX image files, every single frame weighs in at 100 MB. With upwards of 175,000 frames in each film, a complete scan requires about 21 TB of storage (42 TB if you want a backup copy! And then you need at least another 21 TB of space to work on it – over $1000 just in hard drives is therefore required for every film). Having the film cleaned prior to scanning costs another $870 (plus about $75 shipping each way) and then the scanning costs between $2000 and $15,000, depending on where you send it. And this is all excluding the cost of buying the prints (the Star Wars LPP was $2000, the latest Empire print was $5000). So please do consider donating. It all goes into an account used only for funding these projects.

The Star Wars Special Edition restoration cost 20th Century Fox an estimated $20 million, but it earned them $138 million at the box office in 1997. So far this restoration (including money spent on 4K77 and 4K83) has cost TN1 a little over $16,000, but sadly there can be no box office receipts or DVD/Bluray sales to refill our bank accounts when it’s all done.

So if you can spare even just $1, please consider donating.

A big thank you to everyone who has donated so far.

To follow the progress on this project and others, consider joining the forums.