Our optical printer was designed as a beam-splitter type, with two projectors on each axis. Many of the shots we dealt with on Empire had so many elements in them that a beam-splitter printer was considered to handle these complex shots more conveniently. Some of the asteroid sequence shots had as many as twenty-five separately filmed elements in them. Using separation positives (three records per element), this would constitute seventy-five passes through the camera. However, with the beam-splitter arrangement, the number of passes were halved, with one set of separations and their respective mattes run on each axis. This saved us valuable printer time, and most of the multi-element shots in the show were printed in this manner. Richard Edlund, Visual Effects Supervisor, came up with this approach for our composite process.
With the many white background shots that we would be dealing with , we felt it would be essential to position each element individually to its matte. On the first show, we were only able to obtain one fit for a key foreground subject; however, this time around, every matte had to fit as perfectly as possible.
We worked out a system in which our projectors were mounted on X, Y, Z axis slides which were hooked up to encoders which could monitor position to within 1/10,000th of an inch. This provided us with a very accurate matte positioning system as well as allowing for optical pans and moves. Our optical printer operators, Dave Berry, Ken Smith and Don Clark, did an outstanding job of utilizing the printer's capabilities to produce a successful composite.
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