What is this crap about digital being bad? Digital medium is by far superior in terms of storage and preservation. Unlike analogue recording (film), which starts to degrade/change from the point it is being recorded, the digital recording is basically time-invariant. For example, the colour encoding of digital video is strictly defined, while in analogue film it varies based on the current conditions.
Of course, you might still want to use analogue film camera for some reason to shoot the film, but in any case you should digitalise the film as soon as it shot (in highest possible resolution).
Who here has lobbied for not preserving film elements digitally? As far as I can tell this conversation is all about capture mediums.
Still, I do not see why wouldn’t you immediately record it digitally. If you use analogue film to record a scene, by the time you transfer it to digital medium it will not be the same as it was originally recorded. Not to mention conditions of transformation process which requires projector (use different lighting during the projection and you have different results, etc.)
If you originally record it digitally, you have it completely preserved. You carve that digital recording into stone inside a cave and aliens will still be able to read it tens of thousands of years after we will destroy each other in the exact form as it was originally recorded.
Digital storage is intensely unreliable and is extremely prone to failure-so much so that many things from even the early 2000’s and beyond are now unsalvageable. Nearly every digital restoration is even printed back to film for storage.
Film v Digital are two different processes. Film is natural photography which involves changes in capturing the image, processing, lab work, printings and dupes and so on. Digital is fully controllable and does not involve any in-between steps.
Digital allows for greater flexibility and accuracy in restoration compared to analogue work, but of course like anything in life is not perfect.
The key to all this is that Disney has to have something ready for 4K and beyond. As-is they have nothing that is up to date. They have a history of completing restorations or title updates and simply returning them to the shelf with little or no fanfare. (20,000 Leagues) The real question is: what do people refer to when they say “negative conformed to SE”. No one in their right mind would recut the o-negs that way, unless you were a studio back in the old days butchering films for quick theatrical releases or later reissues. And there still should be IPs on hold. Something will have to be scanned from a high generation-and essentially no SE material outside the 97 source is high enough-and even that is outdated and in need of a complete overhaul ala what was done to Lawrence of Arabia in modern times versus its original 1989 analog based restoration.