We should also talk about the mess that Lucasfilm made with all of this as well. What we’ve ended up with can really only be described as a mess. They haven’t done a restoration on these films since the 1997 Special Edition when the o-neg was upgraded with newly struck film to replace the aging stock (aside from the unused 4K version done by Reliance Media in 2012, but until it get used it doesn’t count any more than Legacy does). We were then told this made restoring the theatrical versions impossible, which isn’t true because even if the o-neg is now different there would still be internegatives or interpositives that can be worked from, or the camera negatives that are still stored, or of course prints, or the parts of the o-neg that were removed as well.
The 2004 DVD was just a high definition video transfer for home release. The surprising thing is that’s the version that was screened in a 2014 cinema marathon. The 1080p transfer done in 2002 we would not even call a scan by today’s terminology, we’d call it a telecine. Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly good by telecine standards, and Lowy did a decent job at digital clean-up given the short turnaround time required, but the limitations of the technology are quite obvious. For example, there’s a scene where Luke is in Ben’s hut - 36:11 on the SSE and 36:32 on the blu-ray - watch that scene and look at the wall above and to the right of 3PO. It shakes! Yet there’s no shaking at all on the SSE, it’s an imperfection in the 2002 telecine. Or the film is warped (which modern scanners are designed to cope with, and 2002 technology wasn’t). That unsteady image can be seen all over the 2002 transfer actually, it’s just a particularly good example of it.
One of the major differences with what poita is doing is that he has an IR damage matte - that didn’t exist for the 2002 home-video transfer, it was a 10-bit RGB telecine. In their press releases they did call it a restoration, but restorations should produce a theatrical quality result, and we know Fox/LFL’s policy until very recently was that screenings of these films had to be the 1997 SE prints, not the 2002 home-video transfer as confirmed on Film-Tech and also Home Theatre Forum. So I’m not sure what happened in that instance, but my guess is they got permission from Fox/Disney to run the BDs through DCP-o-matic, or they were directed to do that because it was cheap.
According to that Lowy press release they removed up to a million of pieces of dirt from some single scenes in the movie, such as the desert scene. “We’ve cleaned up more dirt on these three movies than we have on any movie we’ve ever worked on, including Citizen Kane – and that was almost impossible” (Lowy). LFL color timed the movie prior to sending it to Lowy, whereas MikeV said that color timing is the last thing you do in a film restoration.
That whole process would be much simpler today, just look how clean and gorgeous the reels poita had scanned came out after ultrasonic cleaning, I believe telecines picked up more dirt than modern scanners as well. Plus just the fact of having a 6K or 8K sensor - even if downsizing to 2K - means that the image and grain structure is of a much better quality as talked about in that cinematography forum thread where DavidC says 35mm needs 8K even though the detail resolved is around 3K to retain the fine film grain.
If it’s scanned at lower resolutions the grain can block and smudge together and you get that blotchy look that the SSE suffers from. As noted before, everyone seems to think that Wizard of Oz was scanned at 8K when the restoration video makes it clear it’s being scanned on a Spirit 4K scanner, and I think people are confused about the exposure resolution vs the resolution on the hard disk. I’d be interested to know if these prints are being scanned directly at 4K or at a higher exposure, and if poita agrees with the benefits DavidC on cinematography forum argued for.