What exactly does it mean for the negative to be disassembled?
The first thing they did for the Special Edition was clean up the original negative shot by shot and frame by frame. This process was started in 1994. The technology to do this digitally didn’t exist yet, as it would by 2004, so they were still doing this photochemically. Because the o-neg was made up of four different kinds of film stocks (one for the shots that would’ve come straight from the camera, another for the vfx shots, etc), it had to be disassembled in order to clean and chemically treat each shot with the tender love and care it needed. I’m not sure if this necessitated separating each and every shot (for example, the scene where Luke has dinner with Owen and Beru was presumably all shot on the same film stock, so maybe they were able to clean/bath that scene without disassembling it).
While they were doing this, they also redid the optical wipes. This would have involved separating the end of each scene from the beginning of the next.
The negative has been conformed to the SE since 1997. George decided to cut the changes directly into the negative because, as far as he was concerned, the SE was the official version of the movie now.
We recently got confirmation from the relevant person at Fox that the pieces of the negative replaced for the SE were indeed put into storage and not discarded. It’s worth noting, though, that many of the vfx shots had deteriorated by '97 because of the chemical properties of the specific film stock they were finished on. As a result, even the shots that weren’t completely redone with cgi still had to be replaced. Because the only alternative was going to a grainier second-generation source like an IP or sep, George instead had ILM go back to what I presume were the VistaVision originals (which I guess hadn’t faded as badly?) and recomposite those shots digitally.
I think I remember reading on zombie’s website that the negative need not be disassembled to reconstruct the unaltered version. Because a modern restoration would be done digitally anyway, they would simply need to take a scan of the o-neg as it is now, scan in the pieces that got replaced, and rebuild everything in the digital realm.
Well, first off, you obviously don’t know how they make wipes. Wipes are effects shots. What is in the original composited negative is not the original camera negative elements and it affects the entirety of the shot before and after. To redo a wipe you go back to the original camera negative and recomposite the wipe and then splice in the composited negative element.
Also, Star Wars had a 3 color separation master made. Each color is separated onto B&W stock which does not fade. The problem in 1994 is that this separation master had suffered from inconsistent shrinkage. There is no known optical method of restoring this. Fast forward to today and this is the single best source to do a 4k restoration of the original 77 cut of the film. Digitally this is a piece of cake to reassemble and align. It has been done on innumerable films already. So worrying about finding all the pieces, the wipes, etc, is really pointless when all you have to do is find this 3 color separation master and go from there. It isn’t faded. It will have the original color timing. It is the ideal source to do any restoration of the film. Even if they wanted to do a 4k version of the SE, this is where they should start as it would take a lot less work than the original negative. My understanding of the process is that the B&W film has a finer grain so it maintains the image quality of the original negative when used to make an optical print. Using digital restoration on it should provide the best possible copy of the original film and to restore the 97/04/11 SE, the 97 elements just need to be scanned (which probably have not faded at all) or regenerated from the digital masters (and in either case they would need to be upscaled and cleaned of any digital artifacts. So all the fresh wipes, all the freshly composited effects shots should be on more stable stock and be easy to scan.