What exactly does it mean for the negative to be disassembled?
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.
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.
For further context, the negative is the first-generation source for the footage used in the final cut. They are also without any color timing as that comes later in the process, and unlike a 35mm print, which is a few generations down from the negative, there is only one layer of grain to deal with (this is not the case with SW as there is optical compositing).*
*if I’ve made any mistakes, please correct me.
Would any IPs or separation masters still be usable and around?
Nothing I’m reading here suggests ANY hope for a remastered OOT.
The separation masters are still intact, as are other film elements closer to the o-neg than the theatrical prints.
Robert A. Harris emphasized several years ago that “these assets are well-protected.” If a user on the blu-ray.com forums is to be believed, Disney has been meticulously going through every last piece of Star Wars film material and scanning them in. It’s simply a matter of time … and of timing.
I hate to be eternally negative, but A) why believe this, and B) how much time?! I’m not getting any younger.
Combining the separation masters will not yield the same quality as that which can be derived from a scan (or even a photochemical replication to a first generation interpositive) from the original negative.
A massive chunk of the original negative was lost/damaged beyond repair from the scene where Supes confronts Lex Luther in Superman The Movie.
For the restoration in 1999, they recombined the separation masters to recreate that scene.
But the colors were slightly out of sync and the resolution noticeably compromised.
Lucas has already gone on record saying that the separation masters for Star Wars were not preserved correctly(Fox were to blame).
So the original negative is the only salvation for Star Wars.