The original negative is conformed to the Special Edition, which was not fully digitized until the DVD master was made. However, Lucasfilm likely stored the pieces of the negative they removed, and they have recently been archiving every single piece of film and audio they have. So in a sense, the original negative has been digitized, but it’s not assembled or restored.
Do you know what resolution the negatives were digitized in? i.e. 1080P?
Really hope Lucasfilm has digitized all their OT recordings in the highest quality available. Things like music and sound effects, etc.
The stuff they’ve been archiving recently is most likely 4k, but who knows.
The thing I’m worried about is the original negative of the OT. Lucas said it was in terrible shape back in the early 90’s, i.e. fragile and pink colors, etc. So, I’m just wondering how they’d do a 4K scan on it 25 year later?
I still hope they at least try to do a 4K scan of all of the original pieces of the negative for the OT soon. I do believe they’d said that 4K scan they did recently was of the special edition. Whatever that means. Hopefully more comes out on that. As I know we all were hoping that 4K scan was of the pre-special edition stuff.
The negatives were restored to a degree before the special edition work began, so it should be in okay shape.
Do you know if that “restored” meant they were able to stop the film color fade? It’s my understanding the film stock Lucas used during that time period ended up being poor film stock. And thus the deterioration and bad color fade happened. Which is why the negative looked pink and thus resulted in extensive recoloring and things that people complain about.
At least in the case of the portions that were used for the special edition, yeah. Nobody outside of Lucasfilm has seen the pieces that were removed, but those are supposedly in horrendous condition.
This is why the most reliable way to restore the OUT may be to simply go to the separation masters. Scanning them in and recombining them won’t have quite the same level of detail as the o-neg, but it would still be “close enough” in my book.
The o-neg, meanwhile, appears to also have been in good enough shape for George to re-scan it nearly a decade after the Lowry job. Granted, he only needed it to look the way he wanted.