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 original negatives were cleaned up optically back in 1995(ish). Then they scanned the negs in 1080p, replaced some of the original effects with CGI effects and printed the new scenes again to 35mm film. A combination of the original negatives and the new scenes was created and printed again as “special edition negatives”. These special edition negatives were later scanned again in 1080p and digitally color “corrected”, the color “corrected” scans were then shipped to the external company whose name I can’t remember right now, who cleaned it up (mainly degrained it). Lucasfilm then did more changes to the cleaned up scans (e.g. the new Jabba) and the result was a source of the 2004 DVDs and all of the HDTV broadcasts. Back when they were preparing the 2011 Blu-rays, they took the 2004 version, fixed a few things in it (like the digital encoding glitch or the colour of the lightsabers in some of the scenes) and the result was used for all of the post-2011 releases. So what we got is basically a reencode of a reencode of a reencode of a 1995 1080p scan.
Disney is in process of scanning everything in the Lucasfilm archives
That is a lot of rescanning and rescanning the scan.
I really hope they do a 4K scan of the original negative or something as close to that as possible and release that on Blu-Ray. I didn’t know that there were that many processes involved inbetween the original negative and what we see on the Blu-Ray.