DrDre said:
With regards to the speeder shot, I’m curious to know the maximum image quality that can be pulled from the prints, without reverting to the in my opinion somewhat revisionist techniques employed by Mike Verta to clean up the speeder shot, and essentially remove all the color noise that most likely also existed on the original negative. The downside of removing all the color noise in my view is, that you will never recover the detail that should be associated with such a clean image, and thus the cleaned up image may actually appear less natural without the noise than the image with the color noise in it. In essence when our eyes cannot see detail, we expect noise. If we detect neither something is amiss, and we get that heavy DNR effect. So, I believe noise reduction should always be in the service of detail recovery/enhancement, but not be a goal in of itself.

I don’t think Verta ever intended to “preserve” the negatives. Those were already gone before the 97SE according to him, and there is no fool-proof way to separate dirt and noise that is from the camera and dirt/noise that was introduced when they were handling the negatives for the first time, or the 31th. He has always said that his restoration is an idealized version of Star Wars that tries to match the original intention, the original photography and all the detail that can be restored. Even his main version of Legacy doesn’t have the shaky logo from the original 1977 prints.