I’m more inclined to believe that the saber differences are simply due to the different path the media takes for telecine, but that’s just my opinion.
However, I do have evidence to support the claim that “All of the wipes and fades were redone optically for the Special Edition,” rather than digitaly:
“He found the original negative at Fox and the separation masters in a salt mine somewhere in the Midwest, but he couldn’t find the original negatives for the wipes. They looked all over Los Angeles—no luck. Nobody asked me. They were in my ILM editorial warehouse… We had the negative and everything else he was looking for.”
Ironically, just as ILM was retiring optical printers and moving into the digital realm, the technology was resurrected again. Pacific Titles had eleven state of the art, modern optical printers with new lenses, which, when combined with Kodak’s finest film stock, gave “a boost in resolution and color saturation,” according to company vice-president Phillip Feiner. They re-composited all wipes and transitions (the “bread and butter” opticals, as Feiner calls them).
- Industrial Light and Magic - Into the Digital Realm, P.285-295.
- Secret History of Star Wars