Good replies guys, and I fully realise that doing SW Revisited 720p is a lot of work for Adywan. There will be many challenges and a long job list. What I am asking is what are the ‘additional’ challenges to making it 4K - what is on that list that wouldn’t be on the 720p version list?
doubleofive mentions requiring significantly more storage space, so that would be an additional challenge. What other challenges to a 4K version are there?
Mala mentions that Adywan is already having to redo everything from scratch for the 720p version. Surely this is more like an opportunity than a problem. If Ady had already done months of work in 720p that would have to be binned then that would be a big problem - is that the case? Because otherwise ‘starting from scratch’ would seem to be the ideal time to move to 4K.
Hal, you make the point that these edits take so long that the next ‘tech’ will outpace you, so why bother. I follow AV geeky tech stuff a fair bit and I truly believe that 4K will be with us for many years to come. 8K TV sets suffer massively from ‘diminishing marginal returns’ and by all accounts the gain between 4K to 8K is barely visible to the eye unless you have a 100" plus screen. The direction that consumers are going is streaming and that allies itself to lower res not higher. Suffice to say that if Revisited were released in 4K, the current high standard, it would have a better chance of longevity than if it were 720p.
I have read the piece, written in 2012 which sets out the reasons for 720p. This was 7 years ago, a lot has changed. There is now a 4K source and furthermore Adywan has dropped the PT Revisited. The original reasons for 720p in the article no longer seem to apply (but perhaps new reasons / challenges have arisen). Here is the article:
"People have been asking why i am not doing the HD versions of the edits in 1080p, but instead opting for 720p. Well it’s down to a few factors; One being that I am having to use the 2006 bonus DVD’s to return some Special Edition shots back to their original state and , as we know, the quality of the Bonus discs is pretty low. Upscaling them and cleaning them up can give some pretty useable results when going to 720p but not so good when going up to 1080p. Another reason is rendering times. The layers of FX / Video i am having to use on many shots slowed my old PC to a crawl when rendering at 720p and just wouldn’t have coped at 1080p. My new PC can handle things a lot better now, but that would mean starting from scratch, which i am not prepared to do.
Another reason is that, when i get around to the prequels, i want to be able to play about with the framing of a lot of the shots. So, for example, i can frame a shot tighter into one of the actors, but keep the quality of the image. Very handy if i want to replace a line of dialogue from one of the actors.
The final reason is the actual quality of the Blu-Rays. Many people don’t realise that these are old transfer scans done in 2003 and the detail levels, especially after the grain removal done by Lucasfilm/ Lowry, isn’t anywhere near as high as they would have been if they had done a fresh scan using todays technology. "
I’d be very interested to hear from Adywan how he feels about potential 4K Revisited now in 2019?