Again, I respectfully disagree… the resolution of AotC is definitely 1440x800.
His choice of format caused many a sideways glance among those who actually understood these things at the time: It was the Sony HDW – F900; a ½” * 3-CCD EFP camera which captured 3:1 compressed 1440 x 1080 component video in “SR”, a bastardised “segmented” Tape format. That basically means each progressively scanned frame is converted into a pseudo-interlaced format, and each “field” is recorded as two separate JPEG-like images, (which does NOT give the same result as storing the whole frame as a single image).
Since SW2 was to be displayed as 2.35:1, and Panavision were not able to come up with the promised Anamorphics to work with a Prism-splitter 3-CCD camera, the movie was shot letterboxed, so the master images were only 1440 x (about) 800. At the time, Cinema video projectors were very thin on the ground, which meant the vast majority of punters wound up watching a 4th generation film print, struck from a master video image with considerably less resolution that a 4th generation film print struck from 35mm negative! And there weren’t no Arrilasers then either, just a lot of rather dodgy CRT video printers.
A few years before this epoch-marking event we’d already been told that the then-new HDW – 750 was already a “Replacement for 35mm film” and we laughed hysterically, so hence we were left wondering what had been done to the aforesaid 750 to give us the F900.
Well … apart from adding 150 and an “F” to the model number … not a lot….Well anyway, Boy George went on to produce exactly the sort of results we said he’d get, and nothing daunted, he then proceeded to sever all ties with the aforesaid Panavision and pitched woo to a new upstart startup called “Plus8 Digital” (nee “Plus 8 Video”) to equip his next instalment: SW3 “Revenge of the Sith”.
This time he used Sony HDC-F950 cameras - still 1/2” prism jobs, * but with true 1920 x 1080 recording, which produced noticeably better pictures than Episode 2, (by now the Arrilaser had become available which also helped) but still crap compared to Episode 1, which was still shot on film….
(Plus8 Digital then proceeded to go broke and were eventually bought by Panavision, ROTS apparently being the only feature of any significance to be shot on their brace of expensive new cameras…)And HD is not 2k. The 2k format is slightly higher resolution.
About 2K vs. HD, I never wrote something about HD, I just said that it wasn’t shot in 2K.
That’s why I included the brochure from the Camera that Lucas used on AOTC. It was the HDW–F900 and according to the brochure your estimate is way off. 1440x1080 is 1555200 pixels and the camera is rated at 2200000 pixels. The pickup device is listed as 3-chip 2/3-type FIT type CCD. My undertanding is that the yellow chip was indeed 1440x1080, but the other 2 were 1920x1080 resulting in an image that is almost as good as the next generation cameras. But was not 1440x1080. The final cropped image is 1920x816, exactly what we get on the Blu-rays. It does pay to investigate and read the documentation on the camera used on the film. The brochure I included the link to is copyrighted 2002, so it is not some later and updated product, but the very one used for AOTC. This topic has been discussed fully before and I remember most of the details. So the HDW–F900 was slightly inferior, but once you print it to film, as all the FX shots were going to be anyway, and make the distribution prints, viewers can’t tell the difference.
While the o-neg itself can produce nice crisp images that benefit from being scanned at very high resolution, distribution prints fall somewhere below 1080p so these digital cameras provided cutting edge digital editing and digital intermediates. And it made the whole movie match in quality. We know better today with our DLP projectors and 4k TV’s, but in 2002 they were not looking so far forward, just as many movie makers never imagined that some of the tricks they used that were obscured by the old optical printing process would be revealed by modern digital scans. We have surpassed the quality level they planned for. And until digital FX started being done higher than 1920x1080 or 2K, there wasn’t much point in the rest of the movie being at a noticeably higher resolution.
And my comment about HD is not 2k was just a general comment, not in reply to you.