And if what you say is true…
Hi yotsuya,
I’m sorry, I don’t want to argue with you, I’m just reading and believing what ILM HD Supervisor Fred Meyers said about this matter, and I’m assuming it is true: “This chroma sub-sampling combined with spatial sub-sampling effectively reduced HD’s 1920 resolution to 1440 for luma and 960 for chroma.”
About the ideal scanning resolution, as I said before: even if the original master was shot in 6k, after going through a traditional Intermediate Positive, then to IN to release print stage in the lab, it wouldn’t go above 2K. Plus the weave and lack of pin-registration in most projectors, plus the less-than-optimum focus, you could easily wind up with well below 1080 resolution.
Believe me, I’m currently scanning The Phantom Menace in 4K: there is nothing to get more than in 2K (and Harmy seems to think the same).
I have spent years scanning photos and you always want to go higher and then reduced after the scan. A movie is just a series of 180,000 photos. The post scanning image handing tools are much more sophisticated than the scanning tools. It just pays to get more and then reduced to what you really want. It also helps during the repair process (removing dirt and scratches). I’ve had to repair a number of old photos with missing corners and enlarging them 2x, doing the repair, and then shrinking them back to the original size helps hide the signs of the repair and results in a better end product. So scanning at 4k and then fixing the dirt and scratches will give the best final product rather than scanning at 2k or HD.
As for the resolution, it appears to be a recording device limitation, not the camera. And they used a number of different recording devices. Some probably are at the resolution you are describing and the couple of frames I checked may have been done with higher end equipment. And when you consider how many scenes in many movies are made, the quality has always varied a bit depending on whether the editor/director wants to use the scene as shot or crop it for a better picture. I remember noticing in 1997 that the front shot of Luke looking at the binary sunset had more grain than the surrounding scenes indicating it was originally a wider shot. That one shot of Qui-gon Jinn in the Counsel chamber from TMP is just awful because it was digitally shot and then cropped.