…Aaaaand in another act of unbridled stupidity by yours truly, I just realized I forgot to edit the film anamorphically.

Let me explain.

When I obtained the Schorman preservation files for the prequels, I converted Episode I to DNxHD without using my head. I converted the file as is without looking at the other options. So, I’ve been editing Episode I in a 16:9 format with black areas on the top and bottom of the frame without a care in the world. Until now.

Now that I looked at the options again, I found out there is an option to crop the black areas off and stretch the movie to a 16:9 format. Then, I can unsqueeze it using the 1.3x anamorphic option in Resolve. Not only is the anamorphic file smaller (38GB as opposed to 47GB for the unsqueezed version), it also means that the file is at the highest quality possible, since all that’s being used is the actual movie (much better than the movie and 25% black on the top and bottom).

On the bright side, this means that the video quality will get another upgrade. The bad news is that the new file hasn’t been edited yet, and I’m gonna have to go through the process of editing the film again. Hopefully, the process should take a few days (provided my job doesn’t take too much of my time). My apologies for that, but there’s a silver lining to this problem.