He was pushing for shooting digitally when it looked like ass, cameras meant for news footage. Episode II will never look good. on III they got the technology a little bit better. But they will never look as good as 35mm shot movies on film.
The part that makes no sense to me is George decided no Clone Trooper suits. It had to be faked in cgi.
General audiences did not care the films look like animated cartoons in places or CGI animated. Lucas was able to get away with it because you don’t linger on a single shot. so the fact some of the renders don’t hold up, whatever they go by at 24 frames per second. Yeah, you can pause the movie at home now in 4K. and say good lord who approved this shot it looks terrible.
There were sets and miniatures and it wasn’t all cgi. Yes we know about the location shooting and miniatures. But the overwhelming amount of the movie was shot on greenscreen with a digital backlot, and actors shot separately from one another as elements. Actors acting to nothing, doesn’t help.
Anakin94 made a good point on the previous page; that on the old CRT TVs perhaps some of the CGI issues possibly didn’t look too bad… though once we got the blu rays (and later the UHD/4Ks) as well as higher quality TVs… the numerous CGI issues become more apparent / noticeable / jarring etc?
And that’s before we go down the whole ‘shooting digitally’ limitations of the time - in comparison to quality of film (though that may well be better suited for another thread) 👍.
For me, many of the quality Fan Edits on here have done an admirable job in addressing the multitude of CGI issues in the PT.