I’m not sure what you mean saying that the light beams move at different speeds. They don’t seem to to me! The light beam that is in a different position in the gif you posted is NOT moving in either clip. Yet it moves more in your gif than the hair does. We should get to the bottom of this.
They are different thicknesses and transparencies… I wonder if differences in the fidelity of the films and scans, the cropping, or post-processing effects like sharpening/DNR might have something to do with it? Maybe that could also explain why the hair seems to move a little! After all, the specific way it moves really reminds me of comparing the same frame from, say, Harmy’s Despecialized and 4k83. Seems less fucking insane than Lucasfilm editing in a pubic hair for no reason.
Oh my god…
I aligned the shot exactly before comparing. Oh well, It was just my theory, If you don’t want to belive me then that’s your pergotoive. What I do know is that the hair is, in fact, manipulated in the first shot, and no, DNR and Sharpening have nothing to do with it. Look at the top of the 0, it’s perfectly aligned and doesn’t move. So why does the hair?
Maybe it’s because you didn’t actually align the shot as well as you thought you did?
The original image was stretched and you did not account for the stretching exactly right. It’s most apparent in the clouds by the left edge of the frame, since the movement is more pronounced the further you get away from whatever you used as references when aligning the frames. But it’s also visible in how the 2 wobbles. The hair moves along with this stretching exactly. Compare it to the clouds nearby it on the right side of the frame.
It looks like it moves relative to the light cone, but looking at the whole frame it looks like the light cone just has a little difference in how the light cone’s glow drops off, changing where the “edge” appears. This is easily explained by differences in fidelity and post-processing. Much more easily than them editing in the hair. This is why I included that comparison from Return of the Jedi. The drop off in the glow of the lightsabers is significantly different, for similar reasons.