Originally posted by: zombie84
Is the Abyss DVD actuall from the LD??

If they went to the trouble of making a DVD transfer, I can't see why they wouldn't make it anamorphic. The movie was first released on DVD in 2000 and they definitely knew about 16x9 enhancement at the time.

I believe the official line was that Fox wanted to make a new transfer of The Abyss, but James Cameron declined and said the current one (presumably from the LD) was fine. Actually, this happened again with the Alien Quadrilogy set. Fox did new transfers of every film except Aliens because Cameron said he was happy with the old, grainy transfer from the first DVD release (which was anamorphic by the way).

Actually, a LD transfer doesn't mean it will look that bad. The current edition of George Stevens' Giant is taken from the laserdisc and it looks pretty decent. The main problem with it is that there was some really dreadful edge enhancement added to it. I'm hoping the source Lucasfilm is using for SW is one before they applied filters, etc. to it.