I want to throw this idea out here despite the fact that I don’t have any of the equipment necessary to do it. Hopefully it will spark some response and/or interest.
I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all grown up with or absorbed the OT on home video in its various forms. The 2004 transfers of the films are “prequalized” right down to the very look of their color and lack of grain. It’s safe to say that the films never looked the way they do there, not even in the theater, and I don’t even consider a single frame of these new ultra-digitized transfers to be the OT anymore. Ignoring for now all the ludicrous changes made in the 1997, the traditional restoration work done on the trilogy negative- namely the optical recomposites and (some) matte removal- made for what is arguably the best and most definitive look of the original trilogy.
A DVD fan transfer of the OT could be made using both the Special Edition laserdiscs and the Definitive Collection/Faces laserdiscs. The latter would fill in the gaps where special edition effects and scene changes rear their ugly heads, lightsaber luminance blows out, and where frames are missing at side breaks. One of the most distracting aspects of the ‘Definitive Collection’ and I assume the ‘faces’ laserdiscs as well are their copious amounts of aliasing artifacts on any kind of diagonal or horizontal lines and edges. The Special Edition home video transfer doesn’t exhibit these kinds of artifacts at all if I take my VHS copies to be representative of the laserdiscs.
Obviously the DC/faces material would have to be carefully color corrected and carefully anti-aliased in spots to match the SE, but I believe that both would be similar enough to blend together well. And in the end we’d have a very solid transfer of the OT that does not exhibit distracting aliasing or smearing, showcases the restored 1997 print with compositing and matte errors reduced, exhibits better color, uses an uncompressed soundtrack, and ultimately causes us to suspend our disbelief the same way we did for years in the past. It would present the apex of the “home video” look of the films we all know very well and would probably have distinct advantages over the September release, considering the new DVDs are a straight transfer of the flawed 1993 remastering.
I realize that it would be a considerable undertaking to sync everything up with sound and match frames perfectly around the changes, but it is still something do-able, and it would represent the best the true OT has to offer us on home video. Am I onto something, or have I been reading these forums way too much? 