Janskeet said:CGI being spliced in? How is that even possible?? They would have to convert the CGI footage to film, then cut the film and insert the film footage of the CGI into the original negatives to make that work.
That's supposedly what happened. But I think it's bullshit, and I think the o-neg of the theatrical cuts still exist. And even if they don't, there's the Library of Congress prints, and Lucas' 3-strip archival prints that he's admitted to keeping in the Lucasfilm vaults (he said they used them for color timing in 1997).
And it's very possible to print CGI to film - that's how the majority of films are done nowadays. The film is shot, scanned in at compressed SD, edited (the "offline" edit), then the shots that were used in the edit are rescanned at 2k or 4k, the effects added at that resolution, then it's all color timed, audio mixed, titles and such rendered at 2/4k and added in, and then you have a 2k or 4k uncompressed master file (the "online" edit). Then that is printed to film. So most movies nowadays have a concrete maximum resolution of 2k or 4k, depending on which online resolution was used.