zombie84 said:I think people just don't understand the film process. Its not like the physical negatives were altered. Such a thing is impossible. Once the film is on film, its permanent, you cannot change it. What happened was certain parts were replaced. The original restored negatives were put in storage and replaced with newly-created ones involving CGI. People really don't understand the filmmaking process so when LFL says "the originals were destroyed" people assume it means they were chucked into a furnace, when it really means that the O-neg no longer conforms to the 1977 edit--which it hasn't since 1981, since that is when the "ANH" crawl was added. Technically, the "original" film was "destroyed" 3 decades ago. Fixing it requires simply hiring neg cutter to retrieve the shots from storage and putting them back in the O-neg conform so that IP's can be struck.
You've got it on the nose. But the thing is, conforming (at least today - this may not have been the case at the time given the prevalence of splicing tape seen on the laserdiscs) is, by its nature, a destructive process. Two frames past the end of shot A are scraped off, leaving (effectively) blank leader, while two frames before the beginning of shot B are also scraped off. These are each then cemented to black leader, alternating back and forth between reel A and reel B (shot 1 is on reel A, shot 2 is on reel B, shot 3 is on reel A, shot 4 is on reel B ... ) - these two reels are run through an optical printer, and out comes the interpositive, with everything put together nice and smooth.
But in order to remove any sections from the original negative, which is cemented into two separate reels like that, you have to destroy the head and tail of each shot, since it's fucking cemented down.
So, assuming this process was in practice in 1976/77 (I honestly don't know if it was), then changing the original negative would, in fact, destroy at least parts of the shots that have been replaced/altered. In going through ANH for my Trilogy edit, I noticed that several frames are inexplicably missing from many shots that have been altered for the SE - this, in my opinion, supports the theory that this conforming process was used, and those frames were destroyed because there wasn't any other way around it.
For further proof of this issue, see the extended cut of Mallrats - there are many times when the frame will jump ahead two or four frames, because they wanted to extend a specific shot, but those frames were destroyed in the conforming process.
But then again, since this whole process was designed to eliminate the presence of splicing tape on release prints, and Star Wars has quite a lot of splicing tape visible in its pre-SE state, I could be dead wrong about this.