Darth Editous said:
They should have the same framing, but they don't.
Left/right cropping differences can be explained by the vagaries of analogue video capture (by which I mean the laserdisc rips being used for comparison).
Going by the fact that the cropping is exactly the same on SW and ESB and is only different in ROTJ makes me conclude they did something different for ROTJ. The video would have been an ntsc telecine as soon as the film was scanned - convention back in those days used a scanning process that directly produced a telecine by scanning odd and even lines in sequence (each frame is scanned twice, with the scanner picking up first the odd lines for the telecine, then the even lines).
Furthermore they probably fine-tuned their scanning scene-by-scene, and then edited the telecine so I would be very surprised if the master tape contains an uninterrupted 2:3 pull-down pattern... so conversion to PAL would have been very low quality (29.97fps --> 25fps). It's my guess that George Lucas Jr didn't care about the theatrical trilogy even in 1993 - and that this little exercise was more about how good the film looks and are they ready to do a 2K scan for the SE?
The video would not have been resized for Laserdisc after scanning since it was already an ntsc telecine. But I think Red5 may be right, because it does appear to be the same transfer in all other aspects (same colour, exactly the same top cropping, etc). For some reason they mastered it differently to the first two films, but from the 1993 THX ntsc telecine nonetheless.
Just 5 more hours to wait before the G-Force script completes on ROTJ (after that I still need to encode the XVID - but that'll take barely any time), I can't wait! Haven't watched the movie in like 3 years now.