Harmy said:
There are wipes and FX on the original negative, it is a completed cut of the film. The way it works is the director chooses which takes he wants evolved and those are then copied to a workprint material, which is what the editor works with. The editor puts the workprint together and that is then sent to a lab, where the same cut is assembled from the original camera negative material under laboratory conditions, including wipes and FX. That is why separate FX elements are (were) usually shot on 65mm or 70mm, because they were then combined in an optical printer to a 35mm film, which became the FX shot's original negative.
Think of it this way-
Any wipes on the camera negative (the original-original negative) would have to have been done inside the camera while they were standing there in the desert filming in 1975 (this technique was used in the 1920s by just opening or closing the iris of the lens to create a "wipe" transition).
Instead, the Star Wars wipes were done in the lab after filming was completed, by duplicating the portion of the film where the wipe would occur, and optically printing the wipe into it. That way, if they didn't like the wipe, and wanted to remove it or re-do it, they would just go back to the original, wipe-free camera negative and start over from scratch.
zombie84 said:
What you really need to do is compare 1997 to 2004. Because if I am right then the 1997 versions should basically match 1977, but then 2004 starts early. If 1997 and 2004 are both the same early starts then it would just be that they decided to start each transition a few frames early for some random reason.
Which would make me wonder if they used the camera negative at all for the '97 SEs.