Originally posted by: vince_the_destroyer
Since the sources (Laserdisc) aren't anamorphic, how the bootlegs based on them be? btw, has anyone considered taking scenes from the SE that weren't altered, but were cleaned up in the restoration, and stiching them together with the pre-SE laserdiscs? would be nice

The first part is easy. An encoder will allow you to convert 4:3 to 16:9 while retaining it's aspect ratio. I did this by cropping the black bars off and replacing them with my own which are true black and look better than the black bars of the source. Since I did that, I had to recreate the alien subtitles. When I recreated the subtitles, I stuck them in the image instead of the bottom black bar since they were in the image in the theater.

I wouldn't even attempt to do any stitching. It would be too noticeable every time it switched from SE to Original because there is a huge difference in quality between those two sources. The only way you could do it without noticing it would be to have some very expensive equipment and color correct each frame so that it matches the colors of the SE versions. Too much trouble.

Patrick