S_Matt said:
So, what you're saying is, there's only one opinion allowed on this forum?
I must say the strange double standards of the restorationalists puzzle me. Especially the notion that its fine to use tools that weren't available 35 years ago to clean and recolor a film but not okay to use the technology to fix compositing faults like matte lines and flickering boxes?
The tools are meaningless. You don't see or hear the tools in the film. It is the effect that matters, the end result. Regardless of how you restore the film the ultimate goal is to get it to look and sound as it originally did. As long as it looks and sounds exactly as it did, it doesn't matter how you did it, the process doesn't matter, it's the result we are concerned with. If there was an audible difference between the original sound tapes in 1977 and a digitally restored version of the sound tapes in 2011, I would be concerned that it's not truely being restored to its original state--but there is no real auible difference. The result is the same. And that is what ultimately matters. If you could somehow make Star Wars look the same as it did in 1977 using a rock and hammer, that would amazing, because it looks the same as it did in 1977, so why would anyone care that you used a rock and hammer? It's restored, it looks and sounds identical to how it did when it was first made.
Furthermore, cleaning the film is the act of restoring it. The dirt is foreign. It's attached onto the surface of the film from handling, time, and storage. It wasn't originally there, thus in order to get the film to look as it originally did, you have to get rid of it. No one said anything about recolouring, except to get it to match the 1977 version. See the pattern? Matte lines and flickering boxes were there in 1977. That's why they don't get removed. See the difference?
That's why recompositing the effects digitally matters. It's not just that you are recomping them digitally--the end result takes on a different quality. It looks different--that is, after all, the whole point of doing a digital recomp, right? To make it look better, cleaner, more realistic, or whatever, than the original optical. And that's why it's not a restoration. You're changing how it looks and betraying the visual repercussions of the state of technology in the year the film was made.
I've made a lot of really salient points throughout this thread that you've not addressed. I don't know this is on purpose, but I've shot down pretty much every point you've raised.
Anyway, you're basically asking for a tasteful Special Edition, like Blade Runner Final Cut. Which is cool, I would enjoy that and so would a lot of people here probably. But let's not pretend it's anything but that. Once it ceases to resemble the original version, it's no longer a preservation or a restoration--again, the whole point of recomps and stuff is precisely so it can cease to resemble the original version exactly, to get rid of matte lines and mis-timings and opacity issues, and other stuff. So you basically answer your own issue here; your whole point is to create a version that isn't a preservation of exactly how the original was, one that has changed certain visual or audio elements to be technically better and have different characteristics and qualities (no matte lines, fully opaque, consistent colour, etc.). Because if it looked the same, you wouldn't need to re-do it so that it looked slightly different right? So your whole concept is predecated on altering the original content. How you could consider this a restoration or a preservation of the film is beyond me. You seem to think "restoration" means "improving" because restorationists erase scratches and dirt. But the reason they erase those things is because they were never there in the first place, they are foreign artifacts, so it's not actually improving anything, it's (get ready for this) restoring the film to how it originally existed.
This entire thread is basically the whole board here trying to convince one person he is wrong. If you can't see why you are wrong after 8 pages of nothing but rebuttals from dozens of people, some of whom actually do work in non-professional film restoration, then, well...