Mavimao said:
According to the article:
"Sadly, after 17 years, the CRI material had lost so much dye that every shot realized on that reversal stock had to be removed and recomposited from scratch in order to bring Star Wars back to its original glory. Soon, Kennedy had Star Wars Special Edition film editor Tom Christopher (at Skywalker Ranch) and visual effects editor Dave Tanaka (at ILM) searching to come up with the original effects elements so that these shots, as well as other less-than-perfect opticals, could be recomposited digitally."
CRI was a then new reversal film adopted by special effects crews. Unfortunately, the film was extremely unstable and it fades extremely fast compared to other film.
Ahh---indeed--good catch from that article.
It seems kind of ironic---according to this rare LA Times article from 1995--CRI stock was introduced to stop fading!
The main problem, says Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum, who is hard at work on the restoration, is that the duplication stock developed in the '70s by the major film houses was supposed to last a lifetime. The specially treated stock, called CRI, was created because films from the 1960s were already losing their color.
But when Fox pulled "Star Wars" from the vaults, it was discovered that "the duplicate, from which the release prints were made, as well as the negative that its stored on, were corrupted," McCallum says. The main defects in "Star Wars" were found in special-effects optical sequences, which sometimes contain eight to 10 layers of film.
http://articles.latimes.com/1995-07-09/entertainment/ca-22054_1_star-wars