The opening to Star Wars looks excellent, great job to all on the project! =) Imagine the whole movie in 1080p once fully restored... :) :)

snicker: I agree with the general concern, but bear in mind that repairing scratches, nicks and other sorts of damage is standard when restoring a film. It's simply putting it back the way it was before it became damaged, restoring it to it's original appearance when the print was new (which is what we want, within the limits of the sources and tools available).

It's totally different than applying digital noise reduction, which causes a loss in detail. It's quite possible to fix the scratches and various other forms of print damage and avoid DNR, and thus retain the very fine detail from the print, and keep the natural film-like quality in the final 1080p video. If you look at some of the best professional Blu-ray movies you can buy (Saving Private Ryan is a great example), this is exactly what they have done. They've taken scans from top-quality prints and transferred it to optical disk while leaving the picture alone, and not interfering with the wonderful natural detail of the 35mm film. And I'm sure negative1 and all those involved have that same goal, restore it back to new as best they can (within reasonable time limits for working on it), while retaining the excellent natural detail of the film. :)