Darth Mallwalker said:
Okay so we'll forget about that wipe to Tatooine.
Instead of three, just consider two instances of shrinkage (70632 & 128032).
I've presumed the shrinkage happened at the telecine stage.
Imagine the telecine operator finishing a reel at 5:00PM then going home.
Next morning he starts the next reel. He hasn't turned any knobs or changed the machine settings from the night before; nevertheless, the machine hasn't reached operating temperature yet, so the framing ends up slightly different.
I've imagined a scenario like that ... but he would've been using 1000ft reels in that case.
Now let's throw that idea out the window.
Let's imagine the shrinkage was introduced earlier, whenever the 1k chunks were printed onto 2k reels.
Then the 2k reel suffered the blob damage later in its life.
Is -1 following this thread? I wonder if he could provide uncropped images of these four frames.
If we could see those frames uncropped with sprocket holes and all, do you think their exposed areas would align?
The following is from davisdvd.com...
The letterboxed Japanese transfer was used to create this edition and since the picture on that had been shifted up, some slight re-adjustment was necessary to equalize the letterbox bands and place the 2.35 frame closer to the center. How this was done was through a "controlled video scroll" (like adjusting the vertical hold on an older TV set) to move the picture to the approximate center of the screen. The top of the frame, now vacant of the original picture, was matted over with a black letterbox band. Now here's the kicker: since this was all done by eye, at some point during this correction process the top letterbox band began over-matting onto the top edge of the picture. This essentially changed the aspect ratio of the film midway! To check for yourselves, grab this laserdisc and chapter to the cantina sequence. Go up to your screen and mark where the top letterbox band meets the top of the picture frame. At the point Greedo gets shot, the top black band will creep down lower than its original position. And to make matters worse, this happens a second time somewhere during the course of the film. So by the point the rebels are preparing to attack the Death Star, the film's aspect ratio has changed from 2.35:1 to 2.55:1. This "Incredible Shrinking Ratio" was later corrected in 1992 and issued on both VHS and laserdisc. See below for that [ Very Special Thanks to David C. Fein ]