Fang Zei said:
I'm bumping this thread in light of last week's Disney announcement. Several weeks ago we learned that Clones and Sith would be hitting theaters only a few weeks apart next Fall. With Episode VII hitting in 2015, we'll obviously be seeing all three of the OT-SE installments hitting theaters much earlier than originally expected (late 2014 / early 2015 at the very latest).
I bring this up not out of any interest in the 3D versions, but out of interest for what this might mean for the OT in general. Will Lucasfilm spring for 4K rebuilds of the OT now that money is no longer an object? The current Lowry masters are stuck at 1920x817, which is just fine and dandy for hdtv and blu-ray, but the standard digital cinema resolution for a cinemascope film is 2048x872. Jim Ward called the Lowry masters a "digital negative" back in '04, saying they could use that for theatrical if they wanted to.
Well, it's been eight years and (correct me if I'm wrong) that master hasn't been projected theatrically anywhere.* That says to me that, no, hdtv resolution for a 'scope film is not a "digital negative."
*Was that special screening of Empire a couple years back (with Ford in attendance) the '04 version or was it a '97 print??? That's literally the only time I can think of where the lowry master might have been theatrically projected.
No offense to Michael Kaminski, but the Star Wars films were scanned at least 2k resolution which for a scope film is at least 1828x1556. It was more likely scanned at 4k since 1828 horizontal pixels is less than 1920.
LFL used a Cintel C-Reality film scanner which scans at either 2k (at 6-15fps) or 4k (2 seconds per frame). The C-Reality cannot, however, natively output in either 2k or 4k. It only outputs in HD and lower resolutions. The full squeezed anamorphic scope frame was scanned at a higher overall resolution than HD and downconverted then output at 1920x1080 10bit color (4:4:4 RGB). Whether it was anamorphically squeezed at the full 1920x1080 or was letterboxed on output to 1920x817 is not known. The only source is Lowry saying it was "HD" and Videographer magazine saying it was 1080p, as far as I can tell so it's hard to say.
Since the C-Reality doesn't store images, the cost between 2k and 4k probably isn't much as it only comes down to time. It would be interesting to find out whether they opted for 2k or 4k. I would hope they did 4k. Even though fans don't like the colors, the overall image on the blu ray is pretty detailed. They look more detailed than Raiders and Raiders had a 6k scan with the restoration work done at down-converted 4k. LFL color 'corrected' the 1080p version and gave this to Lowry for restoration and de-graining. I would suspect they did not use the OCN either and opted for the 1997 SE internegative.
Star Wars was shot on the same film stock as Raiders except the composites and wipes/dissolves used a different film stock (among others) which faded so they re-did them either digitally or with an optical printer. Because of the generation loss with them and the effects and also if it is the 1997 IN, a 2k scan would have captured all the detail, a 4k scan would have definitely captured all the detail. The only way to make it better would be to scan the OCN parts that are salvageable, preferably at 6k or 8k.