Owyn_Merrilin said:
Tobar said:
Harmy said:
And now imagine what kind of detail level could be achieved if they did a proper 4K scan of the original negative, when even a poor 1080p scan of the o-neg, that doesn't actually resolve much beyond 720p, can show more detail than a 4K scan of a projection print.
I wish that could still be done. This was taken from a recent article about the rediscovery of Black Angel, the short film originally shown before ESB:
Tanaka: I remember when we were working on the Star Wars restoration, that was a different process. I think we optically recreated interpositives. But in order to do this, it went through some kind of warm chemical bath cleansing. The weird thing about Star Wars was that it was made up of different film stocks, so it went through this bath and they didn’t know what would come out on the other end...
Parker: You mean if it would survive or not? ‘George we might destroy your entire film, but it’s... we think it’s going to be OK.’
Tanaka: There’s a space battle shot and a close-up on Hans Solo, and the original negative is coming out of this cleaning solution and it’s just acetate.
Parker: It’s all clear. Oh no, did the bath dissolve it?
Tanaka: Yeah, it dissolved it, depending on the film stock.
='(
That is absolutely horrendous, but at least the entire film wasn't destroyed. If it's Star Wars we're talking about, and not Empire or Jedi (which seems likely, considering how much worse the deterioration supposedly was on Star Wars, and how many stocks of varying quality it used), if Disney were to get serious about resoration, they could go back to a technicolor print, or maybe even the technicolor separation masters, and still wind up with something higher quality than you can get from a standard 35 mm release print. I'm sure that's what they had to do for the special edition, anyway -- there aren't exactly any scenes where it's just a black screen with a description of what's missing, afterall.
Even the 97 restoration had to use dupes made from the separation masters at certain areas. Perhaps the chemical bath was the reason why...
But yeah, any restoration of the original 1977 Star Wars will not come 100% from the original negatives. Perhaps a combination of OCN, separation dupes, interpositives/negatives. With today's technology, this is rather par for the course with typical restorations done (especially with much older films that rely on a lot more dupe material to reassemble).