Harmy said:
zeropc said:
at the end it's still a different thing what you see on set and what you see in the finished product.
Well, exactly - and what you're seeing in cinemas, through digital projection, is pretty much what is on what would be considered the equivalent of the o-neg in digital film making, so the fact that something is scanned from the o-neg doesn't mean that you have to get lobster-men and hoe makeup if the restoration is done sensitively.
The difference in this case is that the makeup crews and lighting guys are crafting the 'neg' with digital production in mind, the movies of the 70s were counting on the 35mm print and the generations to get to it to have certain properties.
If you scan the Star Wars neg, the makeup will look overdone and the matte paintings will stand out like dog's balls. This is a lot of the reason the BD needs to be despecialised in the first place.
A restoration from the neg in Star Wars would be quite a different procedure, and you would end up with a film in a way it had never really been seen before. So not really a restoration so much as a recreation. You could recover all the details in the shadows that are on the neg and remap them so that all that detail could be seen. But of course, you are then changing the directorial intent of that scene. For example, those areas may have been dark and relatively featureless to lead the eye to stay focused on the action in the scene that the director wanted you to focus on.
You could of course scan the neg digitally, and then use digital tools to get back to something that looked very much like a 'really good print', maybe a bit sharper and more detailed, but you would effectively be correcting to a print anyway.
This is kind of what Harmy's project would be doing, and there is nothing wrong with that at all, it is just yet another option for people to enjoy the movies they love in a different presentation, and currently still the *only* way to enjoy the original movies on a high definition screen.