Mike O said:
I'm not saying this to be a smartass, but are you sure?
If we are to believe what has been said and written about it in several magazines, articles, documentaries etc, yes that is the way they approached the cleanup process.
http://www.theasc.com/magazine/starwars/articles/sped/ssws/pg1.htm
Fortunately, Fox's head of postproduction, Ted Gagliano, made the restoration of Star Wars a personal labor of love, working closely with YCM Labs, Pacific Title, Lucasfilm editorial, ILM and Skywalker Sound. Had the negative been constructed more conventionally, the first order of business would have been to wash it in a sulfur bath a 104F, then wipe it down by hand. But those four different film stocks couldn't be washed together; instead, they had to be separated and washed in batches. That meant dissecting the original Star Wars negative, washing it, and then reassembling it. "That made everybody suck in their breath, " Kennedy says, recalling the stressfull situation. "Thankfully, Robert Hart, the neg cutter on the second and third films, came in to put the negative back together. After doing various tests, we found out right away that nothing beats scanning original negative. Star Wars was an A-B neg cut, which meant that they could actually lift and slug original negative and send it back to ILM whenever we were enhancing a live-action shot. I think this is the first time someone has tried to bring a Seventies effects film back to the big screen."
Mike O said:
Do you think he was lying, misinformed, or just being an idiot?
No, I absolutely don't think he was lying, being misinformed nor do I think he's an idiot. David Tanaka were a visual effects editor at ILM who was directly involved with this "restoration." He was apparently responsible for finding the elements for the original optical effects so that they could be digitally recomposited.
I just find it frustrating hearing these vague stories on how things went down as there's been a lot of confusion and different thoughts on what actually was done to the original negative. It effectively muddies the water. Reading that quote from arstechnica again, my guess is that when he says original negative he's actually talking about those negative bits and pieces they had to track down for recreating and making their new visual effect shots and not the actual finished cut negative that was disassembled, washed and reassembled. But what he was saying may of course have been perfectly clear to you or everyone else besides me.
So, Mike O, what did you make of his story? Do you think I am misinformed, or just being an idiot? ;)