m_s0 said:

Harmy said:

I'm pretty sure, that the pieces of film added to the negative in 1997 should be recognizable not only by their content but also by their markings, so should they want to really do a proper OOT restoration using the negative, it shouldn't be a problem to identify exactly which shots have been changed.

You're assuming competence and dedication on so many levels here...

Cataloguing all of the original elements properly I believe in. I've got some doubts concerning storing them properly afterwards. Giving enough of a crap to keep them that way for 20 years I just cannot see happening.

Call me a pessimist, but I've seen and read horror stories about film restoration. The original film elements are never in good shape, even if they were supposed to be handled well. It would be a pleasant surprise to learn that someone did indeed take care of them.

Not really - what I was saying was, that when we're trying to determine what was changed and what was not in this or that version for our own restorations/recreations, we have to actually look at the content of the frames and compare them closely to see if for example a particular shot was recomposited, which is a time-consuming endeavor, which involves a lot of guess-work and we could quite easily miss something and I don't see them (Disney, Fox, Lucasfilm) being this thorough anyway -- BUT if they wanted to recreate the original version from the 4K '97SE scan they probably already have by replacing the shots put in in '97 with something like an I.P. or even distribution print scan, they should be easily able to determine which scenes were added in '97 by the markings on the film - they wouldn't have to bother comparing the content at all, so in fact, it may well be easier for them to replace all the shots, which were replaced/added in '97 with some other source, rather than cherry-pick which shot to replace and which not to.