Beatleboy99 said:
NeverarGreat said:
http://rmwimages.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/rmw-article-p3-update-june1.pdf
A link to an article discussing RMW's projects and tools. From the article:
"After RMW bought Lowry Digital, the company has completely restored over 50 commercially released classic films and DVDs over the past decade, including Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Singing in the Rain, the James Bond library, the Star Wars trilogy and numerous Disney films."
More evidence to consider.
Well, they did restore the Star Wars trilogy for dvd and blu ray
But it wasn't RMW that did the restoration for those releases as far as we know.
Here's another comparison using a higher quality promotional image I found next to the Blu-ray:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/84310
They look quite similar, and the final result doesn't display the same warping that the other video examples show. That lends credence to the idea that it is simply the old Lowry work. But the warping on C-3PO (perhaps caused by different temporal smoothing) is quite different than the Blu-ray, and that combined with the damage differences shown earlier make it clear that this is something other than the old work. The lack of overall warping in this comparison is odd though. Perhaps they simply used the old Lowry scan for this work, and applied a new cleanup algorithm on top of it. But why not just re-scan the O-neg in 4K to do this new work?
I'd guess that either the original film didn't warp or significantly change in the 6-7 years since the last scan, or it degraded so severely that it was unusable and they needed to revert to an older scan.