Actually, in that particular shot, the channel misregistration is different on the models and on the background, so it was clearly part of the original compositing and in order to fix it, Mike had to cut everything out of it’s background and shift each element separately, thus literally re-compositing the shot.
Any chance you can point me to what shot you’re referencing? I’m watching the legacy videos on Vimeo looking for it.
Edit: I believe I found it. Is it the shot of the X-wings on top of the Death Star? The original version has a stain in the top left corner that he fixes.
Thanks! Based on what he says in the video, he seems to ideally only want to remove the chanel errors introduced by the prints. It seems like if he had access to the negatives, he’d know what errors were original to the negatives.
Given the sources he has, I think he made the best choice.
As far as wanting it to look like a 35mm print, I’d fall on the other side of the fence. I want the movie to look as great as possible with only errors present in the original negatives to remain (but I would want all of those errors to remain).