It will be a combination of multiple prints for all three films actually.
So is this the kind of thing where you utilize multiple prints in order to achieve a higher net resolution than any individual print alone?
Partially, but it is mainly for other reasons.
-
The sad reality is the popularity of these movies means that any ‘complete’ release prints are actually full of splices and are missing frames, so you need multiple prints to have a hope of getting as close to a complete movie as you can.
-
As per above, some frames are scratched or damaged to the point where the only feasible repair is to use frames from other prints to help restore the damage
-
Noise reduction, having multiple prints is useful for scenes that are heavy comps. They are way noisier to begin with because of the extra generations required, and as they age, in some cases they get the dreaded brown noise that you can see clearly in the sandcrawler and Speeder shots for example. Combining multiple prints helps the signal rise up out of the noise.
-
Colour. Having multiple prints means you can make a better estimate of the original colour timing.
-
Damage decisions. Is that a fleck of sand on Kenobi’s robe, or is it a pinpoint scratch on the film? Multiple prints help you decide what is image and what is not.
So, some scans may not end up having a single pixel in the final mix, but still may be useful, some shots will be from one scan only, others may have 2 or more prints combined on any given frame. It is a painful way to work on one hand, and is a horrible amount of data to wrangle (another 5GB of SSDs would be lovely), but it does take away the guesswork and allows you to do more restoration and less interpolation.