wow. gimme a minute to respond here.
[edit]
I admire the enthusiasm on this guys, I really do. There are merits on both sides of the argument. But I think people are forgetting what we wrote in the first post:
First and foremost, the project aims to be an archive preservation of the Original Star Wars Trilogy laserdiscs in the best quality possible. We are culling video from a number of different sets. These include, but are not limited to, the US Definitive Collection set, the US "Faces" set, and their Japanese equivalents.
Every single frame will be looked at and corrected. Fixes will be limited to dirt and film damage removal, color correction, and stabilization. Wherever possible we will be using the actual celluloid film for reference.
Glitches including matte lines, saber colors, and frame jumps will not be fixed in the initial version. A possible second version could include fixes to matte lines and garbage mattes, but keep the rest of the "glitches" intact.
We will always be keeping the raw transfer, with starless starfields, LD pressing errors, garbage mattes, everything. (Think of this as the DarkJedi of X0 releases.
)
For the absolute purist, this may be their lovechild. It will be how the LDs would look if you were fortunate enough to own an X0 player.
We will also be doing a straight cleanup to remove cue dots, laserdisc sparklies, restore the starfields (remembering we aren't putting any stars back that are not on the laserdisc, just bringing them out), remove the garbage mattes, remove any "film problems" i.e. splices, scratches etc. as per our previous newsletter, and adjust the color to match the theatrical releases as close as possible.
This would form our "base print" for any future projects. These would include things like saber fixes, fixing dodgy effects, etc.
Garbage mattes are really a color correction issue when you think about it. If the colors were set properly, you wouldn't see them at all. At least in the initial archive version, they are certainly of interest from a 'wow, look how they did that in 1977' point of view.
But they won't be in the version that we will be sitting down to enjoy watching in our homes.