DIGITAL MASTER FROM 1995-1997 (TEDIOUS AND SOMEWHAT LONG TOPIC)

If you already know, in 1995 for the Star Wars special edition released in 1997, Pacific titles restored the film, cleaning it in a 104 degree sulfur bath which helped to remove dirt, dust, and any residue impregnated to the tape, then hand rubbed, the negative had never looked so clean and new, the only bad thing was the color fading, luckily George had copies of those films made in technicolor that had a slower color fading than the Kodak film, thanks to that they had the base to restore the colors, first they scanned the original negative with a professional scanner at the maximum resolution of that time, 2K, they also scanned the copies for the colors, the negatives had to be cut in the scenes where there are transitions to redo them digitally, they added the new CGI scenes and they printed everything on a new fine grain tape so they didn’t generate too much grain, now my questions are: If in 2004 Lowry scanned the special edition negative, which caused them to spend months working on grain reduction and sharpening contours unnecessarily, why didn’t they just use the digital master that pacific titles made for lucas film ? why if Lowry scanned the new physical master, it will have worse quality than the digital master, and the second question is: Lucas film in 2012 restored Star Wars to 4k according to media and leaks and we didn’t see any of this until Disney released the UHD version in 2019-2020, my new question is, where does this edition come from and what base does it use ? I have heard out there that this UHD version is a scan of the 97 physical edition, The problem is that it is not UHD, it is 2K, even if the negative was scanned to UHD, (3.8K or 4K) this will still be 2K, and of a quality quite inferior to Pacific’s digital master, except that Lucasfilm scan the original '77, '80, and '83 negative to UHD and on top of that put the changes in CGI in 2K, which still gives me as a third question: Does that CGI in 2K come from the physical master or the digital master, I know it’s a tedious field and there are many questions but I can’t get them out of my head for days now.

The only things that got scanned into the digital realm in ‘95/‘96 were the shots getting cgi added to them. The optical composites were also redone digitally using scans of, presumably, the original VistaVision vfx footage.

Literally everything else had to be restored photochemically.

Lowry’s 2004 HD master that was initially prepared for the dvd was created from a 2k scan of the camera negative. This was redone from scratch in 2012 for the 4k.

The new pieces of negative created in ‘96 for the SE would’ve mostly been filmouts of footage that had gone through the computer to have new cg effects added to them (obvious exceptions here and there, the new shots of Boba Fett and Oola in RotJ for example) and/or been generated entirely in cg. It’s unclear whether these new and redone vfx shots still existed in purely digital form by 2004/2012 or if only the filmed out negative was made.

TPM’s digital filmout tapes, which were used to film out the final “negative” in May of ‘99, were still readable twelve years later when it came time to prepare the blu-ray and do the 3D conversion. Remember, unlike the SE which was still mostly the true original camera negative, every single shot in TPM had to go through the computer to have vfx added to it, something pretty much unprecedented for a live action film at the time. Even the few shots that had no vfx added to them were scanned in/out just for the sake of consistency.

So, for the SE it was just the new cgi vfx shots (either the old footage with cgi added to it or the entirely new cg shots) and the digitally recomp’d shots that would have existed in their finished form as digital filmout tapes before being, well, filmed out to brand new pieces of negative. Whether those filmout tapes were saved and still readable by 2004/2012 is unclear, but I’ll just say that back in ‘04 watching the dvd even the entirely cg shots in A New Hope still look like they were scanned back in off the filmed-out negative.

I realize you are right, as when the cleanup was completed, the negative was reassembled but the special effects composite shots were changed to the versions recomposed, or CGI versions, I started the topic thinking that the scene transitions or sweeps were done digitally, when for that the entire film would have had to be digitalized, Something that was very expensive for the time. The scenes were recomposed again but in an optical or analog way like 20 years before, I was really very confused.