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and i allso noticed that many people mentioned lot of different things but everybody was just speculating
so i'd thought i might help you with that,i know some facts,i have read lot of articles and talked to some people from the industry (not ILM or anything,just some DP's that know a lot about it) that know
the facts in more detail.
I opened a new topic because this post would probably get lost in that old thread.
so here i go:
First of all the restoration of the trilogy was NOT digital at all...
there are NO restoration disks,or whatever.
Only scenes which needed additional effects or opticals recompositing
were scanned at 2K resolution.
The restoration job was done by YCM labs,as you can read in the credits of SE
and most of the job they did was just plain old cleaning of film tapes
with a sponge...then the film went through a high temperature bath in wich the emulsion was
softened and all the dirt came out...plus the scrashes were minimized
since the emulsion blended over the gaps.
this is all that they have done,nothing more.
the colors have faded about 10% in ANH and that was not that bad.
Actually nothing has been done to repair the color fading since nothing CAN
be done with chemical restoration.
the prints looked good since the intermediate stock that the interpositives and
internegatives were printed on usually has the habit of increasing color saturation a bit.
That is why the colors looked ok in cinema.
But the films stayed faded.
And as for the video releases,and TV releases:
It is an usual procedure to correct the colors ,contrast and brightness
on ALL films,even if they are not faded,since the scanned image
is not really suitable for waching on TV,it has to be corrected.
So all the wonderfull color comes from little color tweaking.
Anyway...in 1997 george did NOT have digital copies of the films.
And one more thing...you all mention prints.
For SE they went back to the original negatives,they didnt use any kind of prints.
Allthough some scenes were lost and the original negatives could not be found,
so they used black and white separation copyes and printed them with filters
onto a new film stock to recreate the missing scenes.
After the restoration has been done,the new SE negative was placed in the
Pro-tek vault which is where it is right now (unless Lucasfilm used it in sicret in meantime)
Pro-tek is a company of Kodak which are the manufacturers of all films stock,
including the Eastman 5247 100T film stock that All star wars films were shot on
(ROTJ used another new film stock for forest shots) so they know how to keep the negatives
in good shape.
These were the facts.
And what does that mean?Since only a chemical restoration has been done
and film was not remastered to a new film stock,the original negatives are cut together with
new negatives of altered scenes.In other words the film exists in SE form right now.
But here is our hope:
Lucas probably left all the other original negatives of the scenes which were altered.
So all it takes is a little video editing...id doesnt matter that the original negative is cut today in the
SE form...if the original elements are left in the vault too they can recut it on video to be
the way it was.
