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S_Matt said:
I respect all the arguments for and against but you misunderstood my car analogy. If you're restoring a car, even if you put every single part back that was originally used, you still have to dismantle it first to repair and clean the components.
You do this with film too, though--without changing things (i.e. recomps, etc.). In some cases you have to disassemble the negative in order to cut in duplicate pieces from other sources, for sections that are damaged beyond repair. This happened to Star Wars. With older Technicolor negatives you have to go back to the original dye strips and re-assemble the final negative (with a scan nowadays). Sometimes for Kodak negatives you have to disassemble the colour layers and clean each one individually for dirt sandwiched in between the layers that can't be removed any other way. Etc.
A film is not a car, but if your analogy is to have any relevance it would be in the above. Doing digital recomps is, as was stated, like putting power windows in an old car, or replacing parts with ones that never existed like modern fuel injectors and turbo charging the engine. Or whatever. It'll perform better--but the point of a classic restoration is to bring it to its original state, not improve on that original state. Otherwise you haven't restored anything, you've gone beyond the restoration and enhanced it. For car enthusiasts, a lot of them are fine with that, because performance is usually the bottom line--but in film it isn't about performance, unless you want to acknowledge that its an enhanced version. Blade Runner Final Cut is about performance, about getting the slickest, best possible version of the film, and that's why its "Final Cut," because it's not the original, not a restoration, it's an enhancement that never existed quite like this but is technically superior to the original version in terms of technology (while being respectful of aesthetics, etc. of the original).
