fallenorder0392

I’d like to give some clarity about this leak, and I’m not the leaker from the Reddit thread, just someone who is in the know of the happenings surrounding this event and to provide context:

I was alongside a group of people who knew about the OOT restoration leaks before this got unceremoniously leaked online on Reddit and has unfortunately gained alot of traction. Initially, we thought it was cool for us to share them around because we thought it was uncomfirmed, until we started pixel-peeping and matching alongside the 4K77 sources and other versions of the film, in which we realized it WAS the real deal.

The reason why we “gatekept” this in the first place was out of fear that the absolutely pristine restoration work that these people were doing of the Original Trilogy would be publicly leaked, and be pulled out of release by Disney and Co., and that these projects wont ever see the light of day. It would put the fansites (us, TSWT, etc.) in jeopardy as they might go on banwaves trying to silence us, or finally break that “legal gray area” that we’ve all been operating on for years in terms of restoration projects and fan-edits. It wasn’t really out of hoarding or keeping them to ourselves, we knew the implications if this would leak (given this is some very high level technical stuff involving teams of people working across different departments, allegedly) and we wouldn’t want these people to lose their jobs because of a shoddy autouploader that was posted to a random YouTube account.

Ultimately, it’s a bit saddenning for us because we didn’t want this to leak out the way that it did, and now the people who were involved in this effort (their names were literally on some of the clips) would now be at risk of being blacklisted by the industry even though they weren’t even part of the reason why this was leaked in the first place.