378 Terabytes Of Star Wars on 600 G5s

Mrbill points to this USA Today story on the digital makeover given to the original Star Wars trilogy, noting that the digitized films have also been converted to HD for later release as high-definition DVDs.

Comments

High Def of Low Def

[airider]

So the question I've been dying to find out from all the high def zealots out there is... does making a high definition recording of something originally recorded in some other definition (in this case celluloid) going to look "better"? It's been my experience dealing with image processing of "analog" imagery that the higher up in resolution you go, the more "anomolies" can be detected...i.e. there is only so much you can do with the original baseline, and going up in resolution requires huge amounts of post processing to clean up those anomolies. AAANNND the final product is still limited by the originals. So even if we get more lines of resolution from the celluloid, the celluloid is still the limit on how good you can go. So will high def DVD STAR WARS look better than standard DVD STAR WARS. Probably, but not any better than the original and not THAT much better than standard DVD. I think the movie industry (and music too) have lost the fact that we aren't clamoring for higer resolutions of our recorded media, we just want ones that don't wear out. That's why I think SACD and DVD-A haven't taken off.

Re:Special Edition Questions...

[bottlerocket]

1. Yes. Lucas wasn't on his digital projection kick yet.
2. Well, the articles claim that they are the original prints. They describe how they've been sitting in storage for more than twenty years. But if they are the originals, that does raise the question of whether all the new special effects had to be reinserted.
3. Original cut, no. Those are dead and gone and will never be released again. But HD-DVDs of the Special Editions? Oh, you betcha.

Re:Restore again?

[falcon5768]

if you compair the images there are numerous touch ups...

Jabba looks MUCH better in the first one

the image is cleaned up even more

the rotoscoping effects on the lightsabers are cleaned up and made to look like the current sabers

now Han and Geedo shoot at the same time

biggest change, now its Hayden as Anikan at the end ghost scene