Cool it! The man said ‘restoring’ not ‘improving’ or ‘amending’ or any other form of buggering about which Lucas has previously used as an excuse to further indebt himself to the Star Wars fanbase. Look, you owe us one Georgie-boy.

In one helluva fascinating article over at secrethistoryofstarwars.com a fella by the name of Michael Kaminski has written a very comprehensive piece about the restoration of the original Star Wars film negative. There are some tedious facts, lots of fun for colourists and video techies but also some interesting details, or to put it kindly ‘oversights’, on the part of George Lucas are revealed. Shockingly the prequels to Star Wars were all shot natively on 1080p HD ‘film’. This is disturbing because, well, I can shoot that on my camera as a fun extra feature these days… despite not having that all-important Panavision lens-set to play with. 1080p was a brand new technology, it wasn’t the future resolution– no where near it. Dagobah to Lucas! Hello!?

… another undoable element of the prequels — filmed on 1080p HD, they have, at the most, less than half the resolution of the 35mm original trilogy… they have just under 1/5 the resolution…

Anyway, enjoy: Saving Star Wars: The Special Edition Restoration Process and its Changing Physicality.

via BinaryBonsai