Kirk Pearson's Weblog

The original Star Wars movies are now in High Definition

But you won't be able to see them that way for a while. A September 6, 2004 USA Today article describes the digital restoration process the original Star Wars movies have undergone to prepare them for their first release on DVD (on September 21, 2004). Original movie prints get scratch, scuff and dirt damage every time they are copied, and the Star Wars prints were in pretty bad shape. A company called Lowry Digital Images has digitized each frame of the original prints and retouched them using "80 employees and 600 networked Power Mac G5 computers with the equivalent of 378 terabytes (378 million megabytes) of hard-disk storage" to remove the signs of wear and tear, and now "the footage seems to shine, as if brand-new." (I am picturing the brand-new shine of C-3PO at the medal ceremony at the end of Star Wars :-))

Is digital restoration a good thing for classic movies, or does it change them for the worse in some fundamental way, like colorizing black & white movies? It sounds like the good will far outweigh the bad. And George Lucas' editorial changes to scenes in the movies could be far more damaging :-) Hopefully they'll be improvements, like his changes to his first film, THX-1138. I guess we'll see in a week.

Oh, about the High Definition thing: now that the movies are digitized, a High Definition master of them exists, and it can be used to make new film prints and High Definition DVDs.