The Process of Restoring Star Wars for Blu-ray

StarWars.com has got a great article about the process of restoring the Star Wars saga for Blu-ray. It’s interesting to see how the films have progressed from its initial theatrical release, Laserdisc, VHS, DVD and now Blu-ray.

“When they did the transfer from film for the previous DVD, they wanted to make sure they got rid of frame edges, artifacts, splices or what have you,” says Dorne Huebler, an Associate Visual Effects Supervisor at ILM involved in the Blu-ray restoration. “So they were pretty aggressive about the blow-up.”

A blow-up is a magnification of the film image done to avoid displaying the edges of the frame. The Episode I home video magnifies the image to such an extent that approximately 8 percent of the picture is missing. In certain shots in Episode I, there are characters from the edge of frame that are gone in the DVD release, and have now been restored for the Blu-ray.

Expanding the picture and revisiting it in high-definition also surfaced some longstanding visual effects and technical errors that had gone undetected in the past. Though not every shot has been revisited (there are 2,000 after all), some have been corrected for this release.

“Ironically when you see things in HD, it’s not forgiving in the way film can be,” explains Huebler. “Flicker, grain and projector weave naturally disguise certain nuances when viewing film. We’ve really gone over shots with a fine-toothed comb and discovered issues we could improve with a bit of TLC.”

“Some of the issues come from these movies being finished for film and projected for film, and that’s how people saw them. A lot of things that look a little different on HD or DVD are really the nature of how video treats color space,” explains Huebler. A dramatic example of this came up in the 2004 DVD release, with the dimming of the lightsaber cores throughout the trilogy, even to the point where Luke’s lightsaber aboard the Millennium Falcon shifted from blue to green in Episode IV.

Read more about this fascinating restoration project on StarWars.com: http://bit.ly/qd5l3x

Pre-order today!

• Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Episodes I-VI) [Blu-ray]
• Star Wars: The Original Trilogy (Episodes IV – VI) [Blu-ray]
• Star Wars: The Prequel Trilogy (Episodes I – III) [Blu-ray]

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