OTHER TECH

Did you have to create a demo to show how good Star Wars could look?We did the Indiana Jones stuff last year for Paramount, which Lucasfilm was involved in, so it sort of got this relationship started. Then they created some samples of other things they had done, and eventually they sent us THX 1138 , which was the first film that George made.

THX 1138 was, to say the least, an interesting challenge. It had been shot quite some years ago in 1971, so it had various degradation factors. There was a lot of flicker, lots of grain, because everything was shot indoors in a studio using faster films - and it was shot in two-perf Techniscope, which has a half-size negative, so the dirt and grain look bigger, and the jitter is worse. There was a spot on the lens during the shoot, so every time the camera moved, so did the spot. One particularly demanding problem arose from the characters having been shot against a white cyclorama. We had to try to make their faces look good without making the white cyc look ugly.

George was always in the loop. We'd send everything up to him, and he proved to be one of our fussier customers. We'd get stuff back and say, "Boy, has he got sharp eyes." He'd find stuff that we hadn't, so we got fussier in the process. By the time we finished, he was very happy with our work and gave us the Star Wars movies to do. They sent us some tests and said that the actual films weren't nearly as bad. That was total bullshit - they were worse . They're not 30 years old yet, but I've never seen movies so dirty.

Because they were so popular?They were so successful that they kept hauling the negatives out to make more prints, so they are really beat up now.

Were there other problems you had to contend with?In the first movie, you have C-3P0 and R2-D2 walking across the desert, and I think half of that desert sand ended up in the camera. It was unbelievable. One technique we use is where you look at the frame before and the frame after to determine what is dirt on the frame in between. When you have as much dirt as this, though, the before and after frames have the same damn dirt - and more. It's really hard for the program to separate what's dirt and what's image. It led to a lot of extra work - run it again, check it again, multiple passes, a lot of hand work at the end.

And on each of these movies, George would look at a scene and ask us to sharpen something a little - almost scene by scene. We can do that beautifully without putting edges on things. It's very different working with the director who created the movie you're restoring. It gives us a whole new sense of the creative objectives and exactly what path to take - how much sharpness, how much grain to leave. All decided by George.