All Star Wars episodes to be re-released in 3D

It is official! Lucasfilm Ltd. announced this week that all Star Wars movies will be converted from traditional 2D in 3D. As we have previously mentioned, it is pretty costly to turn a 2D movie into a 3D – theatrically-wise, TriDef technology (the one used in laptops to transform 2D images in 3D) does not really cut it; instead, the director overlooks each image on the 2D format to be transferred into 3D.

Depending on what is going on in the image itself and how deep the 3D actually gets, costs for converting 2D to 3D are around $50,000 to $100,000 per minute. This will net an estimated 7 to 14 million dollars just to make the whole of Episode 1 into 3D.

All 6 Star Wars episodes will be converted, starting with Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace to be released in 2012. The bright side is, we’ll finally be able to watch the whole series start to finish in chronological order.

Imagine a 3D Darth Vader!