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" You put 9 minutes of footage back into the movie. What new things can fans expect to see? It&amp;#039;s all the stuff that I hated to take out when we were cutting Avatar for overall run time. When we were doing this, we didn&amp;#039;t know how long an audience could sit in a seat with 3D glasses on their faces there was no data for a movie over two hours. I think the next longest film was maybe 100 minutes; Avatar was 161 minutes. So we were way out into frontier land and, you know, there was a possibility that peoples&amp;#039; eyeballs might have melted at the two-hour mark. We had no idea. So, my instinct was just to be efficient in the story telling. We wound up taking out like 45 minutes out of the film. And of that, you know, some of it we felt righteous about and some of it we really liked. As a scene in and of itself it was really cool and so we didn&amp;#039;t like taking it out, but the overall flow of the picture improved.   So an example of that is this big sturmbeest hunt sequence. The sturmbeest got cut completely out of the movie. In the scene, Jake and Neytiri and the Na&amp;#039;vi hunt them on the back of banshees and using Dire Horses. It&amp;#039;s a big action scene. And there&amp;#039;s a little bit of the love scene. There&amp;#039;s a little bit of running around in the bio-luminescent forest at night. There&amp;#039;s a scene with another creature called the Sting Bat. There&amp;#039;s a little bit more of the battle. There&amp;#039;s a big emotional scene towards the end of the film that everybody hated to take out in fact, I got a lot of flack for it and we all really love the way that scene looks and plays. So I think you&amp;#039;re going to see that this is all like platinum standard stuff that&amp;#039;s equal to the best of the rest of the movie. Otherwise I didn&amp;#039;t put it back. We have stuff that&amp;#039;s kind of a B-plus that fans would have been interested in, but, I&amp;#039;m putting that in the box set. You&amp;#039;ll get access to it, but it doesn&amp;#039;t go into the flow of the film for the theatrical rerelease.  How finished were those clips when you decided to take them out? So in other words, I guess, how much work did you have to do to get them ready? Millions of dollars. Which sounds like they weren&amp;#039;t very finished, but we had a unique process we used on the film. We captured the performance and then we finished the scene internally, which meant that it was a frame accurate cut with finished virtual cameras that actually were the final camera moves, pixel accurate. But then we gave it to [New Zealand-based visual effects house] Weta Digital and they would replace every single asset with a high resolution asset and render it. And that could go from a 30th of a second to 30 hours per frame. That&amp;#039;s where the photo-reality comes from. So we worked in a non-photo-real kind of video game proxy level, which we called the template. So the scenes were finished in template form the final cut, right to the frame and that&amp;#039;s when they were taken out of the movie. Because if there was any doubt about a scene we tried to take it out before the scene went to Weta. So I had to go back to the studio and ask them for I don&amp;#039;t want to say specifically X million dollars to finish these scenes, and then, of course, we had to work on them for several months. Normally in that process it would take Weta nine months from the time we shipped them a scene in template form to the time they delivered it back to us finished in photo-real form, but they had gotten so good at everything that we were able to collapse that down to about three and a half months.  That&amp;#039;s still a long time. Well, long is relative. It took us years to figure out how to do this. It took us more than a year from the time they started work on the first scene to when they delivered it to us during the making of the film. Then this stuff they had gotten it down to three months, which felt like nothing to us, and the beauty of it was they were so good by that point that when they&amp;#039;d send us a close up of Ney&amp;#039;tiri or a close up of Jake, it would have all the emotion and they would be completely real-looking pretty much the first time I saw it and we&amp;#039;d just be talking about the lighting. You know, move the key light or something a little bit. Put a little more wind in the hair. You got down to small stuff. So that sort of accounts for the timing of the rerelease.  Has there been any movement on the 3D Blu-ray at all? Have you guys made any decisions about when that might be coming out? We&amp;#039;re not ready to announce the date, but it&amp;#039;s going to be next year. It&amp;#039;s not going to be soon. It&amp;#039;s really just because we&amp;#039;re waiting for people to buy the sets and the players. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a6099/james-cameron-spills-details-on-extra-avatar-footage-1960498/>