Kind of.

So who's playing the role of Aamir!!!C'mon mhafner man!!Why the delay?

To give you the best product possible given the current transfer...

After all this time invested in creating this product, how many copies are you hoping to sell? Also, any ideas what the retail price is going to be for the BD?

I don't think there is any more restoration work going on or left for Dil Chahta Hai. As far as I know, the digital transfer of the movie was finished in 2008.

Some information. When a HD transfer is made from film elements the following steps have to be done for
a superior product:
- find best film elements
- scan on good equipment
- do digital color grading of the whole film
- do digital manual clean up and remove all dust, dirt, speckles, stains, hairs, scratches, tears... (some can be done automatically but quality will suffer, only manual work delivers best results)
- deal with nasty special problems like camera flicker and adhesive tape soiled, instable and warped edits (remember all the white flashes at image borders at cuts on so many Bollywood DVDs?) and sometimes, no kidding, undoing bad restoration work done before by 'other parties'. Fixing some of the issues is at the border of what is currently feasible technology wise (e.g. working with experimental software...).

Films like DCH have between 1000 and 2000 edits, most are in need of work, and over 250000 frames, each of which is manually inspected and cleaned...

So why do the latest films not take long to reach Blu Ray? And look usually good to excellent? Because they were made with DI technology right from the start. The color grading and clean up is done as part of the production process from brand new negative. Once the DI is done making the Blu Ray is pretty much a piece of cake. Almost auto pilot like.

I was under the impression, based on a statement by Farhan Akhtar in 2008, that they had then just finished doing, presumably, what is stated above. Obviously my understanding of what he stated was incorrect, or quite simply you guys are involved in a totally seperate project from what Farhan was referring to. Also, it seems you guys are taking far more pains to deliver a top notch product, than the 'digitization' project, that Farhan Akhtar was referring to. Which too would be so in keeping with the Bollywood tradition.

It's the same transfer. What is different are the quality goals for the finished product.

4 years to transfer a 21st century Hindi film to Blu-Ray??!! What gives dude??
You could have written a sequel to "War and Peace" in this time

The actual work is not 4 years. In between are large breaks for various reasons. In the end the actual work is probably a year. And it's meaningless anyway since the time depends on how many people work in parallel. If you have 20 people cleaning, it takes 20 times less than one person (on average). Restoring whole films digitally takes several months to years, depending on what needs to be done, what is available technologically, and how many people work on it.

so...any time frame? 2 months...4 months...6 months...whatever it is.

May be 2012

Second half 2010.

clever answer! you have almost secured 10 months...