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Notes -
I think it's pretty clear what happened...
Their normal production methods preserved the editing sheets, I can't remember the official term but they keep a map that codes frames in the final cut to individual film negatives.
So they farmed out rescanning the necessary film negatives and gave the sheets, new scans, and orginal hd versions to some shop who had software to automatically match the color timing and spit out a new final episode.
No one putting this process together remembered that Mad Men had occasional digital post processing to remove things like crew members at the edge of some shots.
So it wasn't in the budget and it was no one's responsibility.
The companies they hired underbid and had tight deadlines, so they just figured it wasn't their problem.
There have been worse screw ups than this before. There was a release of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in widescreen where they not only didn't remove crew at the edge of shots, they also forgot to darken the night scenes and tint them blue.
Things like this always happen when upper management tries to split up projects and keep costs down without anyone clearly in control of he final product.
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