I recently began to wonder, though, how well it would work to de-saturate the colors on some obviously CG scenes to make them look more realistic (like the Jedi Council room and the Droid Factory). It makes an amazing difference. It looks like you're actually in a real room- the bright, phony looking colors are muted and realistic. I am so pleased with how this simple adjustment improved these scenes that I am probably going to use it a lot in the time to come.
Another change, pertaining to the moment when Boba Fett says: "Get him. Fire!" If there was ever a moment when dramatic music was needed, that was it. So what I've done is taken a dramatic cue from "The Wrath of Khan" and started it when Slave I races towards camera, firing. And it was an amazing feeling to watch it. It felt like Star Wars again! (ironically enough, by using a musical clip from Star Trek). I've done it so that the brass hit two dramatic chords as the ship races towards camera, and it's synchronized so that the following orchestral crash coincides with the cut to Obi-Wan's cockpit. It works beautifully, and is really an amazing moment.
Why don't you just make a white "muzzle flash" picture in photoshop with a blue background, then chroma key it until you get a nice feathered effect, and put the opacity right down. Make this 6 frames long, and key frame the opacity and the shape to go up then down as the shot progresses. Then just put that over all the blaster nozzles. You can adjust the opacity depending on your view. also, you might want to make it more yellow.
Good advice! Thank you very much; I think I'll do that.
Technical stuff: The finished film will not contain 5.1 surround sound. I simply don't feel as though I can do a very good job on it, considering the new character voices and the amount of stereo-only material I'm putting in. So it will be PCM stereo, and I will actually probably use the audio from the pan-scan VHS (filtered) for the base, because not only is it uncompressed, it's Pro-Logic encoded. So the final mix might actually wind up with 4 matrixed channels; I don't know.