Some news after many weeks …

Since ChewieLewis’ project (https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Phantom-Menace-99-HD-Theatrical-Version-by-Chewielewis/id/60924) started on the same basis as mine, and since ChewieLewis told me that he wanted to deliver his project as soon as possible in 2018 (and thus, it wouldn’t be possible to collaborate because my work speed was much more slow than his), it seemed constructive to me, for the benefit of all, to restart/reload my own project on a new different base, even closer to the “Despecialized” approach: rebuilding TPM in HD by taking Blu-Ray as the main source (instead of merging HDTV and STDV sources).

As a result, the OT community will benefit from two different approaches:

a reconstruction from HTDV and SDTV sources (ChewieLewis’ project)
a despecialization from Blu-Ray (my project).

The process is obviously more complicated, but is well advanced:

rebuilding every altered scene (mainly via rotoscoping + the modeling technique I developed for the previous project) - almost done
color grading and cropping on a scene by scene basis - to be done

I have also been able to find other major sources (ie captures from the first DLP version of Texas Instruments in 1999, or negative scans with original cinematographic subtitles).

I’ll try to deliver the final result for the 20th anniversary of TPM (19th May 2019)

NB: I sincerely regret that ChewieLewis insisted so much on finishing the project in 2018 - which was the main reason for our lack of collaboration (since I was not able to work so fast)… finally, his project was not delivered as fast as he said in 2018, so we could have collaborate.
That’s life… 😃

Some comparaisons :
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/029MNNNU
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/WP7PNNNX
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/029CNNNU