Oh, you absolute beauty! I had the impression you weren’t going to produce a third batch, but that’s fantastic news! They all look lovely, especially the richer colours you’ve been drawing out.
One thing I noticed while watching your edits which might be challenging for my own, was that in some places where you’ve joined two episodes together you’ve introduced a little overlap, in order to keep the transition smooth. Obviously that’s eminently sensible since you’re aiming to present the arcs as complete units, but it does mean that the odd shot or two that sits around the transition point may not be used in your cuts, and therefore may not have been upscaled? I may find that the ideal case would be to include one such cut shot, in which case I assume I’d have to rely back on the original Bluray rip version rather than your upscaled/recoloured version - unless you are doing your upscaling/recolouring in advance before cutting episodes together and could make those edits available?
One other question: Have you made any changes to the sound mix? Clone Wars is relatively easy to edit in its original form because its voice/SFX and music are in different channels, so you get a lot more flexibility with cuts. Have you passed through the audio unchanged?
Either way, I’m hugely in your debt, so thank you for this! It was your edits which sparked the original idea for this project, so without yours, this wouldn’t exist.
In almost every single episode I try to ensure every new shot is used, with a few rare exceptions…
Off the top of my head…
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The number of shots I don’t upscale in the opening of each episode is extremely small. A few shots were cut from the opening of Season 1 Ep 16 and Season 2 Ep 16 since they both were prequels to the film and I had to get creative to make the film’s new longer “opening” seem more coherent. I rearranged the order of these shots to make it work, but kept most of them. Senate Murders is missing one or two shots of Padme’s crew in the opening since it would be redundant, but I used the rest (like the shot of Senator Burtoni showing clone Phase II armor). A few shots are missing from the intro of the 3rd Umbara episode, if I recall, and Landing at Point Rain I had to cut new shots of Mace and Kenobi talking since I couldn’t find appropriate voice clips to fill them with. Beyond that, I can’t recall any other bits with missing footage. If I had to guess, the entirely of shots I have cut from 90+ episodes of content so far comes down to less than 30 seconds of footage.
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I use music and SFX to replace the narrator whenever possible in order to extend and preserve these extra scenes. (my favorite trick is pulling from the KOTOR I and II OST, though I use the show’s own OST a few times.
Here’s a sample of how I’m doing it in the upcoming ROTS v3 edit. Every new scene from the opening is preserved, I just update the audio to flow better as the introduction to a “Saga film”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1B-yAzEm58&feature=youtu.be
And here’s a sample clip from the Maul Film where I merged the end of Season 4 with the start of Season 5 and reconstructed entirely new sound to make it work (the lightsaber fights of Savage and Maul killing Jedi were redone from scratch):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmxBk5zTGfk
I do not have unaltered upscaled episodes, as the 4K HDR rendering is done with the edits timelines are already in place, so many episodes will now have Lucas/style wipes in their transitions. Of course, these affect only a few frames of the show each, but a few frames may get cut in some cases to make this work.
I hope that answers some of your questions and gives you a better idea about my process. My intent is to preserve/recut the show as reasonably intact as possible, and I have largely succeeded so far (less than 0.01% of the show is “missing” from these edits). And of course, I don’t yet know the challenges for editing the remaining 2 parters, but I suspect they will be easy as 99% of the time, sequel episode recycle clips from the previous episode through most of the narrator’s introductions. Of course, the first episode of each arc is 100% intact.
Also beware that these edits are encoded in x265 for the most efficient and highest quality compression, and since it’s the standard for 4K HDR streaming, which they look fantastic with and still remain reasonable in size (for 4K files), but they can also be hell to work with in some editing programs depending on the quality of your rendering/editing machine.