Hey there fellow LOST fans!

There is now a new post for the finished project! Current details and information on how to access are there! 😄 Check it out: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Causalogically-LOST-A-new-unique-chronological-re-edit-of-LOST/id/113262

I have just completed editing together an all new version of LOST in chronological order, in full Blu-Ray video quality. My original inspiration was “Chronologically Lost”, which I believe was the first attempt at putting this complicated show in time order, which was a whole new way to watch my absolute favorite show of all time. I loved that someone put all that effort into it, and it was super fun to watch. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

However, there were things about it that bugged me, mainly that the source quality was poor (which was no fault of the editor, there wasn’t a lot of options back then - and it’s recently been updated to HD by another awesome Lost fan on this forum). But it was more than that. Though it made sense that the idea was to put every scene in it’s technically correct place in the timeline, there were many parts of the show that no longer worked as a cohesive story because of this. As an example (not specific), if a character time-travels from 2004 to 1956, rather than following their journey as they experience it, the 1956 scenes were moved to early on in the show, during the 1956 section, which is jarring and nonsensical story wise. And since there are many time jumps like this, there are many confusing scenes early on because they are completely out of context. And then much later there are giant gaps in the characters stories because they were moved way back to the literal point in time. Hopefully that made sense 😃

So, my new version was completely made from scratch, and I did my very best to make it a cohesive story while also making it chronological. It is edited in the chronology of the characters, rather than being strict/literal with the timeline. This means all instances (and varieties) of time-travel are experienced along with the character(s), since that is what they were experiencing in their present. This includes Desmond’s experiences, since they are happening to him in his present as well. It’s been clear to me over the years that many people would prefer seeing it this way, and as far as I know, it is not available currently.

I wanted this edit to be more than just rearranging scenes for fun. I wanted to make it it’s own (as close to professional as possible) experience. So, I did my best to take out all commercial break pauses, flashback noises, opening LOST graphics, continuity problems (there were more than I thought there would be), and to change the context of certain scenes to feel more natural when watching it this way. I scoured the episodes repeatedly to achieve all this (in addition to already having watched the entire series dozens of times). The episodes are continuous scenes, with no pauses or breaks, edited together to feel like it was meant to be this way. Watching Lost in this manner is such a different experience, it made sense to me to go all in and make it special. That said, I did my best to not mess with it too much, only enough to make this version of it work best. There’s only so much you can do with an already finished show (oh how great it would be to have some raw footage!), but I did my best.

There are 80 episodes total. I steered towards roughly an hour per episode, though it varies. I let the story (and timeline) dictate this more than anything. I’m leaving in one batch, rather than trying to separate it into seasons, or anything like that. While there are logical places to do this here and there, overall it didn’t feel right. It is one big story after all.

I added in all the Missing Pieces, “The New Man In Charge”, and the season 4 deleted scenes. I REALLY wanted to put in the delete scenes for the entire series, but unfortunately all the rest of them are such low quality it just takes you out of the show, so I took those out. It made it worse, trust me, or I would’ve kept them in. I always wonder why they only made the deleted scenes 1080p for season 4 and nothing else. Weird. But, if they ever do a 4K set of LOST (oh please oh please!) maybe the deleted scenes will get an upgrade, and then my edit will as well. I will gladly go back in and make the whole edit 4K if that day comes 😃.

There is no split screen used at all, as they did with “Chronologically Lost”. I wanted every scene to flow naturally, like there were never a bunch of separate scenes from different perspectives of a single moment. Instead, all the parts were edited with extreme detail to combine into a single flowing scene. Those scenes are some of my proudest moments, and I think they work amazingly well this way.

It was edited in Premiere Pro, using the untouched Blu-Ray video files, and exported in the same exact quality to maintain the best possible picture. This means it’s huge (884GB) but having the best possible video quality was very important to me. It has 5.1 AAC VBR audio at 640-800bps. Adobe doesn’t like DTS audio or I would’ve maintained the DTS-HD audio tracks from the Blu-Rays as well. However, the audio sounds great to my ears so I’m happy with the outcome.

As of now it is not available anywhere to share. I would love nothing more than to let my fellow LOST lovers watch and enjoy this, and have not set anything up yet because I want to make sure it’s safe for me (and you) to do so. I’m also debating adding optional subtitles that display the current time/date of whatever scene, in case anyone watching was confused at all in that regard. It would mostly be for the flashbacks, since some of those episodes traverse a number of years. Anyway, if it’s going to happen I want it done right. What that means, I don’t know yet. I guess I’ll find out how interested others are in seeing my version of this based on this post, and proceed from there. It would please me greatly for you all to see it, so I’m hoping it can work somehow. I do not have an official name for this edit yet, but I’m open to suggestions!

My brain has been busting at the seams with this whole project, and there’s probably a bunch more details I haven’t mentioned here, but this post is already really long. I’ll edit it, and/or answer questions within the forum, with any and all information if it’s asked for/thought of. But I want to share my excitement with fellow fans!

Please let me know your thoughts about any of this! I love LOST deeply and know there’s many others out there just like me. Say hello! And thanks for reading my overly long post!

Edit: I should mention that this will only be watchable for those that speak (or at least understand) English. The English subtitles for all other languages spoken in the show are burned-in, but there won’t be any subtitles available otherwise. I doubt that will be a problem, but who knows. At the moment I have no plans of adding any additional subtitles because it would be insanely difficult to implement.