Modified and added shots:
There are many small and bigger modified shots in this edit to fit the goals of the edit, my personal preferences or to fix errors left in the original footage.
I removed the cord that is visible on two shots of the Queen at the window. The shost are also made sharper.
Here Sidious’ face is made more obscured. This was done until his balcony scene with Maul where the light hits his face in a way it’s not possible to cover.
As mentioned before, the Hyper drive- display is changed to more readable, simple one.
I wanted to cut out C-3PO so I had to do some removals in some shots. In second one I had to get rid of Jar Jar as a bonus. 😎 Also I don’t know how R2 was able to stay standing in the original, considering how his legs are.
During the pod race grid sequences, there are many shots in the official bluray (added among the theatrical shots) that are out of focus and don’t look good because of that. I cut the worse ones and improved the better ones. All the alien racer intro shots are modified to look sharper. Some shots are replaced with bryantmh’s upscaled DVD shots which are a little bit zoomed in comparison to bluray version and actually have more detail, especially when I added After Effects’ Unsharp mask- sharpening effect to them. Shots are also color corrected.
Also this extended bit of Anakin with his mother looks better with replaced DVD- shot.
I added two parts of the DVD’s extended race sequence where Sebulba uses fire against his competitors. These were sharpened and color corrected but also the soundtrack had to be built to 5.1 from stereo.
I wanted to add a deleted scene of destroying the probe droid, because it explains them running from Mos Espa. In my edit, the scene of probe droid looking for the protagonists (first image) doesn’t happen before the race, but after Anakin leaves his mother. The deleted scene happens right after this. However the wide shot below of the Qui-Qon and Anakin walking (second image) is not quality wise up to bar with the theatrical similar shots. These deleted scenes can only go so far, despite bryantmh’s excellent upscaling (close up shots work better). So I set out to make a new shot out of elements of footage that I had already cut. It replaces this walking shot. The result is 2 second shot of probe droid closing in on them and I think it turned out pretty good.
The first threeway lightsaber fight in the hangar is extended. There are shots on DVD bonus materials of the lightsaber fight that are not in the theatrical cut. Fortunately Topaz video upscaler turned out to be easy to use. With a couple of upscale passes, sharpening, color correcting, lightsaber effects and some fine tuning, the shots look good enough to add, they are fast paced (after partly speed up) so it hides the slight lower quality quite well. Also the soundtrack is made from scratch, borrowing bits from elsewhere.
Also a lot of small tweaks like changing the ship explosion in the first scene to more orange from pink/purple, adding a hot glow to Maul’s cut saber hilt, and tweaking this tank shot by lowering the contrast of the tanks and adding some noise to blend them better to environment: