Changelog sounds great. Are you also making the common changes made by the current leading edits (Hal’s, L8WRTR’s, etc)? Do you have plans for an alternate opening crawl?
C-3PO’s removal from 1 & 2 is understandable - are you likely to make any other similar deviations from canon? I’m asking here more in the sense of other media which reference events of those movies, whose references might not make sense now. Coming at this from a Clone Wars angle (naturally), C-3PO appears in that as a previously known character, for example.
Speaking of C-3PO (but irrespective of my last paragraph), his inclusion in TPM does introduce a nice connection - if you cut the lines where one of Padmé’s aides (posing as Padmé) assigns Padmé (posing as an aide) to clean up R2-D2, it’s implied that she’s essentially assigned herself that task. And if Padmé’s just naturally interested in working with droids (or at least working with her hands) it makes sense that she’d be impressed that young Anakin has made his own droid - something that might add a nice first step in their relationship.
I always found the world shrinking to be much less noticeable/offensive when the movies are watched in chronological order, but I understand the objection, and the priority to keep these movies tight and ask fewer questions, which may override that.
I think that’s the only thing that could be considered a canon deviation, other than like Yoda not fighting Dooku and minor stuff like that. If people end up caring enough about this to have a “Canon version” I would consider doing that and keeping 3PO, but so far I can’t really gauge what the interest level is.
I’ll be honest, editing through these right now is the first time I’ve watched the theatrical versions in a while, so I likely am doing a lot of HAL’s cuts just naturally, but I didn’t watch any edits to prepare for this one as I wanted to go at it with the freshest eyes possible.
No changes to the opening crawls or titles of the films are planned right now.