Darth Editous completed his monster edition of Ep IV right about the time I did mine, and I quickly realized how much more I preferred his edition; yet, I was still a fan of a few things in my edition. So I decided to create a hybrid of the two, so that I could have my own definitive edition that I’d want to watch every time. Using his video as a base, I re-inserted six sequences from my edit; namely the extended sandtrooper scene from the SE (I especially liked the music behind this scene) the Greedo scene (Greedo doesn’t shoot in either edit, but it’s handled a bit differently) the Jabba scene (which will immediately prejudice most of you against this version, I admit) the head bonking scene, the Biggs scene, and lastly the post-credits scene I concocted. Otherwise, it’s all Darth Editous’ work, which was just too painstakingly detailed to mess with.
Then, for the audio, I re-synched my custom 2005 mix throughout (that straightens out the tie sounds, and then plugged DE’s audio back in, keeping several of DE’s corrections. Especially the scenes where he fixed particularly bad audio with Owen, with Ben, and with Tarkin / Alderaan’s destruction. This created a “best of breed” that took advantages of different corrections we both made to the audio. It should absolve any issues noted in the Alderaan / Hyperspace scenes where the subwoofer was overdriven by lopping my edit out at those points … 'cept on the Heresy Mix, which really doesn’t matter anyway.
I should note that the audio did not need to be recompressed again from our respective mixes. Because they were both generated at 448kbps, Womble let me stitch the regions together without recompression. To my ear, they blended quite seamlessly without the need to rip them apart, crossfade them, and then re-compress them back into AC3. Thank Womble for small wonders.
As it stood, the Hybrid Edition was only about 4% larger than the length of a SL disc, so I created two versions. A SL version that is compressed only 4% from the source, and a DL version that includes the Heresy Mix, resynched. Now that I think about it, I should probably put the 1997 mix in the DL version as well. But I’m leaving the 2004 mixes off entirely, even though space permits. They’re just not worth the time.
Anyway, first and formost, the thanks goes primarily to Darth Editous, not only for making the basis of this project but also being cool enough to agree for me to let it escape my private collection. I remain appreciative for all of his help on the prequel and ANH re-edits and wanted to acknowledge him publicly once again.
This thread is separate from our respective threads to cut down on confusion, and I’ll try my best to keep feedback on this particular version directed into this thread to keep the distinction from becoming muddy over time.