Since this edit has remained quite popular on the various forums but was aging a bit (it was my first fan edit created maybe 8 years ago) I’ve decided to recreate it in higher quality and 5.1 surround sound. Unless told otherwise, I’ll leave the original description above as it’s mostly still accurate. I’m also keeping both a V1 and V2 available. You can read the differences below.
New runtime information:
Total Run Time of 2 hours 59 minutes
Ep 1 @ 5 minutes or 2.7%
Ep 2 @ 56 minutes or 31.3%
Ep 3 @ 1 hour 50 minutes or 61.5%
Custom crawl + credits @ 8 minutes or 4.5%
As I’ve added several scenes back in, I’ve come to believe Senator Amidala is the character to most benefit. At this point I firmly believe that making Sidius (through Darth Maul and Dooku’s assassins) responsible for the attempts on Padme’s life adds an extra layer to her story. While not explicit, to me it implies she could have been the voice of reason in the senate to hold off votes for more executive power. Palpatine needed her out of the way to concentrate his power. While he didn’t succeed in killing her, he did remove her from the political playing field. Even ignoring my exclusion of Episode I, this plays much better than silly Nute Gunray holding a grudge against her (which is a plot point that escaped me for many years).
Differences between V2 and V1:
V1 wasn’t initially created with the intent of widely sharing. It was my first fan edit and only undertaken as a way to learn Avid Media Composer. The source files were compressed from Blu-ray and I chose to work with stereo audio for simplicity. V2 uses full quality Blu-ray files and 5.1 audio. Additionally, I no longer kept the edit to an arbitrary limit of 2.5 hours. Also, as of 2025, I’ve improved as a fan editor in the 8 years between versions 😉
In short, download V2 if you want the best audiovisual quality and storytelling. Download V1 if you simply want the shortest version.