I really respect your dedication. I am looking forward to your finished project, but I just want to offer up some constructive thoughts. I totally follow your logic, and see your vision especially around 1:22 of the clip, but you are doing drastic editing on already completed and compressed footage, so the dynamic range will be unforgiving. That is to say, the brightened fire doesn’t look “filmic” overexposed like it sounds like you were going for, its digitally totally blown out, the tie fighter shadows are lifted from an already crushed state, so now they are distorted, and the general scene blacks/shadows are quite crushed now. From a “realistic” camera perspective, if the scene was exposed for such jet black shadows in the new regrade, then the fire would look like the 1.0 grade, because the scene is already very underexposed. If the shadows were left intact, then mayyybe the fire would be blown a bit, but it would have to come from the capture itself, its difficult to fake that kind of natural looking film overexposure with fire.

Honestly the original scene never quite looked right in the first place, so whoever did the original night conversion edit really did the best they could with what they had to work with, and it already looks decent. I think some of the color shifts you made near the end of the clip are nice, but again with the very limited dynamic range, there’s a bit of distortion/banding, which could outweigh the benefit of the adjustments.

Best wishes on your progress!! And don’t let this internet stranger’s comments get in the way of your vision mate, you’re doing an amazing job.