Overall I'm happy with it. The transfer looks good - very clean, and brighter than the 2004 DVD. It looks more like the original version. Brightening up the dark areas and taking the saturation down made quite a difference.
There are a few things I will fix, but these are very minor.
Unfortunately, this is the one time in my fan edits where having a dual layer copy will make a difference. I can clearly see compression artifacts from shrinking this edit down to a single layer.
The single layer looks fine, but there is a difference which there hasn't been in the past.
A major problem was frame rate. When ripping the video in MPEG Streamclip, the system was having trouble figuring out the 24fps framerate - it thought it was looking at 30fps video. Although very minor, there were some repeated and dropped frames throughout.
The only place I had a real problem was with the first 15 minutes-ish of the film .... On the official DVD there are alternate angles showing the crawl also in French and Spanish, and this has been the bane of my existence in all these Classic Edition edits, as it makes it impossible to rip the crawl and first shot in English - it's just a mess of three versions combined. (For Empire and Jedi I believe I captured the crawl analog, just watching the DVD).
Although not a problem here as I'm using a different crawl anyway, somehow this managed to confuse MPEG Streamclip completely for the first 15 minutes - I believe it thought that the film was running at 30fps .... quite a bit too fast .... and the video it ripped was a mess filled with constantly dropping-frames.
I wound up ripping the film about 7 times before I got it right ...
Instead of using MPEG Streamclip I just used Quicktime to convert the M2V video to PhotoJPEG. Quicktime understood it as 24 fps video without trouble. I wish I'd done that for the whole film, there'd have been no dropped frames.
It looks fine now.
Anyway, I should be done soon .... I will have to rerender the entire film over the next few days, just to make a couple of tiny changes .....
I did a whole new sound mix for this edit, even though I probably didn't have to, as it's basically identical to the original Classic Edition sound mix.
Party on.