Those who know me at all know that I have always been obsessed by cut scenes from Star Wars in particular, and particularly the Tosche Station scenes. It's what starwarscutscenes.com was based on when I created the original site nearly 10 years ago. So this particular project is very close to my heart.
As you might imagine, I've seen the cut scenes now countless numbers of times. Even before Behind The Magic came out (which of course I bought the instant it was available), I had seen the scenes already from a bootleg camcorder clip I picked up on Usenet, shot at Comic Con '97 during the one time that footage was ever shown in public. But this time, while watching MoveAlong's DVD, I felt like I was watching the scenes for the first time. Because it was the first time I had ever seen them fill a widescreen TV. It was the first time I had ever seen them play so smoothly. And it was the first time I had ever seen them properly cropped with no annoying extra black space on the edges. It was fantastic. I viewed them all in sequence with a smile on my face the whole time.
I can truly appreciate the effort that MoveAlong put into making this look so good, because I tried myself for years to do something like this. But I never managed to pull it off completely, due to either lack of expertise or lack of technology. I never found a way to pull the material directly out of the files on the CDs. The best I managed to get were some decent video captures with a certain amount of quality loss. Playing the original CD-ROM was okay, but it always required installation, configuration, a computer to play it on, and I had to deal with playback being a little choppy and no real ability to move forward or backward through the material. Also, the Lost Cut cantina footage had Special Edition footage playing along with it for comparison, and while it was interesting the first time, it was annoying every time afterwards. With MoveAlong's preservation, I can finally watch all these scenes in their BEST presentation yet on any DVD player in full anamophic widescreen without any kind of messing around. I can show it to friends and family on their own TVs. It's exactly what I was hoping for.
If that weren't enough, the entire content of the Behind The Magic CD-ROMs is included in the extras folder. I spent literally hours and hours going through those discs in the past, trying to find all of the photos I wanted and painstakingly screen capture them. Now it's as easy as browsing through the jpeg files. I will never give up my original BTM discs, but I'm extremely happy to have an easier way to get right to the meat of the content without wondering if I missed anything.
Maybe Lucasfilm will release these Lost Scenes in perfect quality down the road. Maybe they'll make this project moot soon. We can only hope for that. But in the meantime, MoveAlong is the hero of the day once again.
--SKot