shanerjedi said:

Another great thing about your edit is that it also turns the jedi into detectives who suspect something is up and they're going to Kamino to find out about it.

By moving up the emergency powers act, you've also kept the momentum going because the assassination attempts just happened. In the existing film, they were presented so late and so far after the assassination attempts it just seemed to languish.

Are Padme and Anakin already gone to Naboo in your edit brash?

Yeah. Immediately after Anakin and Padme take off for Naboo, we get the tweaked senate scene and then the scene of the two of them aboard the ship on its way to Naboo.

TheTome said:

Sounds good. I'm using a mac with Final Cut, but most of the concepts are the same. My personal advice would be to get a rough cut of the movie made so you can test pacing, plausibility, etc. then, once you have that, work with sfx problems you know can be solved (ie. seen it done before) and find out how they were done. You may learn enough from that to figure out what can be done in later scenes. Basically, the more focused you are on a single problem, the more likely you are to get the exact help you need.

Well the rough cut is already done. I just need to add wipes and such (and I don't yet know how to do so with the same feathered edge as seen in the rest of the movie) then there's the sound to sort out, and I wouldn't know where to begin with creating a 5.1 mix. I've only worked with the centre audio channel so far (I'd assumed it would be easy to duplicate the cuts for the different channels down the line).

After that, it's all After Effects for the crawl, compositing, deleting, recolouring. Again I'm a bit lost with how to do any of this. If anyone can point me to some useful tutorials, that'd be great.