I've also been taking inventory of just what some of these things I want to do will entail. The deleted scene version is pretty straight forward. DVD quality, stereo sound, minor edits. The cleanup will be challenging and time consuming. But my edit will be harder. 720p, 5.1 surround, color correcting the different versions to match, matching grain or lack thereof, fixing some of the sources that come from PAL back to 24fps. That is going to be quite a task for ANH. TESB shouldn't be too bad, but ROTJ has a lot of issues to solve.

For instance, I want all 6 films to have the exact same opening. The starfield should be unique to each film, but the Star Wars fade out should be identical. I'm pretty sure the PT match, but ANH doesn't and I don't think TESB or ROTJ do either. So what I think I'm going to do to practice and to work on the color corrections is to recreate the 2004 DVD and the 97 SE versions using the BluRay and Harmy's despecialized. In the process of watching the different versions I have come to the conclusion that the rock in front of R2 in ANH Bluray is the single worst thing George did. It is the poster child for needless tinkering and it makes no sense. So my first task is to work on creating the 5.1 audio for the Bluray versions and edit out that damned rock. 7.1 is great unless you have older equipment so to start with I want a version that has 5.1 audio that I can enjoy listening to, even as I cringe at certain SE scenes.

The biggest challenges for this are first, color correcting the bluray version (it needs to be de-Lowryed) and second, matching the rock scenes with Harmy's to replace that.

I know that most people refer to the holy grail technicolor prints for color correcting ANH, but I have a different plan. I have 6 movies that share some characters. R2 is in all 6. C3PO, in his golden covering, is in 4, Yoda is in 5. The PT share a similar cast and the OT share a similar cast so skin tones should carry across where the same actors appear. Light sabers also appear, with Kenobi and Skywalker's sabers crossing from one trilogy to the next (and now Skywalker's in the ST). The cores should look like a light source, not like a white rod. I want to watch all six and not constantly be thinking that C-3PO looks orange or Solo looks sunburnt in ANH and that the light sabers look washed out. I also don't want to see those garbage matts again, so that means a unique color correction philosophy. I'm mostly doing this for myself.