Back in town after a much needed vacation. I may be on here less in the coming weeks, but I'll not be absent for sure. I'm going to try to pick up where I left off on ROTJ this week, with what has now become my "reduced SE" project. Not de-SEing the whole DVD, but trying to fix the major things that stuck in my craw. Two are down. One is half way done. To recap what I've done, and what I'm trying to accomplish:

1) I've managed to get Shaw reinserted based on the previous post from the PAL LD (Grisan's post, I believe?). Using only the three Shaw shots edited in-between the surrounding DVD footage, I've gotten a seamless scene recreated in NTSC. Had to convert the PAL to NTSC first, and then using Womble's MPEG Video Wizard, I made all of the cuts in the video and reassembled.

2) A few people have seen my pet project in the SE, which was to re-order and re-edit the "Jedi Rocks" shots over top of Lapti Nek. Since the original film version of Lapti Nek is only available in the film, this was a radically different approach than restoring the SE. The result was getting rid of most of Joh Yowza, not to mention that stupid, stupid, stupid song. It works pretty well if not perfectly, and it quite enjoyable. Interesting trivia: This new sequence takes up exactly the same number of frames as the original DVD. I simply replaced the soundtrack, re-edited the video to match, dropped in some Jabba dialogue to match his taunts to Oola, and it's done.

3) I've gotten the "Wesa Free" line out of the ending of the stereo track by crossfading with the French 2.0 track during the final scenes of the movie (after the dialogue is complete). I have not gotten the 5.1 remixed though, as I'm having a bear of a time editing 5.1 audio. If anybody has a 5.1 track in a non-english language (German for instance) PM me. It may help. I'm unsure if they made a 5.1 mix in any language other than English, but I'm hoping.

As for ANH, so far I've:
1) Deleted the shot where blaster fire is exchanged. Greedo does not shoot.

2) Restored the title card recession using the Spanish angle, and did a video fade into the crawl to help mask the difference in start times. Until I learn how to do masks, this will suffice. It's not exactly as it should be, but it's still better than what we were given officially.

3) Whenever I get a hold of Combustion, I'll start to recolorize Lukes infamous green saber that I can't stop railing on. The demo for Combustion was promising, but the big red X won't fly in actual output.

4) I even came up with an alternate set of subtitles for Jabba. His dialogue is much less redundant to Greedo's now. Knowing this puts me in the minority, I always liked the scene, but now I think it plays much better. Both the original subtitles and my re-edit will be muxed on to my final disc.