Wazzles said:

What exactly is this? An early reconstruction of the '77 crawl and audio?

As far as I can remember/tell it’s NOT a reconstruction - but more a merging of the content from a VHS bootleg handcam recording from a time before ‘A New Hope’ or ‘Episode 4’ was added to Star Wars - edited together with a laserdisc version of the film (for quality) and put onto dvd by MagnoliaFan.

(back then we were all watchers of the various laserdisc versions from PAL/NTSC/Jap regions, and varying quality of laserdisc players being put onto dvds - by the likes of Dr Gonzo, TR47, Cowclops, Isomix, Moth3r, Editdroid, Editous, Citizen, Grinder etc).

Hopefully someone else remembers better than I do - though it may be worth contacting MagnoliaFan himself to see if he can remember! 😃

actually (from 7-Jul-2004 - http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-The-Edits-and-DVDr-releases-thread/id/801/page/3)…

MagnoliaFan said:

The audio mix comes straight from the bootleg vhs.
The video has been replaced shot for shot with the lbx laserdisc and the alternate crawl was recreated in After Effects. Also Greedo’s subtitles were recreated as a subtitle track. It’s similar to how the dvd remastered Phantom Re-Edit was done.

For that, the audio was from vhs, the video was a dvd rip, and the subtitles were transcribed as a seperate sub track.
In that case, though, two shots had to be replaced, as no dvd source existed for them, but a before and after vhs to dvd comparison was left to show how minimal the changes were.