ImperialFighter sent me the TFA edit by “Noodle_Finger,” and I gave it a look to see how it handled moving the destruction of the Republic capital to late in the film. For those interested, I’ve typed up the relevant descriptions.
During the first scene with Snoke, following the scene where we meet up with Han and Chewie, he removed Hux altogether. The scene begins with, “There has been an awakening,” and goes on from there. (I’d recommend having the line, “There has been an awakening” read over the establishing shot of SKB, then cut to the interior from there.) The editor removed mention of Han Solo being Kylo Ren’s father, but that’s outside the scope of the SKB third act.
He moved the Hux speech scene to later, so the viewer follows Rey running from Maz’s castle through to when she finds BB8 and sees the First Order coming overhead.
Once we get to the next Snoke scene following Rey’s failed interrogation, he used the bits with Hux that he removed from the earlier scene. The scene now reads like this, with bits from the earlier scene in brackets:
Paraphrased
Snoke: The scavenger resisted you?
Ren: She is strong with the Force. Untrained, but stronger than she knows.
Snoke: And the droid?
Hux: Ren believed it was no longer valuable to us, that the girl was all we need. As a result, the droid has most likely been returned to the hand of the enemy.
[Snoke: The strategy must now change.]
[Hux: The weapon is ready. I believe now is the time to use it… to destroy the Republic. They’ll never reach Skywalker.]
Ren: I can get the Map, I just need your guidance.
Snoke: Prepare the weapon… If what you say about this girl is true, bring her to me.
This would require one brief FX shot to cut Red out of a Snoke-POV shot of Hux and Ren-without-mask shot to replace his masked figure from a shot used from the earlier scene. The editor did it and it looks fine. I wouldn’t think it’d be terribly difficult for someone to recreate.
After Ren’s tantrum upon finding Rey’s chair empty, he pasted in the Hux speech. It goes directly into the Sun being sucked in, which was here at this point in the movie anyway.
Duing Resistance briefing scene, he removed Leia saying that they are the next target.
Once Han gets stabbed, he goes directly from closeup of Ren looking contemplative, to the weapon being fired. Once the planets are destroyed, cut to Leia having her “just a headache” moment, then cut to Chewie reacting.
He also had to remove the cutaway about the weapon firing in two minutes, right before Rey and Finn encounter Ren in the woods.
I’m not gung-ho about fan editing TFA, but I would really like to see the SKB restructuring be pulled off as well as possible, because I believe it would have made the story better if it had been done this way from the start.