>Can't wait to see this, but I'd rather not watch another work in progress.
Good question, Dr. M ... don't consider it a work in progress. This is mainly a release of the Star Wars deconstruction, which is done ... for now.
The Empire and Jedi sections are very short and lacking, and I still want to do a traditional, narrated documentary on some of the major deleted scenes ...
So we'll see about that when Deleted Magic Strikes Back.
As far as the first Star Wars goes, I have noticed that whenever I post new parts of Deleted Magic, people are really quick to come up with things I've missed, corrections, new ideas for things and new bits of footage I never knew existed.
I'm putting this version out as done ... but I'm sure within a couple months I'll have a million corrections or additions I could make. I actually have a few dozen ideas that didn't make it into this cut. =) And better quality media I could use for certain scenes.
You probably won't be waiting 20 years for Deleted Magic: Special Edition ...
But that said, pick up the Deleted Magic DVD. If you don't, you'll be sorry. =)
It's not a work in progress, it's a proper release of a finished film ... with the option for sequelling and tweaking in the future, a la George.
Email me at [removed] for a proper copy.
As far as the subtitles not being on the screen long enough, that's the nature of the beast, I'm afraid ... I've done my best, but sometimes the scenes themselves are too short to let the titles be up extra long. Myself, I'm a fast reader, but if it's too fast, that's what the pause button is for.
TBone was a big help with this project, his Cutscenes site was the major inspiration for this, and he's hosting the official site at starwarz.com/deletedmagic.
I printed off the first "test" version of the DVD last night. It looked good and played well ... I had made a few small mistakes which I went back and fixed ... and I changed some subtitles to be on longer. =)
My main surprise was that it was suddenly hard to get true blacks ... I've noticed this problem with a lot of fan DVDs, but I'm not sure what causes it .... suddenly the blacks get brightened up a bit ... It was mainly noticeable for me in the black widescreen bars above the image. If and when I do a "Special Edition," redoing all the widescreen bars myself is going to be job #1.
Due to this change in black level, the opening crawl no longer looked right ... it exposed a few seams in the image showing how I put it together!
So, I went back and redid the crawl, with a new starfield background keyed in, and it looks a hundred times better now.
And, just for the hell of it, I redid the 1977 crawl as well, which is on there as a special feature. Originally taken from the monomix DVD and looking awful, I keyed in a new background, changed all the color levels and reworked it generally ... and it looks lovely now, right out of Empire of Dreams. It, like the opening crawl for Deleted Magic, now features Shadowman's brilliant reconstruction of the opening shot .. he restored the shot to the way it looked before the 2004 DVD ... Amazing to see.
Also, just for fun, I've added in a special section in the "Lapti Nek Extended Music Video" section, a short "Making of Lapti Nek" feature. Very short because I was running out of disc space (mostly done using alternate audio and seamless branching rather than new video), but you will hear the english language version of Lapti Nek, and two different Huttese versions .... plus get some clips from both Classic Creatures and Star Wars to Jedi.
Dig it!