Star Wars: Deleted Magic Revisited (2009)
An unofficial, not for profit DVD.
Support the official releases by Lucasfilm ..... especially if they ever
release any of this material in DVD quality.
Deleted scenes. Alternate footage. Editing secrets of the Star Wars
trilogy.
In March 2005, I created a DVD called Deleted Magic and released
it for free, on a non-profit basis, on the internet. It was very
popular. I'm told that Clive Young's book Homemade Hollywood
called it "The best documentary ever made on the making of Star
Wars."
In 2009, I decided to revisit the major deleted scenes of Star Wars
. Most of these scenes had only been released in low quality, 12
frames per second, on CD-ROMs in the late 90s. I used the
program Twixtor to generate new frames and restore these scenes
to 24 frames per second - not a perfect solution during fast
motion, but jaw-droppingly successful during dialogue scenes, and
an improvement that is like night and day. I combined a multitude
of new sources within the same frame to restore the Jabba the Hutt
scene. I animated a shot of Luke and a Treadwell droid, and a shot
of Ben attacking with his lightsaber during the Cantina sequence. I
have restored these scenes to a quality never seen before, and
placed them on this disc for you, edited into the original,
unchanged Deleted Magic feature documentary from 2005. Enjoy.
-Garrett Gilchrist, June 23rd, 2009
With many thanks to:
Mark Johnson
Brad Cook
Peter Lopez
Jambe Davdar (Jabba the Hutt scene)
A note that the special features also appear in slightly better quality
than on the original Deleted Magic ... ripped directly from other fine
fan DVDs. The 1977 crawl does not appear this time round due to
disc space (I had intended to use the version from my own Star
Wars Classic Edition 2.0).
Slightly different menu music this time round.
You might find subtle references to two of my other fan DVD
projects.
The object of Deleted Magic Revisited was to recreate my original
Deleted Magic DVD from 2005, but with new versions of five major
deleted scenes. I had edited these scenes in 16x9 aspect ratio to
preserve their quality. However, the original Deleted Magic was
edited in a 4x3 aspect ratio, due to the many different sources
used in the film, and the onscreen captions.
So, it was impossible to place the new material into the film seamlessly. Instead, there's an ugly jump as to another track as your DVD player switches ratios.
I tried to place these switches in inconspicuous places, reediting
some material from the original Deleted Magic in 16x9 to make the
transitions easier. Not a perfect solution - in fact it shows the
slightly ropey quality of the original Deleted Magic! Murky black
levels etc. The new material looks a bit shinier/better.
I've recreated the functionality of the original Deleted Magic DVD,
not an easy task, as it's a very complex DVD full of subtitles, photo
galleries, many chapters and tracks, "stories", alternate audio,
different versions of things ... I retyped the extra subtitles,
recreated the image galleries, etc.
Enjoy this new version!
