Hal 9000

Wow, thank you for that. As always, I’m glad to hear of them being well received and living up to their goal of functioning as an opening day replacement for the originals in the mind of the viewer.
And just to repeat myself, I’m just adding to an ongoing project and very little of what I’ve done really originated with me. But it’s good to see people enjoying the results regardless.

That Grievous hologram is a really good idea and looks totally convincing.

Steven_TheFarce said:

Hey fellow galactians! I am Steven Hightower! Acclaimed professional film youtube reviewer. Here is my review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. My opinion is not only clamored for, but asked for too.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/d93SbwRBUJY

Wow, what astoundingly poor taste.

Oh, I don’t doubt that at all!

Hundsdorfex does great work, having contributed a few important shots to my edits. Not to carelessly add to the pile, but I know some people would have liked to see a variety of saber colors in the prequels, or thought it was weird for Sam F*%#%^ Jackson to be the only combo breaker.
One idea that was tossed around when starting my edits would alleviate this with a minimum of work involved. It would take two minor characters and give them their saber colors from the EU. During the battle on Geonosis, Plo Koon’s saber would be yellow and Ki Adi Mundi’s would be purple. We see both of these ignited prominently, and they don’t appear very much. And if you like, one or two other random background Jedi we see for one shot could have a yellow saber. The lady Jedi who had a red saber in the EU never has it ignited onscreen. (Ki Adi Mundi’s would need redoing in Ep3 as well. And one might want to give a yellow blade to one of the Jedi who accompany Windu to arrest Palpy.) For a minimal amount of work you’d have someone else with a purple saber, a few yellow ones, and keeping the majority as being blue or green.

fullmetal777 said:

I’d rather watch bith clone wars tv shows

That’d be interesting, but would probably require subtitles.
One more thing that held me back from enjoying Clone Wars (2008) and Rebels is the ugly and unappealing animation. If a few of the main highlights were novelized, I’d honesty prefer to take in the story that way.

For what it’s worth, I sure don’t.

joefavs said:

I don’t want to watch the prequels by myself.

Those are the sort of good instincts that save lives.

Started in June!
June was Cloak Of Deception (My Ep1 edit)
July was The Approaching Storm (My Ep2)
August was Labyrinth of Evil (My Ep3)
September was Star Wars - Despecialized
October was Empire Strikes Back - Despecialized
and November will soon have Return of the Jedi - Despecialized

I also read a lot of SW books spread throughout chronologically.

Thanks! That’s a valid point, though I did remove Qui-Gon telling him to stay in the cockpit and made it look like Anakin only got in there when he saw Padme needed help. You might get what I’m saying by comparing it to the original version of the scene when the duel with Maul begins. (I also trimmed Qui-Gon’s like so he tells Anakin to hide but doesn’t emphasize it by repeating himself. He’s gotta tell Anakin something before taking him into a war zone!)
Your sister’s concerns are valid, though I don’t think she knows what a force to be reckoned with the prequels are! Thanks for the feedback.

Red Leader destroys the Death Star.

Glad you finally let the OT.com crowd know about these.
They’re entertaining and should make for a few hours of fun. I mean, I listened to them.

Awesome, thanks for posting!
Reencoding is one way to make it fit to a disc.
I was hoping to have V4 out before TFA, but it depends on Schorman’s schedule, but V3 is adequate in the meantime; it’s what I watched with some friends during our own pre-7 viewings.

The thought has crossed my mind of someone swapping their eye color, but no one’s crazy enough to actually do it… are they?

John Williams did a fantastic job with the prequels, and so I’m happy to leave the music alone for the most part. Even if there are a few things I’d have liked to do, it’s prohibitively difficult to pull off.
I’m not so sure the plot point of having Padme survive Episode III will be readily contradicted in future films. In order to contradict it, they would have to be very specific. One could say Vader killed Padme, which is true enough because she eventually succumbs to her injuries. One could talk of them taking Leia to live on Alderaan as Bail’s daughter, which would also be true enough. They would have to specifically say or allude that she died in childbirth to pose a problem. They could allude to Leia’s uncanny ability to remember people or see visions, and that wouldn’t even be a problem, either.
I’m sure there’s probably already been a book or comic or something from the new EU that contradicts what I’ve done in my edit. That’s okay; anyone making an edit their go-to version will need to adjust how they filter these details out. I’d be more concerned with films contradicting it, especially the “saga” films. But I don’t really see that happening, since again, it would need to be very specific. And why would a future film feel the need to allude to it in such a specific way, when ROTJ so blatantly contradicts it? I would imagine they would allude to the events in a vague enough way to not remind people of the contradiction. I could certainly be wrong, but I don’t see why the saga films especially would need to go back to Padme dying in childbirth.

Even if you don’t actually edit it yourself, I’d be interested in what you’d like to see in your ideal cut.

Thanks for chiming in with your thoughts. Without trying to belittle what you said, Episode III always struck me as a PowerPoint presentation, with very quick scenes strung together with bonkers wipe transitions. I’m not sure the main body of the film (from landing on Coruscant to Anakin’s formal turn to evil) would be choppier than before, just reordered. Eh, you’re probably right about overthinking Ep3, though! I admit that for this movie, I was much more creative in restructuring things to give a different impression than the other two. There’s always a downside. You would not be the first to tell me that you plan to put my Ep1 and Ep2 edits on your shelf alongside a different version of Ep3. And that’s actually pretty cool.

Yeah, I didn’t anticipate TS overhead when making sure the final mkv was under 25GB. But, excluding the alternate audio track allows it to fit.
And it just seems like PS4s don’t want to cooperate.

It’s the most liberal change I make to the prequels, true. Probably the one more than any other that threatens its viability as being a somewhat conservative replacement for the original version. However, while it’s liberal in that sense, it’s out of a conservative pull toward faithfulness to the way the original trilogy described the events. Padme dying in childbirth is probably the single most direct contradiction between the two trilogies. Editing Ep3 to have Padme live involved creativity and license in order to craft something compelling enough to justify seeming to cop out of the movie’s emotional climax. Thus, the whole edit is informed by this change. As one disappointed reviewer put it, I bent over backwards trying to justify that one change.
My prequel edits assume that the viewer is sitting in the theater on release day, familiar with the films that have come before. Going into Episode III, barring spoilers, one would not have expected Padme to die, but rather to go to Alderaan with Leia. When doing these edits, I have to work under the assumption that the audience has not already seen the original source material. This will not be the case, but it’s the conceit of doing any alternate cut of anything. As to the look and feel of the footage itself, from The Other Boleyn Girl, I admit it’s less than perfect. However, thanks to Hundsdorfex, it looks better in V4 than V3.
Here’s a fresh test clip has been rendered and uploaded, so you can have as realistic a look as possible at what it will look like in the final version. https://youtu.be/N5UmTwj6Y18

I understand and sympathize with what you’re saying. Having said that, LOE would be a totally different edit if I hadn’t wanted to use the ending with Padme living. If I were to leave it the same as it is, and only reinstate the original ending (past, say, the point at which the duel is over), the editing choices wouldn’t stack on each other toward that goal. It would still be coherent, but the reasons for how it got there wouldn’t be valid anymore. Luckily, L8wrtr’s and others’ edits of Episode III can be plugged in instead. Putting out an “alternate/original ending” version would be problematic for those reasons, and others such as the necklace seen in the funeral scene being missing from my edit of Episode I.
All things considered, I’d sooner watch an edit of Episode III that never sought to remove Padme’s death in the first place than try to contrive mine into that mold. L8wrtr’s edits are stellar in their own right, and there’s no continuity reasons that would prohibit one from subbing in his Ep3 for mine. I don’t mean that flippantly! His edit did not suffer from having Padme die because he never sought to change that part in the first place, whereas my edit was done from the ground up with that point of climax in mind.

Both of those concerns are expounded upon in Ep2’s commentary, but since it isn’t out yet, let me do so here in brief. The Tusken confession scene is gone primarily because of what it does to Padme’s character. She hears that Anakin commits genocide, killing women and children, and doesn’t care; she goes along with Anakin anyway. (This was especially problematic in AOTC, where at this point they weren’t together!) In Episode III, Padme learns that Anakin once again has killed children, and suddenly her heart is broken and she can’t go along with Anakin like she did when he did the same thing before. Also in Episode III, Palpatine references Anakin’s Tusken slaughter, giving us some characterization of Anakin as being willing to confide his dark secret to Palpatine but not to Padme. Plus, it’s a painfully awkward scene. (Cliegg’s funeral monologue is kept in order for the scene transition from Anakin arriving with Schmi’s body to function better. Seemed abrupt to wipe straight into Anakin walking up to the tombstone. Cliegg’s dialogue establishes the scene.)
The droid factory sequence is garbage IMHO. It was cobbled together in post-production, uses random music tracks from elsewhere in the film (including Yoda’s theme), and feature’s Anakin once again losing the use of his lightsaber. (Not to mention the Threepio antics and R2 flying.) I do not harbor any love for that sequence, so instead we get Anakin going along with Padme as she elects to try a diplomatic approach. It seems like what we get in the deleted scene is pretty much what Padme hoped to try to do before stumbling onto a big action setpiece.
Although, I went ahead and silenced the dialogue as Padme looks out her family’s kitchen window as you suggested; very good idea.

Sorry, it’s too abrupt for me. The last phase of the film is important to get to feel as unlike a fan edit as possible, given how much has been done to it.

The scene where they talk about their ‘first time,’ as it comes across, seems weird to me. It’s not a big deal, though. I’ll think about that one, though, as it might not be a bad idea to put it back in, especially since the lead-in scene transition is the same as AOTC anyway. (We aren’t coming into the scene from a different scene from AOTC, now that I reshuffled the scenes to include the extended arrival on Naboo.)
At any rate, the cow tick scene is in because I believe it functions much better given how the film has progressed up to that point. It’s a nice parallel or foreshadow of Anakin taming the beast in the arena and (sort of) saving Padme as a result. Editing gives the scene a different feel than it had in AOTC, with the solution being to fix the film around it rather than just cut out the “bad parts.”

Town32 suggested to make sure to select “Do not change SEI and VUI data” in tsmuxer. There was one other person who had trouble playing it on a PS4, though that was before we found out checking that box solved a great deal of people’s problems.

That was certainly a surprise! (There being another trailer at all, I mean.) It is a very nice companion to trailer 3, giving us a bit more.