Thanks for the input, Darth Raditz.
The timing of the crawl is slightly off. This was one element I outsourced to another editor who volunteered to create it for me. The crawl came up a few seconds short, so I had to run it at a slightly slower speed which causes it to be a little off. Creating my own crawl isn’t something I’ve attempted.
I felt removing Mustafar reduced the breakneck pacing as I felt we were no longer visiting so many worlds in so short a time at the beginning.
In the Exegol opening, Palpatine’s dialogue was unfortunately in the surround channels rather than just the center as with most dialogue. I reduced it as much as I could and felt what remained was as much ominous background noise as actual dialogue.
I did initially use quick cuts with the fan film, but felt it needed some effect to symbolize that it being in Kylo’s mind.
I kept Pryde and Hux talking about their capture because it hints at Chewie still being alive without showing him to us immediately.
I like your idea for muting Zorii’s line and just having her point her gun at Poe. I hadn’t considered that.
The lines “You sent down the ship,” “find Poe,” and “Finn, we gotta go. It’s Leia,” were all cut together using the individual words from different lines. Unfortunately the only audio editor I have at my disposal is the free Audacity which is fairly limited. It can only manipulate pitch and speed very minimally before it sounds obviously processed. A professional audio editor could do a much better job at bringing the cadences closer together but I’m not about to spend $100 just to clean up a couple lines of dialogue.
I’d have to take a closer look at your sequencing for Kylo sensing Leia’s death.
I thought about cutting the horses as I’m not crazy about them, but they are in the background of too many shots to completely remove them, so without the initial foreground footage, it would just feel weird having horses randomly running around on a Star Destroyer in the background for no reason.
I was planning to create a new version that would have mostly been about improving many of the technical issues you pointed out, but honestly, I have lost interest in trying to salvage this film. I have come to terms with how bad this film is and letting Star Wars take a much reduced role in my life. I really can’t say when or even if I will sit down and work on this project again. For now other projects have taken priority.
Thank you everyone for your help, input, and feedback over the last few years.