It has always bugged me that we never got an HD version of the prequel trailers on any of the Blu-ray releases. Even the official Star Wars YouTube upload comes from SD/480p sources.
So I had an idea - why not take footage from the Blu-ray release, re-edit it and create a proper HD/1080p version of the trailers, starting with the trailer that fooled us all, Episode I: The Phantom Menance. And that's what I did, sourcing the footage from the Blu-ray version of TPM.
Most of the work was just painstaking searching for the right footage and recreating some of the transition effects (in the excellent, and most importantly, *free* DaVinci Resolve). Unfortunately, as I found out (see https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/d0oh2u/the_phantom_menance_trailer_when_is_this_scene_in/), some shots in the trailer aren't in the movie or have extended versions in the trailer. This meant that some parts aren't exactly the same, and some have been sped down in order to fill the gaps. I've also applied minor color grading since some of the Blu-ray scenes are kind of washed out - I'm a real novice at this, so this is something I hope to improve on in the future. Also, the last part with the title screen and credits haven't been touched, since, well, I couldn't find a good way of re-doing those easily.
Oh, and digital Yoda instead of the puppet one. Can't do much about that one. Thanks George!
And yes, I upscaled it to 4K. With a relatively poor quality source to work with (we all know about TPM's soft Blu-ray transfer), there's probably not much point in doing 4K, but it's all to take advantage of how YouTube gives 4K uploads a higher playback bitrate and so you get a better-looking picture even when you watch the trailer in HD.
