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Hey man, no apologies. This stuff takes time and there are certainly plenty of things to take up time.

Glad to hear from you though. I had actually checked the website a few times recently as well and as afraid I'd be listening to the preview from now on.

Take your time and look forward to hearing it one day.

Even the preview seems to be gone now. And I never heard it.  

Certainly ST-TMP has one of the very best scores I've ever heard, and I also think the movie is one of the very best SF movies too! Makes no pretence at being a crowd pleasing action adventure, it's deep and philosophical, as well as being beautifully shot, designed, constructed. Comparing it to the other ST films is like comparing 2001 to Battle Beyond the Stars.

Anyway, I'm hoping the collective wisdom of this board can shed some light on the situation regarding the release of a FULL version of the ST-TMP score. There's quite a bit of music that never made the CD album, plus a LOT of alternates. In some cases the alternate is the one on the CD while the movie version is unreleased. The Main Title is a prime example. While the concert version on the album is awesome, the movie version tops it for me.

Superman now has a very thorough release, as do Alien and others; so is there any reason that Star Trek - The Motion Picture couldn't get the same?

hey thanks for the discussion.

ROTS is on its way...and I'm actually cracking on the video side.

The idea is to create a narrative...but juxtapose some scenes with different music. The point is not to match up the music with the same scene. It's going to take some refining of the idea...and you're right Duel of the Fates makes for a difficult piece placed at the begining...but we'll see what happens. The style of the video will be similar to the style of the offical videos as well. There will be some dialogue and some sound FX. I've ripped and decoded the video and audio. I'm working on the first trailer now.

Anyways...I still need to finish up ROTS a bit. Somethings aren't working. I'm really stuck on Battle of the Heroes and its placement.

Good to hear that the Episode III music is well advanced.
As for a video montage, when I said that the structure of the suite would be better suited with Duel of the Fates at the end and a central action piece for the podrace, I didn't mean the exact podrace music (which was only a short tracked section anyway IIRC) but just a piece with some drama to it. Including sound effects and dialogue will smooth over that difficulty though, as any quiet sections of music can be covered by explosions, engines and blasters if necessary! (Although sections of the movie sound will usually already include music, as well as sound effects, so that becoming audible in the mix might be a problem? Unusually, the podrace wouldn't have much of a problem there, with so little music on that sequence.)

Listening to the suites though, I'm still leaning to the view that they are far too mellow to accompany a condensed visual version of the saga. I do have the ROTS music DVD but only ever watched it once on the day it was new, so will have to dig it out and see what their edits were like. I'm probably imagining something quite different from the actual intent!

You wouldn't need to make a miniature Episode I, though, would you? Just as long as you take the images to re-construct the retell the story even though they are out of chrono order. Just like the suit themselves.

Just my two cents. I've been throwing them around all over the place today.

Wouldn't work very well in practice, unfortunately. Imagine scenes of the lightsabre duel, followed by an Otoh Gunga scene, and then Anakin and company arriving on Coruscant, which is followed by some podracing action... it would be a mess. All this cutting and pasting works fine for a musical montage, but for a storytelling montage the structure is far less flexible.

Isolating one thread of the story and putting it to one piece of music would work - perhaps the Anakin and Padme storyline accompanied by "Across the Stars", for example. If real work wasn't so hectic at present, that's the one I would have a go at. It's on my "to do" list...    

Another significant problem with creating a long montage sequence is that a large quantity of shots would be unusable because they contain dialogue. Shots of characters talking with no sound coming out look awful in a montage (it's known as "goldfishing") and once you've discarded all of those, filling a 25 minute suite with shots from just one episode would be impossible.

A pacey suite of the main themes (Duel of the Fates, Across the Stars, Imperial March, and the like) would lend itself to a story montage of the whole saga, but I get the impression it's the music that comes first on this project, and quite rightly too because I'm waiting to hear the other episodes' suites!

I'm always wary of fan-made efforts, but I have listened to these Episode I and II suites lately and found them very enjoyable. Would certainly recommend that fans of "Star Wars" music give them a listen.

Noticed that the website mentions the possibility of structuring a narrative video edit of the saga to accompany the music suites. I've done a fair bit of editing myself, and to achieve a high quality end product the amount of work involved would be truly horrifying; no wonder the editor pulled out - I'd still be running now.  

IMO it couldn't work anyway though, because the music suites would need to have been edited with the narrative flow in mind beforehand. For example, "Duel of the Fates" would have to be at the end of the Episode I suite rather than at the beginning, there would need to be a bit of action music about midway for the podrace, and so on.

In any case, I suspect that the tracks are also just far too long for a "music video"-style edit (even if the music were re-edited with the narrative in mind). A 25 or 30 minute track for the whole saga could work, I think, but editing a video for it would still be an unenviable task.

Hope to hear about an Episode 3 suite before too long!