Dan Brecher
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Jan 8, 1999
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- Daniel
The picture quality is slightly improved over the theatrical version. Compression is cleaner, with less loss of fine detail. The picture still appears to lack the extreme detail of some other new releases (such as The Matrix Reloaded), which implies that slight filtering has been applied to reduce the need for higher bitrates.Having done a number of in depth inspections on both versions now, I absolutely agree with your statement here, Simon. I can't say it came as anything of a surprise given both Fellowsip of the Ring DVD releases suffered from the same issue of filtering. I took the liberty of doing 720x480 uncompressed shots of the exact same frame from both releases. I can't post them here as they are too large and I don't have space to host them. I really I don't think I could bring myself to deem the extended any kind of "significant" imrpovement.
A shame about the filtering issue again since disc one only holds just under one hour and fifty minutes worth of film content, and disc two about two hours and ten minutes worth including the fan credits. It's probably safe to say the PAL extended Two Towers wont carry the filtering since neither PAL Fellowship DVD did.
Also, the aspect ratios differ slightly. The extended edition framing is opened up ever so slightly.
Dan