A Few Words About A few words about...™ The Lord of the Rings Trilogy - Extended Edition -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[montrealfilmguy]

Or you can just throw me tomatoes like its La Tomatina time.

 

[johnSM]

I'm wondering if some people here are actually capable of watching films, or merely watching intently for faults/flaws and being the first to post about it? We've been SPOILT over the years with the quality of many bluray releases, releases that in many cases have actually surpassing many screenings I've been to in the past in quality...
All this screen caps business is just way too OCD - YES there is a different tint to FOTR now (I don't think anyone denys that), one approved by the Director and the DP. Channel your nit picking energies into releases that actually NEED it, not this beautiful looking/produced set!
Sheesh!!!

 

[Jonathan_Clarke]

Finally watching FOTR. Green yes. Bad no. And the level of detail blows the theatrical away.

 

[John Alderson]

I'd be interested to see the merry split screen done with rotk:te and fotr:te... The caps of the flashback between the TEs of TTT and FOTR (first page of the thread) show there have always been color timing differences between the two (with FOTR greener).
But I'm not interested enough to do it myself.

 

[Merrick Gearing]

I would love to see what people would be saying if the opposite occured in which the original version had a green tint and the new version was all natural.

"It looks too natural!!"
"I feel like I am watching a documentary"

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Over at another forum, a fellow posted screen captures from both movies. The vest is clearly yellow in one and clearly orange in the other. It was someone else that took the two separate images and combined them into the split-screen. Here are the two images:
FOTR EE: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/155/fotr6.jpg/
ROTK EE: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/405/rotk6.jpg/
As an experiment, I loaded the ROTK flashback image into Photoshop and applied the Hue/Saturation tool to the image. When I slid the Master Hue slider to about -30 in Photoshop, the color of Merry's vest had changed to about the same shade of orange seen in the FOTR image. And, quite interestingly, the color of Merry & Pippin's cloaks shifted from grey to green. (Surprise, surprise!)
I am NOT presuming or suggesting that that is all that got changed with the image during color grading. When I slid the Hue control to -30 the hobbit's faces turned a bit too magenta. But there definitely seems to be some correlation between changing the vest to orange and ending up with a green tint elsewhere in the image. The two seem to be linked.
If you have Photoshop, open up the ROTK image and try it for yourself.
Mark

I took a look w/ PS, and what you're doing there w/ the Hue control is *shifting* the hue for the entire color palette in a wraparound way. That's not the kind of cyan tinting being debated all this time near as I can tell.

If you take a closer look at the PS Hue control tool itself, (at least in my rather old version of PS) you'll see a basic representation of how the color shift works in a wraparound way. That tool works nothing like what's been discussed so far.

Is it possible PJ, et al. used this kind of color shifting tool on the transfer, I suppose that's possible, but I really have no idea. I'll say this though. If this was actually done that way, then I definitely gotta believe it was intentional because (as you probably realized) this could not be the only step on top of an otherwise perfectly fine, ready-to-go master. There had to be other steps made that work together w/ this one, if this was how it was done.

Combined that w/ the other screencap just posted today from RotK EE (showing Merry w/ the orange-ish vest at the end during the coronation scene), and I'm wondering if the real problem is simply that PJ, et al. just could not realistically exercise tight enough control (at least under the circumstance) over the entire trilogy to yield nitpick-proof results -- and such mistakes could well have been made and/or supervised by PJ himself vs whatever conspiracy theories are running out there. Afterall, we're basically talking about ~11 hours of a stylized, 3-part fantasy epic that's gone thru multiple passes before arriving at this current state, including an FotR that needed a subsequent, new DI and likely complete color regrading. We're not just talking about a typical 2-hour flick done in one pass afterall -- and PJ, et al. have been rather busy w/ The Hobbit these days.

As I've said from the beginning, I think what's probably happening is PJ, et al. are just trying to revise and fine-tune these films (at least the EE version) to yield a more consistent, uniform look that more closely follow his vision, which may or may not have changed some over the years. IMHO, it's certainly quite reasonable to not hold him to the original theatrical release of FotR as necessarily being exactly as he's always envisioned for that film and the trilogy as a whole due to how extremely tight the production schedule ran (down to the wire) and the lack of adequate technology at the time. And at the same time, mistakes can happen, especially for such a long epic seemingly w/ so many color changes/tweaks needed (from its original film sources), but such mistakes need not be what's likely been overblown about the cyan tinting/look either.

Finally, as I also speculated earlier, this might not actually be PJ's final pass on getting the trilogy "perfect" under the circumstance -- he might be planning to do another pass of tweaking at some point for all we know...

_Man_

 

[Cees Alons]

And, honestly, I personally don't think we should continue in this thread (or perhaps anywhere else) to base complicated theories on posted screencaps unless we are told exactly from where in the movie (time-stamp and/or frame-number) and of which release of the film the screen capture was taken, as well as, preferably, the real identity of who made it.

If we don't, we end up discussing screencaps instead of the film. Or worse: discussing ill-defined images that may appear not to have any useful association with the actual released product.
As long as the blu-ray was not released yet, that may have been the only physical subjects of discussion we had, but now the box is out, we can do so much better!


That way, if a screen capture shows an orange vest no-one recognizes, we can look up how it looked on our screen, and judge for ourselves, instead of just playing around with an image alone.


Cees

 

[Sean*O]

 

Huh??? You mean that someone who is in the possession of a copy of the real BD EE release, watches it carefully, judging the image he sees, and finally comes to a well-thought fully informed conclusion, could be called ignorant in this matter just because he's not aware of each and every ill-defined screencap posted on the 'net, which may have been interesting to some before street-day when we all can see the product itself if we want, but is just second-hand information now?  Cees  

You are saying people should just buy it and make up their own mind?

 

[Robert Crawford]

Originally Posted by Sean*O
You are saying people should just buy it and make up their own mind?

People are just buying it and making up their own minds.

 

[Cees Alons]

You are saying people should just buy it and make up their own mind?

I didn't, but, hey, you're thinking no-one can?


Cees

 

[Amillennialist]

I happen to like the color Orange.
I never felt that yellow suited Merry - made him look too cowardly. And we all know Merry isn't a coward.
Once again, a color change for the better.
David

The Lord of the Tinges.

 

[Amillennialist]

None of the easter eggs on the EEs were particularly "Kid Friendly". You think JB's "Prince Albert" is bad, try watching the Gollum Movie Award acceptance speech on Two Towers.  

I was referring to the ease with which the skit is accessed, not the skit itself.The access point was much less obvious in the DVD set.

 

[Amillennialist]

I would love to see what people would be saying if the opposite occured in which the original version had a green tint and the new version was all natural.

"It looks too natural!!"
"I feel like I am watching a documentary"

+1

 

[Stephen_J_H]

You mean like the uproar over what happened to the Deliverance BD, in which the original pre-flashed colour scheme was restored, which had been removed in the previous DVD edition?

 

[theonemacduff]

One of the things I noticed on looking at the blubrew.com screencaps was that the new colour-grading greatly improves the Rivendell sequence, which, to my eye, was always far too golden, too nostalgic; that was always inappropriate, because the nostalgia, if it is such, properly belongs to a retrospective, rather than to an immediate view of things. The new grading reduces that over-saturated golden/orange look and actually renders the flesh tones in a more neutral, and, to my eye, a more natural way. If you look at the flesh tones on nearly all of the blubrew shots, they show the same (again, to my eye) much more natural look. Sometimes adding a bit of blue-green is the best way to reduce the orange.
As for the rest, those posters who have spoken to the importance of correctly calibrating one's monitor seem to me to have the right approach. And while Photoshop is a fantastic toolbox, as has been pointed out to me on this very forum, it's not really using the same sorts of tools in the same sorts of ways that the movies do, so any such comparisons are probably moot. As one who has used Photoshop for years in "restoring" thousands of archival slides and negatives, I can attest to the huge role played by individual taste and judgement in the process. If it's true that Jackson and Lesnie approved this transfer, and that it represents what they wanted to achieve with the film, well, it's their work. I'm sure they did the best they could; and after all, if I turn out not to like it, if it doesn't accord with my taste, I can either elect not to look at it, or I can fool around with the monitor controls until I achieve something I do like. As they said in the old days, de gustibus non est disputandem.

 

[cafink]

What does "pre-flashed" mean?

 

[montrealfilmguy]

Here Carl,
you can read what Roger Deakins (almost all of the Coen brother's films ,Shawshank redemption,True grit )
answered in his forum
http://www.rogerdeakins.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1205&start=0

 

[John Alderson]

I watched the commentary with Jackson, Walsh and Boyens on the 2nd half of ROTK, and they all pretty openly mocked the scene that opens the disc, where the ghost army attacks the pirates. It was pretty funny actually, but really drove home how these are not the filmmakers preferred versions. Although there are several scenes they seemed to wish were not cut, or were perplexed why they were.
Then of course there's the Watchers scene, which Jackson said could make it into the 25th anniversary edition
So now I'm mad that they didn't tweak the color timing on the theatrical edition! *runs away*

 

[Nick Laslett]

Finally got my copy of LOTR, had to wait a little while for it to arrive in Dubai.
Well, my opinon for what it is worth.
My set-up(Pioneer 60" Kuro Plasma [D-Nice method for calibration], PS3 Slim, Denon 3808 receiver)
1. I thought the FOTR transfer looked excellent. I had no issues with the colour grading, I liked the changes and thought it improved Rivendell, Moria and Lothlorien.
2. I examined the the transfer for the green tint. On my set-up it was not apparent. If I looked very hard and went back and forward on a specific scene, I could say I saw a hint of greenness for a few fleeting seconds. But it did not look abnormal. The Rivendell fade to white still looked pretty reddish as it does on the DVD EE.
3. The upgrade in the sound quality from the dodgy pitch manipulated UK PAL version is huge.
I would be happy to say that if you were unaware of the Internet generated turmoil around the green tint issues, that you would hard pressed to see anything amiss with this transfer.
Other thoughts spurred by the many post I have read:
1. Watching the transfer with a pure white reference. On the PS3, if you press the select button it brings up the infamous bit meter, plus time, chapter, etc top and bottom of the screen. All of this text is generated by the PS3 and I would assume is closer to pure white than the FOTR transfer. It is very easy to flick the eye between this text and any white in FOTR. For me on a 20 point scale with the PS3 text equal to 20/20, I would say the whites in FOTR look like a 19/20. There is a difference but it is so small, that it is really hard to care.
2. End titles change colour. I very strongly disagree with this point. I watched them three times. The colour change point is when the main credits transition to the rolling credits. Watch the main credits in slow motion and you see that the fade in and out transition has a piece of very noticeable green. The rolling credits of course don't have any fade and next to the PS3 whites looks a little reddish.
Now here is the important bit. Put in the Two Towers disc and it does the same thing, except this time the credit fade colour is brown instead of green, i.e. the colouring is deliberate and deliberately different between both transfers. The rolling credits actually looked the same to me, using the PS3 text as a constant for the comparison.
It was this that finally made me throw up my hands in despair over all the debate about this transfer.
Good luck to those of you that want a recall. Till then, I will be happy to enjoy the film with no worries and eat crow if I'm ever proved wrong, because I don't think it is going to happen. This is not like Patton, Gladiator, Gangs of New York or Pirates of the Caribbean. Where there were obvious mistakes that needed to be corrected.

 

[Douglas Monce]

What does "pre-flashed" mean?

Pre-flashing means that the unexposed, unprocessed camera negative is exposed to a slight bit of white light in the lab before it is shipped to the set. The effect of which is to create a slight fog effect over the image, and to improve the shadow detail. So the fact is that you can't get rid of pre-flashing by going back to a point before the effect was applied, because it applied before the film is actually run through the camera. You can however now compensate for the contrast change in digital color grading tools, in effect erasing the flashing.
This process was pioneered by Vilmos Zsigmond on McCabe and Mrs. Miller in 1971.
Doug