Lord of the Rings (TE) - Page 74

Really thankful for all the screencaps. They look so much better than the dvds and the HDTV broadcasts that I'm actually laughing out loud at all the criticisms of these images. I'm still holding out for the EE's, but it's got nothing to do with the quality of these discs, which seems absolutely top-of-the-line.

(NOTE: This is NOT to be read with any sarcasm; I am 100% sincere. I'm genuinely sad for anyone expecting more. Life's too short to find fault with this level of quality.)

What level of quality? This is a zero-effort release. They compressed existing assets and put them on a disc. They could've put these out the day Blu-Ray was first on the market for all the work they've done during this wait. I'm sad for people who PRAISE this sort of thing. This is something you should buy grudgingly.

Once again, let me remind you of what a decade-old movie can look like:
http://media.cinemasquid.com/blu-ray...hot-lrg-07.png

I agree.

It's kind of sad that people are cheering for the Blu-ray release that has been DNR'd in places (and demonstrably inferior to the HDTV broadcast in places).

Fight Club got a new print and looks phenominal. There was no work done for this release. It's like Gladiator (sans arrow removal) all over.

This was a heavily-affected movie from the beginning; one that NEVER looked like an "older movie". It was always DNR'd, due to the digital intermediate process that the filmmakers employed. It was a choice they made. I'm a professional cinematographer, and I know VERY WELL what older movies are supposed to look like on blu-ray. I know VERY WELL what film grain is supposed to look like; I love THE THIRD MAN and CE3K, with all that beautiful grain. But this trilogy has always looked like it's "own thing", and has never looked like any other movies out there. That was the aesthetic the filmmakers were creating. This is as good as it gets, people. You're memory is fading... honestly. You're forgetting how stylized these looked, from the very first day of their theatrical run.

And look at it this way... do you really think the studio and Peter Jackson would do anything less than the very best for one of the biggest movie franchises of all time? Really? Are you that cynical?

Take a leap and go with the aesthetic of Middle Earth. No amount of restoration will ever make it look better, and I'm afraid you're always destined to be unhappy.

No, I'm not that cynical. Hence my initial disbelief that this is the product they put out, and hence my subsequent disappointment that it seems to be so. But I'll be sure to be more cynical in the future since WB seems to truly not care about blu-ray.

Great comparison, thanks for posting this. I had forgotten how soft the FOTR DVD is, just loked at it in my BDP-83. My preorder on the TE Blurays will stay - the increased resolution shown in this comparo is plenty of improvement to make it worth it for me, especially when examined at the equivalent of my normal viewing distance in the theater room.

If you know what film grain looks like, then you must know that the sludgy compression mush that's a trademark of many of WB's VC1 encodes isn't film grain. I don't really care about the selective DNR, my main issue is that FOTR is clearly sourced from the ancient HDTV master (and it was NOT fully DI, so they probably telecine'd it from film), and my other issue is that the rest are so overcompressed that they might as well be on HDTV. Every other studio is putting out consistently crisp encodes full of texture (even at lower bitrates), only WB still seems stuck in the early days of the format.

I'm about ready to give up on AVS Forum.

I can only hope that this one screenshot is not a fair representation of how the HDTV broadcast looks like compared to the Blu-Ray. Because it's clear to see that in this one frame, the Blu-Ray has lost all of the grain and texture and was artificially sharpened (which may look like "more detail" to inexperienced people). If the whole Blu-Ray is like this, then I can only classify it as a desaster.

@eric.exe, looking very much forward to your comparison.


You probably have missed eric.exe's screenshot of the HDTV broadcast compared to the Blu-Ray? (see above)

Utter crap.

hopefully not in reference to my post i know criticizing WB's compression work rubs some people the wrong way, but i've done various tests with the x264 encoder and many of WB's encodes look exactly like what happens when you drop the bitrate where it can't quite keep up and textures start to become smeary, like this http://images.blu-ray.com/reviews/2069_18_1080p.jpg (or this http://images.blu-ray.com/reviews/2331_16_1080p.jpg)
And others look fine. don't know what to make of that studio.

Quite the opposite. If you check my post history, you'll see that I'm in agreement with you on the issue.

The problem I have is that I see we're the vocal minority and it appears to most others that we're in the wrong.

Those are some rather compressed jpegs as well, not sure it's worth linking such screens.
I do agree warner has issues, even if now they use more bitrate than before (18-20 mbit), but I'm quite sure it's not just that, there's always a mild denoising at work.
They never had the plastic dolls however, this is newline's style. I think the preprocessing is done by them and the encode by warner?
Had a look at the two towers disc, there is a certain amount of grain in most scenes, it's not terrible, but I think some sort of temporal denoising is ever present, leading to situations like this:

The plastic stuff seems pretty rare from what I've browsed.

Is there any tentative date for the Extended Edition?

2012 I believe has been repeated here.

Not that i'm aware of and I follow everything lord of the rings related fairly closely. I believe that all the studio has said is that they will release it 'at a later date'. A lot of people, myself included, assume that means they will tie it in with the release of The Hobbit comes out, which is in around two years.

I finally managed to work out how to put up a comparison between the hdtv encode I have which is different to eric.exe's one and the blu-ray:

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/comparison/43602

And this comparison is between the two different hdtv encodes, with hdtv 1 being from eric.exe's encode and hdtv 2 being from mine:

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/comparison/43610

It would appear that your HDTV source is stretched vertically.

Did you get yours from an HBO HD broadcast? Yours has more compression artifacts as well.

One thing I appreciate about TNT HD is their 1080i feed is typically 17+ Mb/s.

I have no idea what the source is to be honest. I noticed that it had been stretched vertically compared to the blu-ray and other hdtv encode. What I think is fairly noticable though is bilbo's face and the fabric he's wearing, that have more texture and detail on both the hdtv versions IMO than on the blu-ray that frankly looks like something out of Madame Tussauds.

Like most people here I hope that this is not representative of how the blu-ray looks in motion. I wasn't able to watch the US version of Pan's Labyrinth on blu-ray because of the waxy/dnr look that made everybody look soft, especially the captain. When I bought the UK release and checked it out, it looked exactly how I imagined it should look, filmic and lovely, with all the grain intact.

Here are some examples of Pan's Labyrinth that Xylon uploaded previously to see what I mean:

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/comparison/43627

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/comparison/43632

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/comparison/43636

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/comparison/43638

Comparison between UK HD-DVD and UK Blu-ray:

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/...0547/picture:1

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/...0547/picture:4

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/...0547/picture:6

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/...0547/picture:7

The UK Blu-ray version of Pan's labyrinth was kind of how I was hoping Lord of the Rings was going to look, with clearly visible fine grain. I don't see that in any of the blu-ray screenshots that have been posted here and that includes what seems to be the strongest transfer of the three, Return of the King.

Yes, I wish more people had seen the UK version in comparison to the US release to see what they had been missing, in regards to Pan's Labyrinth.

Most people/reviewers still gave it 5/5 for picture quality anyway.

It's just hilarious how every single time a big title seems to have been messed up, people go into full denial claiming screenshots
don't offer an accurate representation of the actual quality.

Please people, if the history of comparisons here at AVS have shown you anything,
you would know they have always been spot on. The fact that you like LOTR is no excuse to defend a clearly inferior product.

Should, by some inexplicably magical reason, the final quality of these discs turn out to be
stellar (or any different from the screencaps), I'll eat my keyboard.

As long as they are proven wrong every time thats all that matters

There is still a lot of sheeps out there

Im hoping this DNRed frames is either wrongfully captured or it happend on the time New line was operating this on their own. Because if this was done at New line, There is a big chance that SF (who has the rights for these movies in scandinavia) doesnt have it on their release of the movie.

If the grain was sharpened it would stand out more, but it disappears. So it's not sharpened. The Blu Ray is processed in a way to remove grain, and keep detail. But I think that this picture of Bilbo is completely different to the rest of the screenshots. All of the other screenshots have plenty of Digital noise, so this picture of Bilbo is confusing. Like somebody posted earlier, is this comparison the right way around?

It's rather simple. First degrain, then sharpen.

Well that's one way to do it, but there are more professional ways. I think that the grain is noise anyway. Maybe the 3 hour movie was restricted in some way? With extras, maybe they should have gone for a Superbit version?

@ Pincho....the "Bilbo face" comparison is throwing me off as well. I can't find Dave Uptons grab of that particular frame, most of his pics have vanished, arghhh! Not sure if the one eric.exe used in his side by side is from HIS grab of the BR or if he used Dave Uptons?

He used the existing ones.
As for how professional the studios are, I'm rather disappointed. The waxy look is given by strong spatial denoisers, it's not very easy to achieve this. I would have hoped they had better methods by now.

I also hope this is the case, If I'm correct the PAL-dvd's exhibited less filtering than their NTSC counterparts.

In any case this is what happened to A History of Violence in the UK:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...8#post16574398

French rights lie with Metropolitan Film, Dutch rights with A-film.

Yes, and thats because New line wasnt a global distributator. So for every country a different company was in charge for the release.

So I will take one for the team a purchase SF:s LOTR FOTR and see if its a better release.

So there are other possible versions coming out in Scandinavia, France and Holland? Interesting. It's only a fool's hope as Gandalf would say but hopefully everything will turn out for the best.

I think I'm going to cancel my order for the time being and wait and see how these different versions pan out. Fingers crossed they're not region locked.