The Lord Of The Rings Extended

Most excellent. Even when the theatrical versions dropped to $7 each, I resisted. I am so excited for this!

Jurassic Park
Star Wars
Lord of the Rings

2011 FTW.

Give 'Fellowship' (and the others, while you're at it) a new transfer!

I'd say also let Jackson be involved (he was refused participation in the transfers of the theatrical BDs)...but now he's probably too busy with THE HOBBIT.

I predict they won't hit shelves until 1st quarter of 2012.

If WB figures out how to use AVC by then maybe it'll be a worthwhile PQ upgrade even if they use the same masters (though I hope WB actually goes back to the negative/DI for Fellowship this time). All three movies suffered significantly from mushy compression.

The best Blu news so far this year. I'm glad I waited!

Let's hope so. Fellowship used a DI for part of the film, and a standard IP for the remainder. I have no idea why this is so, but apparently the first film wasn't ideal in terms of PQ. Nevertheless there is no excuse for the current BD to look slightly worse than a low-bitrate MPEG-2 HDTV broadcast. The other two films used a DI and should look great. They do for the most part- all WB has to do is remove the DNR filter and it would most likely have a 5/5 rating for the BD, as the DVDs were stellar.

Agreed...it is just shocking to see on my HT setup.
In spite of excellent audio, this first release is a big disappointment.

New, supervised 6k transfers (the DP and Jackson overseeing all aspects) from the original elements!!!

New, matching CGI for Gollum in Fellowship!!!

Two discs for each film!!!**

High bitrate AVC without ungodly filtering!!!

New 7.1 mixes!!!

Subtitles within the picture!!!

**I've always thought they should handle this by making the three extended films like classic roadshow releases with Overture, Entr'acte/Intermission, and Exit music (with appropriate, classy title cards). Rather than an abrupt cut and INSERT DISC 2 instructions.

Pop the second disc in and the movie starts right up at the appropriate title card and music.

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Hey, I can dream, can't I?

No way.........they will get these out during the holiday season of 2011 I bet

GREAT NEWS! Held off on the TEs for these and it looks like we will not have to wait as long as some people thought..............WOO HOO!

My hope is for 2 discs for each film (6 total) and 7.1 audio................

High quality transfers using two discs per film would be plenty for me.

Didn't Jackson say something about this at one point? That, if given the chance, he'd go back and re-render Gollum in FotR? Seems like it wouldn't be that much work, really.. he's only in a few shots, and I can think of only two that would have to be re-done.

Nooooooooo. All you George Lucas types, keep your hands off my LOTR Extended! Not to geek out too much... I feel that the beauty of the way Gollum looks in LOTR is that we don't see him clearly; he's kind of a "mythic" version of Gollum before we meet the "real creature" in TWO TOWERS, so it doesn't matter if he doesn't exactly match. In LOTR, Gollum's sort of the way Frodo imagines him to be before he's actually face-to-face with the little guy.

Also... I kinda just want movies to stay the way they are when I fall in love with them... is that so wrong???

Just my 2 cents.

(And I recognize the irony in my defending an "Extended Edition" which is, in itself, different from the original theatrical editions. Two thoughts about that... #1, the theatricals are always available to whomever wants 'em; it's not like the Extended Editions came out and made those disappear... and #2, I frankly flat-out didn't like the theatricals much; for me, the Extended Editions are the versions I personally fell in love with. So, to me, those are the editions I want to preserve.)

2 dics per film...why? How long are each of the movies?

Title - Theatrical / Extended

Fellowship of the Ring - 178 / 208 minutes

The Two Towers - 179 / 223 minutes

The Return of the King - 201 / 251 minutes

Excellent news!! Definitely will pre order this.

Same.

Kinda hard to do 6K transfers when you're dealing with effects-heavy films finished to 2K. As singhcr alluded, FOTR is the only one that went through any photochemical grading (and that was only for a minority of the film). For everything else -- including the entirety of TTT and ROTK -- they'd not only have to rescan the elements but also redo the color timing and the CGI. That's not happening anytime soon.

A 50GB dual-layer disc is plenty for each film. There's no need to go down the DVD EE's path and split them over 2 discs again. A 50GB disc is enough to hold a 2-hour movie with bitrate at cap the whole way through, and there's no way any movie ever needs the bitrate at the cap the whole way through.

Slightly off-topic, but has anyone figured out what the theoretical maximum movie length is for a 50GB disc, before PQ starts to suffer?

The longest BD I have is Seven Samurai, which clocks in at 207 minutes. But, it's not full-frame (windowboxed), and it's also black & white, so you can get away with a lower bitrate since you're not worrying about color. LOTR isn't full-frame either (letterboxed), but you've got the extra color information to deal with. How much of a difference would that make?

Yes, you probably could fit the films on one disc.. but RotK EE, for example, is over four hours long. That's a hell of a lot of video for one disc.

I' won't worry about the double dip ..I'll just give my theater version as a gift to some one

There are too many factors, including one's threshold for PQ "suffering". I certainly wouldn't compare Criterion to WB, who routinely leave a quarter of the disc completely empty, stuff the rest with pointless dub tracks, and encode at seemingly the least efficient settings they can. You can still hit lower 20-range bitrates with about a 4-hour film if you leave off the unnecessary crap, a bitrate most studios seem to get decent results from.

LOL.. this is true. I only brought it up because it's the only longer-than-normal film I own on BD, and it has several things going for it that let it fit on one disc, perhaps easier than other films would.

Dances With Wolves Extended Cut is a good example. It has much more static images (except the buffalo hunt) than the huge, fast paced, highly detailed war scenes of LOTR...

They crammed it on to one BD50 and the image quality did suffer somewhat, especially in the night shots.

Two BD50's at a higher average AVC bitrate are necessary.

Don't get lazy on us now, average viewer! I need to stretch my legs... and two discs would give me an opportunity to do just that with these ultra-long films.

Four hours on one disc would be fine, too bad Warner suffers from dubitis. Also isn't like 30 minutes of ROTK the credits?

That's one of the reasons I REALLY want two discs per movie. WB also crams their discs with unnecessary "features."

Again, I have a hunch we'll be disappointed with a one disc release's video quality... mark my words.

All of the EE films have ~30 minute credits.

Not that those require much of a bitrate though.

I don't really want 2 discs per film, but I guess it's ok if video/audio quality would suffer by being on 1 disc.