The Lord Of The Rings Extended - Page 110

OOOOOOKAYYYYYYY.....

Doing a comparison tonite between the EE FOTR and the TE FOTR.
On a NON-ISFed display (sorry, it's new).

In a nutshell....I don't see a "green" push.

Looked at all the scenes that have the screenshot comparisons thru out this thread.
The screenshots in this thread are enough to make any lover of LOTR blanch.
And I have screamed with the best of 'em.
But tonite I am sitting down and doing a straight compare (please take note of the display I have used).

Bag End?
Blue sky and realistic, contrasty greens.
The snow crossing?
I see blue sky and reasonably white snow.
Rivendell meeting?
Much more pleasing, sepia not as dark/muddled.
Aragorn slaying the Big Bad?
Lots of subtle colors and contrast.

The rest of the transfer....
Much better clarity and details than the TE.
More colors are employed.
Overall, more pleasing to my eyes.

The audio also seems to have been bumped up a notch.

Does this mean the new FOTR is accurate/correct and the complaints are over-blown?
Absolutely, positively NOT!
At the time of this post, I have no frickin' idea.

I want to stress: this is on a NON-ISFed, 1080p DLP display.
I do have a 720p DLP that IS ISFed and will check FOTR on it and look for differences.
Maybe tonite, no later than tomorrow....

I have not looked at TTT or ROTK to see if the new transfer meshes with them better.

I want to look at FOTR on my ISF display first before making ANY final judgements.

But I wanted to share with everyone my experience and will be posting back soon with more info.

Well, I did just check on my ISFed display (the wife graciously gave up watching Masterpiece Theater for half an hour).

I see a "green" push.
It is relatively persistent through out.

I also see slightly reddish faces.

There is a possible explanation.
The lamp in my DLP is way WAY past its expiration date.
And colors become muted, without sufficient light in a DLP.
This could explain the "green."
I dunno.

Ultimately, my little comparison doesn't prove or disprove anything.
But it was, for me, interesting.

Only really valid if you can do a simultaneous side-by side, otherwise your visual processing will colour correct each one (very quickly) and you probably won't notice/remember a problem.

Maybe even switching between 2 inputs on the same display will be enough time for your visual processing to adjust.

i see a lot of complaining, and yet the creative motivations for a difference in tint in FOTR aren't being explored. depending on your tint bias, if FOTR is brighter or crisper, perhaps it's a metaphor for their innocence relative to the TT and ROTK. if it's greener, perhaps it's a play on 'greenhorn' and the same innocence angle is played.

Maybe the green credits and fade to green are for all the freaking money they're going to make?

No it is so they can release FOTR EE TE Color edition for the whiners

I have looked at it again and I don't find that its tinted at all.

There is a green tint on the disk. This has been confirmed. If you want to debate about how inaccurate your display is, this is the wrong topic for that.

Eyes can adjust pretty quickly for color tint, so if someone is not seeing the tint it does not automatically mean an inaccurate display.

Seriously, what's there to explore?

Scenes that used to be bright and happy are no more.
Dark scenes have become so dark that they are hard to make out
Rivendell has lost its aura
The mountain scenes look horrendously underexposed.
The title text is green.

The best I can say about this whole matter is that aside from these gross issues, most scenes don't really suffer. I can spot improvement from the new grading that's still visible aside from the green tint but that'd also be there if the tint was removed.

I honestly can't see anything that might get improved in any way by colorizing the entire film green, from first to last scene. That's the whole point why the discussion still goes on with no end in sight. If there was any way this change would make sense I think most people would have stopped by now.

True, but if my theory is correct -- that this is all about the default Hue on the Blu-ray being off "normal" a few notches -- it is conceivable that people who "do not see the green tint" actually have their Hue setting off normal enough to compensate for the green tint.

See my earlier posts for a better description. More than a few people tried the Hue fix, and now profess to be watching LOTR FOTR EE on Blu without issue

I mentioned something similar many many pages ago as well, only on my particular display the trick is to use the 'my color' control, which is something different than the regular picture settings menu (and of course still totally seperate of the actual service menu calibration screens). With 'my color', I have a way to quickly raise/lower strictly pink, green and blue...and just by lowering the green some, raising the blue a touch and maybe 2 clicks of added pink (to help restore the flesh tones) it makes a massive difference, gets that sickly green/cyanish feel out of the sky, smoke, faces, etc. Betweeen that and boosting the gamma and contrast a bit, I'm very close to the feel of the TC only with much better clarity.

That said though, just for a goof I returned everything to normal settings and tried your thing of simply kicking the tint (I don't have a "hue" control) over to the GREEN side (my normal calibration has the tint leaning toward the red/warm side by a hair) just to view the effect in real time as the tint moves further green. It works. I still like the look I mentioned above beter, but it was worth trying! You can watch the green vanish from the sky as it turns blue again. Nice. A good simply fix (under the circumstances). Even the skin tones improve. And the foilage stays green. Though I only looked at it for a few seconds, it was an improved look over what they gave us anyway, lol. I doubled checked all the suspect scenes, including the dreaded second breakfest. Even that was improved. I prolly wouldn't have even bothered trying your idea if I hadn't read your post. My favorite place to check is the fight at the end of the flick between Aragon and Lurtz - the smoke/fog in the background on the EE is sadly green, but with either of these tweak methods, it's grey/white again. Nice find.

Would be interesting to see what monitor was used when these were approved.

Head of mastering studio to new grunt in suite.

"So, Mr. Jackson and Mr. Lesnie approved, eh?"

"yes sir. I showed them FOTR on monitor three and all is well."

"Excellent. Good wor... Wait a sec. Did you say monitor THREE?!?!?! Oh crap...!"

Okay, as requested, here are some comparison shots in the mines of moria between the theatrical blu-ray and extended edition blu-ray regraded to remove the green tint. I've tried to find some dark scenes with shadow detail so you can compare the two for black crush as well. The top shots are from the theatrical edition blu-ray and the bottom shots from the extended edition blu-ray regraded:

You also lose detail from this green, black crushed colouring. All of the white to green is missing, and that's missing details in the snow. That is quite a few colours that would be visible detail.. say 40 colours missing there. The black is flat, and missing detail, and colours. Say another 10 colours missing there. These are just guesses, but let's presume that 50 colours are missing. That's an awful lot of detail missing.

Could you post the comparisons from the TE BD to the EE BD without your regrading? And if you have time, the same comparisons from the prolog. Particularly the "fly over" shots" of the swarms or Mordor Orcs Thanks!

Interesting.

I think for the first time in this discussion we are getting somewhere. I have to say that without any exception your regraded shots look worse here, because the color is not right.

Could you also post unfixed shots of the EE to get an idea how it compares to the TE in terms of brightness?

It's also interesting that the TE looks a bit green as well.

There are numerous comparisons in this thread between the theatrical edition and the extended edition, some of them posted by me. I see no purpose in posting up more screencaps of the official fotr ee blu-ray with the constant green tint running throughout. It's clearly an error IMHO and i've now moved on to actually trying to fix the problem. Comparing a fotr regraded to remove green tint to the theatrical blu-ray is far more interesting because it highlights the colour grading changes that PJ/Andrew Lesnie have made with this latest release of fotr. Maybe others here can provide the comparisons you're asking for?

You could even take some screencaps from a video comparison I posted up earlier if you want:

Mines of Moria Comparison:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...4#post20566204

The plethora of different-looking shots that I am seeing is making me dizzy... it looks as though there was one fell-swoop of a color-timing change applied to the EE FOTR Blu-Ray (intended or not, we may never know for sure); in some scenes, such as the Moria examples, it made for a more natural, you-are-there look (to my eyes). In others, such as the mountain/snow scene where Boromir picks up the Ring after Frodo falls, it is horribly unrealistic - this scene (on the DVDs and TE Blu-Ray) is one that I pop in after changing something on my display, because it is one of the few from the films that have natural-looking fleshtones and sky, one that bothered me the first time I saw it on my as-yet-uncalibrated Mits RPTV.

I had not intended on buying this set - I already have the TE and EE DVDs and the TE Blu-Ray (along with the standard and Complete soundtrack recordings) - I prefer the flow of the original TE's as films - the EE's have some great story elements, but the scenes, along with the altered music soundtrack, stick out to me. I prefer the EE Lothlorien scenes (the TE Galadriel and Celeborn are too spooky and weird) - and the EE Faramir in ROTK is much more sympathetic.

I think Fellowship had too much scene-specific color-grading - a "one-size-fits-all" alteration to the print was bound to come out as wrong as it did... I can live without these for now. Maybe someday - with an even more vivid format (Super-HD?) - they will be revisited and repaired, but I will just hang on to what I have for the time being...

Everybody's free to their opinion. Perhaps if you stated why you felt the colours of the regraded version were 'wrong', your opinion would hold more weight? I personally think the regraded shots look a lot better, both in detail and colours, so I think we'll have to agree to disagree. Remember, I have just removed the green tint, so the colour grading you don't like are the colours PJ/Andrew Lesnie chose, not me.

As for posting unfixed shots, i'll post one or two now, then I need to get back to regrading.

EDIT:

It's interesting to note as I look at the mines of moria on the fotr ee blu-ray, that it's the one and only scene in the entire film that looks remarkably similar to the theatrical edition blu-ray. It seems that the mines of moria in the theatrical blu-ray was graded with a green tint as well. Of course, it is just that scene in the theatrical blu-ray, when in the extended edition blu-ray, the green tint is constant throughout the whole film. Here are one or two comparisons between the theatrical blu-ray (top) and extended blu-ray (bottom):

That's precisely why I wanted to see this particular scene with the tint.
It's so similar that one can safely assume that the tint here is fully intentional. So now the remaining question is, why has it spread to the entire rest of the film?

There's a completely new possibility now: Someone wanted to grade this particular scene but by accident applied it to everything.

Exactly why I wanted to see this comparison as well. That AND to see if detail that existed in the TE was being clipped in the EE. Same goes for the prolog which looked too dark to me. In this case, Moria has a green cast in each version but it does not seem any detail is being lost.

By saying this you assume that PJ/Andrew Lesnie haven't simply changed their mind about the colour grading in this scene, as they have in many other scenes.

A thing i've noticed is that when you remove the green tint, the majority of the scenes, especially in the second half of the film, become more 'natural' than they were in the theatrical blu-ray. Could the mines of moria not simply be yet another scene that PJ/Andrew Lesnie decided they needed to tone down a fair bit in terms of colour grading to make it look more 'natural', like they did with Rivendell, Lothlorien and many other scenes?

Maybe they decided that fotr was far too varied in terms of colours in comparison to the other two films so they toned down the colour grading of certain scenes for the sake of continuety.

Yeah! That would make sense.....if you are frozen dead.

The flesh tones in that scene are actually fairly pinkish and therefore accurate IMHO. I couldn't see that clearly before because I was on my laptop at the time, that makes everything look blue, including flesh tones.

I think that's too much of a coincidence that the tint in the EE is exactly how this scene was graded before.

If you look at the comparisons, you'll see that the EE is not graded exactly the same as the theatrical blu-ray, its actually even more green. You can see that by comparing the light coming from Gandalf's staff, it is clearly more white in the theatrical than the EE.

I personally believe it to be a coincidence that the EE blu-ray is fairly similar to the theatrical blu-ray in this one scene. Peter Jackson has changed the colours in the Mines of Moria IMHO and I personally prefer the new look.

So? One doesn't rule out the other, does it?

Maybe he did want to leave this scene more naturally, but someone tried to fix it and screwed up.

Well, without some statement of the people involved this will remain guesswork at best...

Without a statement from Peter Jackson himself, pretty much.

That the regrade is a marked improvement on the official blu-ray is enough for now though, at least for me.