The Lord Of The Rings Extended - Page 4

I completely disagree here. No they didn't, they got at best 8 years old masters slapped onto bluray. What was state of the art in 2003 sure as hell isn't state of the art in 2011! New 4K scans and masters are needed end of story and they would mop the floor with the blurays currently available. The screenshots in my prior post more than prove my point.

Agreed.
And that is what all the complaints are about.
WB too often shows indifference to their BDs...

Pro630 and QuiGonJosh, neither of those things are the problem.

The movies are stuck at 2k, that's perfectly fine with me considering we can't even watch stuff at higher than 1080p on blu-ray.

The problem is that, in certain scenes, DNR was needlessly applied to the HD transfer and it ruins the image. The films did not look like this to begin with, they now look worse. Look at any of the screenshots out there from the scenes in Bilbo's house, it's just awful. A close-up of Gandalf's face that looked perfectly natural in an hdtv broadcast is now riddled with DNR on the blu-ray. Seriously, it looks like someone applied that "watercolor" photoshop filter to it, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home levels of bad.

Here's the comparison so you can see for yourself:

hdtv:
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u...gs/Fotrhd1.png

blu-ray:
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u...gs/Fotrbd1.png

The broadcast screencap looks better hands down, and that just shouldn't be happening. Instead of going back to the film master for FOTR and making a new 1080p transfer, they took an old hd master off the shelf and "restored" it. There simply should not be any instances in a blu-ray transfer in this day and age where it looks worse than a years-old hdtv transfer.

TTT and ROTK appear to have gotten through unscathed, but even then there are instances of DNR. Again, it's always much more apparent in indoor scenes where there's less light, probably because there was more grain in the image during those scenes.

Well, the reviews speak for themselves. Even the better reviews aren't giving 5/5 pq for those transfers.

I think the root cause of the problem with the theatrical bd's image quality doesn't even have to do with WB's willingness to cheap out (though that didn't help). No, the real problem is the apparent grainophobia and lack of quality control. I don't know how someone looks at that shot of Gandalf and thinks "oh yeah, that looks great!"

Been skimming this thread. My brief humble thoughts:

I don't expect these new editions to look like Braveheart, or whatever, and that's fine. What I'd like, however, is for all the ungodly filtering to be absent. Scenes like Theodens transformation are just painful.

The inferior DI process applied to FOTR in post-production led to a softer image. They later revised the process for the later films which is the reason those transfers are superior. There's no apparent DNR in the transfer that wasn't present in the theatrical image. Honestly, I just don't trust screenshots anymore. FOTR does not look like that on my screen. No offense, but I think Xylon sometimes uses an image editor to make the DNR more apparent or something. There's shots in the Star Trek Collection thread that are just absurd and not at all what the transfers actually look like.

There's nothing wrong with Xylon's or eric.exe's captures. I've seen the discs, the DNR is there. If it wasn't there on the older masters, then it wasn't on the prints.

The quality of the FOTR blu-ray isn't completely due to the DI, since it wasn't done completely with DI. The telecine wobble makes it pretty clear it's not a direct-to-digital master unlike 2 and 3. I guess the question is, are the original 2K images still around?

Film negative format (mm/video inches)
35 mm (Kodak Vision 200T 5274, Vision 500T 5279, Eastman EXR 200T 5293, SFX 200T)


Cinematographic process
Digital Intermediate (2K) (master format) (some scenes)
Super 35 (source format)


Printed film format
35 mm (anamorphic) (Fuji F-CP 3519D)

I realize the DI was used to make the theatrical print on this film. My question is the movie was filmed on Super 35mm before the 2K DI was made. Is the 35mm OCN film still available? Were the effects done post DI or during? There are some differing thought on this, if they were done post, a new DI could be made without redoing all the special effects. A 4K scan could do wonders right there. If they chucked the 35mm OCN and just kept the dated master it has too be one of the biggest F()[|{ ups of all time!

As for the screenshots and someone who owns over 483 HD titles from both formats one thing has become abundantly clear. The screenshots don't lie! I have never seen a crappy screenshot and suddenly it looks stellar in motion. So far it is easily the best way to measure PQ compared to the prior dvd or against other blurays. Once Upon a Time in America is my latest example of thinking the film will look better in motion and it never ever does.

I doubt they chuck anything nowadays, but I don't think they're going to do any 4K scans. Might look inconsistent with the DI sections and with the other two films. Maybe they'll completely re-do all the movies in a few decades but I doubt we'll see different masters used for the upcoming edition. And as mentioned they weren't that bad, they just needed to skip the DNR, which I think they will this time. That kind of concentrated waxiness is highly uncharacteristic of Warner, and was probably all New Line's doing, which no longer exists as a separate disc production entity.

They are definitely not going to go back to the original camera negative and toss out all of the digital color grading work, nor would I want them to--especially without Peter Jackson's involvement.

I just found this thread and this sounds like great news. I've held out for the EE of these films on BD. I figured i could always rent the theatrical versions if i ever wanted to see them.

Has a release date and price been announced yet? I will certainly be purchasing these. I rarely purchase BDs anymore but these will go to the front of the line. Pushing the Star Wars BDs down my list.

That's exactly why I wouldn't want them to go back to the OCN and do a new DI, it wouldn't technically be accurate to what was up on the big screen in December of '01.

The problems with the blu-ray transfer have little to do with the DI process. If WB had simply gone back to the final, conformed master and scanned it at 1080p, the reviews would've been better. Not even TTT and ROTK, which were complete DI jobs (no negative-cutting), made it to bd without additional DNR watercolors that aren't present on the hd broadcast.

Even though the official website mentioned Warner Bros motion picture imaging as having worked on the transfers, I have to agree with paku that the dnr seems new line's doing. IIRC Jackson mentioned years ago, before New Line got folded into WB, that he was working on the hd remasters of the trilogy. So it's certainly possible the damage was done back then and not by WB. I can't recall hearing of a WB catalog release as late as 2009 (when the theatricals were originally gonna street) with DNR as bad as in Bilbo's house.

Go see the movies in theatres and compare. They still play them on certain occasions and marathons. You will NEVER have them looking better than they already look on Bluray, unless they go back and SHOOT them again from scratch.

Unless the movie theater was showing the camera negative, I don't think it would provide a very good indication of whether you'd have to re-shoot it from scratch It's a safe bet that Minority Report never looked as sharp as it does on blu-ray on any release print.

Curiously, I found an article where Andrew Lesnie says that during post-production for the third film, they went back to the first film and re-did the 30% of the first film that was analog, to create a full DI to bring the movies in line quality-wise. Wonder why the hell Warner didn't use that

My point was that people who are expecting a mind-blowing, miraculous picture quality of these films on BD need to realize that the original prints never looked good enough for this to be possible. The already-released BD's are true to the original source, and some scenes look even better and sharper than in the theater. I think these people would be shocked to see a theatrical print of these movies, because they would see the same problems they are attributing to the BD.


.

Do you know where I can find that article because I would very much like to read it!

http://archiv.arri.de/news/newslette...erl_lesnie.htm

Thanks!

That's because Warner is either cheap or just stupid. The BD release of the Dark Knight used the IMAX print for the entire film, not just the IMAX sequences. When non-IMAX material like 35mm film is upconverted to IMAX film, they use sharpness and noise reduction (DNR) tools in an attempt to make the film look practically grainless. This is why the non-IMAX scenes in the Blu-ray have a very flat, edge-enhanced look. Warner was too lazy to use the 35mm release prints for the non-IMAX sequences and combine them with the IMAX shots for the BD release.

Transformers 2 did not go the lazy route and the transfer is great throughout.

It's interesting how far off the start of such a topic has gone down.

The part I'm excited about is (from the start of this post)

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

"New, matching CGI for Gollum in Fellowship!!!"

"High bitrate AVC without ungodly filtering!!!"

"New 7.1 mixes!!!"

Sounds to me they're putting a lot of work into this.

What?

From that post where the guy was ticking off things he wished they'd do?

We need to hold out for 3D! Nobody buy this until they do so!



(just kidding)

I've got no problem with splitting them up onto two discs. I'll just rip those suckers to mkv, merge both files, and stream over my network. That's what I did with my Extended DVDs. Worked like a charm.

Thanks. After reading that, I'm more convinced than ever that LOTR will never truly shine in HD. Yes, I'm fully aware that 2K is a perfectly adequate resolution, all things considered.

But when the DP is quoted as saying he wanted to go 4K and that he was "disappointed" with the partial DI of Fellowship (the other two films getting sharpened up as a result), I think that the Armchair Expert criticism of the LOTR DI process (guilty!) isn't entirely without merit.

I do know one thing: if the EE release doesn't have better PQ than the Theatrical, there is ZERO chance of me buying it.

I really don't want movies on 2 discs. It would be like laserdisc all over again. A movie isn't like a record to me, it destroys the experience having to get up half way through to turn the lights on, take the disc out, swap it with the second disc, and start it over again.

You've never gone to a movie with an intermission?

Heck, these very films were shown with intermissions in theaters.

Gekkou: No...er, Yes.

This is about the dumbest thing I've ever read on this site.

Nor here in the States, unless Gekkou's talking about the "Trilogy Tuesday" screenings of the extended cuts of fellowship and towers mere hours before the midnight opening of ROTK back on December 16th/17th, 2003 (which I didn't attend, I just remember hearing about it).