Well, I'm still planing on doing this eventually but I'm occupied with other projects right now.

OK, my STAR WARS project is nearing completition and I think I will start working on this afterwards. I must figure out some technical problems first, I'm gonna be working in HD, although it will probably only be 720p as I'm gonna be using a lot of the extended editions footage, which is only available on DVD. I'll split both movies into the three separate storylines first and then start intercuting between them in a different order then it is in the film. In TTT I will be cutting some of the action scenes and replacing them with some Frodo scenes from ROTK up to the spider scene, like it is in the book. This way I'll make TTT a more story based movie and ROTK a shorter movie.

I have the whole trilogy EE in HD, I just always assumed, that someone just put in the EE scenes from an upscaled DVD (which is definitely true for FOTR as you can clearly see the drop in quality, but it did always seem to me, that TTT EE scenes were natively HD, I just couldn't get my head around where would anyone get those scenes in HD. So TTT was broadcasted in EE? That's good, because IMO that it is a far superior version (unlike for the other two, where the EE scenes are just a nice addition).

And these HDTV captures are actually superior in quality to the recently released Blu-Rays, as they are the same transfers but the Blus suffer from heavy DNR and edge enhancement and other nasty digital "enhacement" artifacts, which were not present in the broadcasts. I'm dreading we might get something like that for STAR WARS on Blu-Ray.

Well, I'll have yet to see about that. I'm still definitely encoding in 720p as I want to make it no bigger than a DVD9 AVCHD and these films are just too long for that being good in 1080p.

And that's interesting about TTT being broadcast in the Extended Edition. How come Warner allowed that? Or was it just some kind of a mistake, like when some TV in UK broadcast the 97 version of SW SE recently?

I don't know, it think Adywan wrote about it somewhere, but he said he only caught it about halfway through so he didn't record it.

I just finished a rough cut of TTT. Although I removed a lot of action, with the added Frodo scenes it'll run about 3hrs 50mins at 23.976 fps, which is a bit too long. Problem is, there isn't really anything else I'd want to remove anymore  :-(

It's not so much about the size as about sitting through a 4 hour film, which is what bothered me about the EE version of ROTK, it was just too long.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, about the preview, I think I will do that.

Sorry, didn't get round to encoding the SD workprint to post but TTT is basically finished, I managed to cut it down to 3hrs 30m in PAL, so after returning the framerate to 23.976fps it should be around 3hrs 40m, which is about the original lenght of the EE, so that's fine. I hope to watch it today or tomorrow and if everything's OK, I'll be encoding and uploading soon.

OK, TTT is finished. In the end I managed to cut it down to 3hrs 30min 28sec at 23.976 fps (10 minutes of which are the ending titles).

I decided to encode two DVD5s insted of one DVD9. That gives me about 700MB extra space over a DVD9 and it will also cut the burning costs as 2 HQ DVD5 are still much cheaper than 2 HQ DVD9.

There may still be some very minor glitches in the sound (I've always said I'm not much of a sound editor) but I'm quite satisfied with the outcome and to me it is a better version of the movie.

One problem of course is that as of now it can't be watched as a part of a trilogy until I make ROTK, because there are many scenes from ROTK put in TTT.

Another thing I'm thinking about and would appreciate some suggestions on is how to name these edits. TTT is definitelly closer to the book now, but ROTK probably won't be, so I really don't know...

Hal 9000 said: It seems a difficult thing to have TTT end with Shelob, unless the intercutting between story strands gets way out of chronology.

It probably does (to be honest, I don't remember the chronogy from the books and there both story strands are separate anyway.) The only time thongs are definitely happening in both strands at the same time is the Minas Morgul scene and I just cut out the Gandalf part out of that for TTT and will have to cut around it somehow in ROTK. I tried to keep some day/night chronology of the scenes in TTT though...

I thought about editing the EE of FOTR down a bit too, because I like some of the aditions but some were admitedly rather redundant. And then it would be a complete trilogy, to put on my shelf and watch as a whole rather than watch the orig. FOTR and then TTT and ROTK edits... :-) Also I removed most of the Aragorn - Arwen storyline from TTT with the intention of putting some of it to ROTK as that storyline is more drawn out in that movie, but I might put some of it to FOTR (the parts which were a flashback to FOTR)...

A for the title, I was thinking something more of an under title, I'd like to keep the name The Two Towers as that is the title of the book it's based on - I was horrified when I'd heard they considered calling it something else back in 2002, because of 9.11. So I'd like it to be:

The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers - Something.

Yeah I was thinking something along those lines, like the PARTLY DESPECIALIZED EDITION, you know...

Sounds really good, I think I'll go with that, thanks :-)