Thanks, guys!

Having played around a bunch more with Davinci Resolve, I’ve now decided to attempt to not just regrade a substantial proportion of the picture to better match LOTR, but to attempt to do a time-of-day regrade on some of the prologue scenes I’m using with the Misty Mountains song (to show Smaug’s initial attack occurring at night), which ought to help with making the flame effects look a little less animated/fake (in large part by the simple expedient of brightening them up the proverbial). I’ll be doing similar flame-brightening for the pine-tree scene and the destruction of Esgaroth.

If I can’t pull them off to my satisfaction, then that’s fine, and they can stay as they are. But I’m so impressed with this piece of software — especially running on a tiny old laptop — that I’d be mad not to at least give it a try.