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Info Wanted: 'LOTR - FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING': Green tint removed? — Page 7

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Engrish = broken English. Remember the Episode III “Backstroke of the West” bootleg?

In the case of FOTR, instead of it being a translation to Chinese and back to English, the Asian bootleggers tried to transcribe the English dialogue as they heard it, and failed miserably. There are bootlegs for the other two as well (TTT’s bootleg is even more notorious.)

Here are screenshots from the bootleg DVD I was referring to, these have been circulating as an Internet meme for almost 14 years. I found an old site on Wayback Machine that has all the images. I have no idea who still has an actual copy. But look at the color of the Council scenes, don’t they have less of a tint than the official DVDs?

https://web.archive.org/web/20070106214116/http://users3.ev1.net/~eekfrenzy/captionspage/badfotrcouncil.html

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Yeah, there’s definitely a difference there. Makes you wonder why they threw that into the DVD then.

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Timing changes were not uncommon on video, even before teal-orange. Phantom Menace looked much better in theaters than the pinkish purplish low-contrast mess we got on EVERY home release. And The Matrix, Spider-Man, The Dark Knight, they all looked different on video.

I do think Jackson and Lesnie (or someone) tinkered with the color for the pre-BD masters, even if just to make it read better on TV sets. They definitely had to for the EE DVD, because they had to put in the deleted footage that likely didn’t get to the grading stage in the theatrical release.

And that bootleg may be an interpositive transfer rather than a print, it does still look like it was lightened or brightened to read better on video? Regardless, it’s not how my EE looks.

I wish someone could track down that bootleg, or a screener, or something.

I concur though, how does the Council look in this project?

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Any word on an updated colour correction for this one? Has anyone done a new version?

I have KK650’s version, and I’m a fan (it’s definitely an improvement over the BD), but his version seems to simply swap out the green tint for a (admittedly less obtrusive) blue one. It’s a better viewing experience, to be sure, but distracting its own way.

I frankly don’t remember how the film look in theatres, but I’d be happy with something that matched the theatrical BD, or Extended DVD, in terms of colour.

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Hey guys, saw MOMA’s 35mm preservation print of FOTR, and I must say, though the BD grading isn’t perfect, the DVD colors are far worse.

Rivendell especially looks nothing like it does on the big screen; it’s got a subtle cyan(!) shift to it rather the DVD’s ugly purple tones. Really, the film looked beautiful on 35mm in a way that none of the releases have done justice.

It really does look like to me that the BD was an earnest, if flawed, attempt to recreate the 35mm look in a digital realm. In short, trying to recreate the DVD colors doesn’t seem like the right path for theatrical accuracy.

Also, there was some footage for The Two Towers at the end of it, and, looking at it, the Extended BD (which keeps the established color palette from the DVD) looks flawed as well.

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No wonder I felt a twinge of familiarity when I saw the EE BD transfer at the 10th anniversary theatrical event. I’ve always wondered if it was closer, especially when I went back to those bootleg DVD screens where Rivendell didn’t look like the official DVDs - did you look at the link I posted earlier?

I would be careful about the Two Towers teaser as a reference though, that was attached to prints of FOTR in spring 2002, 8-9 months before theatrical release. So the grading might have not been absolutely finalized yet. I do agree with you that the home transfers may be wrong, let me dig up the Asian bootleg screenshots of TTT that were also an Internet meme in the early 00s, they were also presumably from a screener or something prior to the official DVDs.

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The Aluminum Falcon said:

Hey guys, saw MOMA’s 35mm preservation print of FOTR, and I must say, though the BD grading isn’t perfect, the DVD colors are far worse.

Rivendell especially looks nothing like it does on the big screen; it’s got a subtle cyan(!) shift to it rather the DVD’s ugly purple tones. Really, the film looked beautiful on 35mm in a way that none of the releases have done justice.

It really does look like to me that the BD was an earnest, if flawed, attempt to recreate the 35mm look in a digital realm. In short, trying to recreate the DVD colors doesn’t seem like the right path for theatrical accuracy.

Also, there was some footage for The Two Towers at the end of it, and, looking at it, the Extended BD (which keeps the established color palette from the DVD) looks flawed as well.

Where can one see the MOMA preservation? Assuming you’re talking about the Museum of Modern Art one, I have the feeling that’s not up anywhere online.

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It was a screening in the MOMA as part of a “Cate Blanchett” retrospective. So, no scan, unfortunately.

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kk650 said:
…Compared to the hdtv transport stream of fotr extended edition I had (and still have)…

Hey kk640, is there chance you’d be willing to send me a copy of that old transport stream? I’ve been looking for one all over the internet and can’t find anything! There are a couple old torrents out there, but they’re so old that no one’s seeding them.

By the way, love your work!

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Finally, after two weeks of downloading - yep, 14 days, more or less - I grabbed the famous HDTV versions of the whole trilogy!

Fellowship Of The Ring.mkv
(3:28:18) 1920x1088 (active 1893x782) 27634067KB
The Two Towers.mkv
(3:44:06) 1920x1088 (active 1893x782) 26044590KB
The Return Of The King.mkv
(4:12:26) 1920x1080 (1920x798) 33587604KB (C more HD logo in the black bar)

Quality is really good; I’m often surprised to discover how good these MPEG-2 broadcasts were (are, like the latest WOWOW Star Wars).

But now, I’m aware of the existence of open matte 16:9 versions… and the mission to find’em all begins!

Sadly my projects are lost due to an HDD crash… 😦 | [Fundamental Collection] thread | blog.spoRv.com | fan preservation forum: fanres.com

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Hmmm… I have an organ that would love to imbibe those 😎

Preferred Saga:
1/2: Hal9000
3: L8wrtr
4/5: Adywan
6-9: Hal9000

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Amazing that as popular as this movie is, and as many complaints about the green tint there were, there STILL hasn’t been a proper colour corrected release of this. At the very least something to match the Theatrical BD’s or EE DVD’s.

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I’m pretty happy with kk650’s regrade.

JEDIT: Which reminds me - before tehparadox went down, someone posted fixed DTS files for kk650’s Two Towers and ROTK EE regrades that have a much less abrupt audio transition at the disc change points (which wasn’t an issue with FOTR). Now that tehparadox is gone, these are probably next to impossible to find. If anyone wants them, I still have them, just shoot me a PM.

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I have KK650’s regrade, and it’s my “go to” version of Fellowship.

Still, it doesn’t really match the TE BD or EE DVD (and in fairness I know that’s not what he was trying to do) and in general just replaces the green tint with a blue one. It’s a definite improvment, but still not how the film should look (IMO).

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Nick66 said:

I have KK650’s regrade, and it’s my “go to” version of Fellowship.

Still, it doesn’t really match the TE BD or EE DVD (and in fairness I know that’s not what he was trying to do) and in general just replaces the green tint with a blue one. It’s a definite improvment, but still not how the film should look (IMO).

Matching the Theatrical Edition blu-ray or Extended Edition DVD would unfortunately require a shot by shot regrade. I believe you’re right about there being a slight blue tint on the Fellowship of the Ring release I put up on Myspleen, I updated the regrade settings a number of months ago but I just hadn’t gotten round to encoding it yet. Thanks for reminding me! I should definately have the new regrade of Fellowship of the Ring done soon.

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kk650 said:

Nick66 said:

I have KK650’s regrade, and it’s my “go to” version of Fellowship.

Still, it doesn’t really match the TE BD or EE DVD (and in fairness I know that’s not what he was trying to do) and in general just replaces the green tint with a blue one. It’s a definite improvment, but still not how the film should look (IMO).

Matching the Theatrical Edition blu-ray or Extended Edition DVD would unfortunately require a shot by shot regrade. I believe you’re right about there being a slight blue tint on the Fellowship of the Ring release I put up on Myspleen, I updated the regrade settings a number of months ago but I just hadn’t gotten round to encoding it yet. Thanks for reminding me! I should definately have the new regrade of Fellowship of the Ring done soon.

Oh I’d love to see that! Like I said, your FOTR is pretty much the version I watch now, so any upgrades would be most welcome.

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Nick66 said:

kk650 said:

Nick66 said:

I have KK650’s regrade, and it’s my “go to” version of Fellowship.

Still, it doesn’t really match the TE BD or EE DVD (and in fairness I know that’s not what he was trying to do) and in general just replaces the green tint with a blue one. It’s a definite improvment, but still not how the film should look (IMO).

Matching the Theatrical Edition blu-ray or Extended Edition DVD would unfortunately require a shot by shot regrade. I believe you’re right about there being a slight blue tint on the Fellowship of the Ring release I put up on Myspleen, I updated the regrade settings a number of months ago but I just hadn’t gotten round to encoding it yet. Thanks for reminding me! I should definately have the new regrade of Fellowship of the Ring done soon.

Oh I’d love to see that! Like I said, your FOTR is pretty much the version I watch now, so any upgrades would be most welcome.

I’ll also be updating The Two Towers and Return of the King as well, in case you’re interested in those.

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kk650, do you have any information of what the actual film print of Fellowship looked like? If not, I remember someone on OT.com saying that the extended blurays were closer in color to the actual film print, but they still had a long way to go because of that green tint and they were more like 75% accurate, might be a good place to start. Idk, something to look into for your regrade, if you’re interested…

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KK, if you’re doing an updated version of TTT and ROTK, do you want those fixed DTS files I mentioned? IMO it’s a huge improvement that makes the disc change points seamless. (I wish I remember who made and posted them to tehparadox so I could tell you who to credit…)

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Ive had good results white balancing the “Fellowship of the Ring” Title card. It removed the green but kept more of the warmth in the Council of Elrond scene, which is a strong orange in the Theatrical.

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ChainsawAsh said:

KK, if you’re doing an updated version of TTT and ROTK, do you want those fixed DTS files I mentioned? IMO it’s a huge improvement that makes the disc change points seamless. (I wish I remember who made and posted them to tehparadox so I could tell you who to credit…)

Thanks for the offer but I don’t think it’ll be necessary. This time I plan on including the DTS-HD Master Audio 6.1 audio track for all three films, so in order to maintain a high enough video bitrate for such large film durations I’ll have to split each film in two parts, like they are originally on the extended edition blu-rays. I should be able to use the audio tracks from the blu-rays as is. I’ll create a join between the two parts with mkvmerge so it will jump seemlessly into part 2 for anybody not wanting to take a break between the two parts.

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Aw damn, I really liked having them all in one file. Any chance of also uploading a high bitrate combined file for each film (guessing it’d be in the 80GB range for each)?

And the problem is, for TTT and ROTK, the audio continues over the black screen that says INSERT DISC 2, so if you just join them at the cut to black without overlapping the audio from disc 1, you get a hard audio cut that’s jarring. This isn’t the case for FOTR, a simple join works fine for that one.

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ChainsawAsh said:

Aw damn, I really liked having them all in one file. Any chance of also uploading a high bitrate combined file for each film (guessing it’d be in the 80GB range for each)?

And the problem is, for TTT and ROTK, the audio continues over the black screen that says INSERT DISC 2, so if you just join them at the cut to black without overlapping the audio from disc 1, you get a hard audio cut that’s jarring. This isn’t the case for FOTR, a simple join works fine for that one.

If he releases it as a BDMV, you can use MakeMKV to turn it into one file.

“You don’t really mean you’ll kill me, do you?” - Juror 8
“Silence, Earthling! My name is Darth Vader. I am an extra-terrestrial from the planet Vulcan!” - Calvin “Marty” Klein

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Unless there’s black at the end of the files for disc 1 for TTT and ROTK like on the actual discs, which would require a bit more work than just joining the two parts.

Not saying I’m not able and willing to do it myself, I’m just pointing it out is all.