FOTR wasn’t a complete DI, which is part of why the EE BR is so different compared to TTT and ROTK (which were complete DI’s). So at least some film would need to be scanned again for FOTR.
Shoot, you’re right. I had forgotten about that, but now that you mention it I’m recalling the color grading featurette from the Appendices, where I believe they said only about 70% went through digital intermediate. Well, however they source the inevitable 4K release, I just want it to look nice and be true to the original release’s grade.
44rh1n said:
I’ve been wondering about this myself. Since LOTR is so VFX heavy, redoing visual effects in 4K is probably out of the realm of possibility. Honestly, I just hope it’s sourced from the original 2K DI, and upscaled. No monkey business, no green tint, no DNR, no artificial sharpening, no scanning of a print — just the original file that got rendered out as the master, before it got printed back onto film. That would be the best source IMO.But yeah its practically impossible for this to happen. Consider the hardware and software the vfx pipeline was built on is long decommissioned. An enormous amount of effort for a very minimal upgrade in fidelity.
Yeah, I agree that there’s pretty much no chance they’ll remaster the VFX in 4K. It will almost certainly be an upscale. But I’m ok with that. A lot of people give the 4K UHD upscales of 2K films a lot of flak, but in my opinion (when done correctly) they are still a massive improvement over the 1080p Blu-rays. People fail to understand that, while 2K 2048x1152 seems like it’s not much higher of a resolution than 1920x1080, it’s actually about 300,000 more pixels. So I’d rather see those pixels preserved in an upscale than removed in a downsampled BD.
May I ask from where the information comes (it was finished digitally as a 2K DI)?
By the way: Thanks for your work, 44rh1n!
Fellowship of the Ring was one of the first films to go through a DI (digital intermediate) process. And back then, pretty much all films were done in 2K. It wasn’t until 2004 with Spider-Man 2 that a film had a 4K DI – and even then, it was super rare to finish a film in 4K. Even nowadays, probably half the major films are still mastered in 2K. We have a ton more being delivered in 4K now, which is awesome, but there’s still quite a lot done in good’ol 2K.