Hal 9000 said:

My only feedback from reading over this but not yet having seen it all is the transition between AUJ and DOS. I would suggest that, whatever you do, it play seamlessly without any sort of a break, even if you do add one. It should be able to play fine in a theater without a disc break the way even the LOTR EE films do.

Thanks for reading through 👍 I’ll send you the final export in a few days and I’ll consider any feedback whenever you’re down to watch it - but if you don’t get around to it, no problem.

Anyways, for anyone else reading this maybe you could give some additional thoughts. This is an interesting topic for my edit, or Hobbit edits in general, as the jump from AUJ -> DoS will always have some sort of time jump/sudden location change with little explanation. That’s why I leaned towards just making it an intermission, which a lot of edits do after the barrel scene such as the Maple edit. For me, I just knew the end of AUJ was the perfect spot for an intermission, even if it’s only about 40-45% of the way into the story, it’s the only time with a really weird time jump in my edit, and so an intermission could patch that up, whereas the end of the barrel scene wasn’t really that climactic and didn’t need an intermission to patch the transition, and in my edit that was about 55-60% of the way in. The true 50-50 mark would be in the middle of Mirkwood. But I also knew that none of the Middle Earth films have ever had a blank screen saying “intermission,” but what they do have, is a screen that says “insert next disc,” so I went for the middle ground, and on the digital version it currently says “the story continues on part two…” so there’s no mention of any discs, but it’s not quite just a generic “intermission.”

That said, I made a little test to show what the transition would be without the ‘intermission.’ https://youtu.be/O8NuorLzhUk (EDIT: slightly updated one here - https://youtu.be/W0LnBzsa6WM ) So it’s either this, or a transition to Dwarvish music with a black screen/text, which I won’t post a test clip of as I’m sure it’s easy to imagine.

Most people I’ve heard from do enjoy this pause even if it’s slightly unrealistic, it gives a chance to take a break, but there certainly is a perspective to be had that the movie should just play through the whole time. I might end up doing a poll and asking my discord.

Finally, for followers of this thread, just need to tidy up the River transition, do a final watch, and the update will be out.