Originally posted by: C3PX
Yeah, I know what you are talking about. They could easily just put both versions of the opening and branch it to the rest of the movie.

Yup. Sometimes scenes are not just extended or not included in the theatrical cut but instead are re-edited--in this case, to preserve the editing of the theatrical cut, two entire versions of the scenes are included, even if the difference between them is only one or two shots, and then branched. I imagine that the whole ten minute opening scene of FOTR is two seperate branching files, even if much of the scene is common between the two versions. Even more drastic use of branching than this has been put to use before, the best example i can think of being David Fincher's extended semi-directors-cut of Alien 3, which keeps almost all of the material of the theatrical version but reworks and re-edits much of it instead of merely inserting additional scenes, as is the case, for example, for the branching Aliens directors cut.